You don't have to get on Windows 8's Metro ride.

Some people are still sure Windows 8 is going to be the cat’s meow. I’m sure Windows 8 and its Metro interface will be more like a cat’s yowl of pain. The more I look at Metro, the more I’m sure that Microsoft’s new desktop will flop as badly as the Facebook IPO.

It’s not just me. Business analysts, who could care less about technology but care a lot about what customers think, are saying things like “Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment.”

Windows users who were already unhappy about having to learn Metro, which doesn’t work or look a thing like Vista and Windows 7’s Aero interface never mind XP’s familiar appearance, are finding out there’s more trouble ahead for them. Windows 8 will cost more at launch to upgrade to from Windows 7. DVD playback and media-center functionality will now be an extra-price option.

Oh as for Metro-friendly applications, here’s what Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, an independent software development consultant, speaker, author, and trainer and all around Windows guru who’s writing the book “Programming Windows 8 Apps with C#” had to say: “does Metro actually work? In my opinion: No.”

I don’t care if your most prized possession is an autographed copy of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, you have got to be wary of moving to Windows 8. So what can you do to avoid, or at least delay, the day you have to start using it?

1. Stick with Windows XP

OK, so your PC is getting a little older, but it’s still working isn’t it? According to some estimates, most PC users are still using XP. Certainly hundreds of millions of users are still using it. If it’s not broke, why fix it?

Well, there is one reason: On April 8, 2014, Microsoft says it will officially end support for XP–and Office 2003 while they’re at it. Of course, Microsoft has extended XP’s life support before. Today, they swear they wouldn’t do it again. But, if say 20% of users still have XP running in their PCs in 2014… well let’s just say I won’t be surprised if Microsoft has a change of heart.

2. Stick with Windows 7 or move to it

So, let’s say its 2012’s holiday season and all the new PCs are coming out with Windows 8, what do you do? You don’t ask, you demand, Windows 7 instead.

Yes, I’m a Linux guy, but if you really want Windows, and I know most of you do, Windows 7 SP 1 is easily the best version of Windows to date. Yes, it’s not the same as XP. There is a learning curve. On the other hand, while it’s not as safe as Linux, Windows 7 is a lot more secure than XP. There are also plenty of useful, easy to-use tools to move your XP data and applications to Windows 7.

3. Move to a Linux or Mac Desktop

Since Microsoft wants to force a radical change on you, why not really make a change and move to Linux or a Mac? The Linux desktop is great for both power users and for users who just need a computer for the basics. Specifically, I think XP users will find Linux Mint with the Cinnamon interface to be inviting. And, Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity interface is much easier to use than Metro. Heck, my 80-year old mother-in-law is a successful Ubuntu user!

Macs, of course, are Macs. They’re pricy, you’re locked into Apple’s hardware and software in ways that Steve Ballmer can only dream about, and, and, gosh they’re pretty and easy to use. Well, easy to use so long as you do exactly what Apple thinks you should be doing anyway.

4. Move to the cloud with Google’s Chrome OS.

Chrome OS hasn’t really caught on yet, but I think Google’s Chrome OS is a real alternative to Windows for many users. It’s not so much Chrome OS itself, it’s the whole concept of being able to use a Web browser and the cloud for everything you need to do and that you want to do instead of a fat client desktop operating system.

Think about what you’re doing today. Web-browsing, e-mail, IM, VoIP, maybe using Google Docs, whatever, how much of that actually requires that you use a local application? If 99% of what you’re doing on your computer can be done on the Web, what more than you really need than the Chrome Web browser, or-and there’s the point–an operating system like Chrome OS, which is just the Chrome Web browser running on a barebones Linux structure?

5. Use an iPad or Android tablet instead.

Microsoft really wants people to switch to Windows 8, and its close cousin Windows RT smartphones and tablets. I’m not holding my breath. I actually think Windows 8/Metro on Intel actually makes sense–Windows RT, which doesn’t have Active Directory support, not so much. Metro looks and works better on a tablet than it ever will on a desktop. There’s just this one little problem: People love iPads and they’re getting fonder of the Android tablets with their lower price tags. If I were a Microsoft fan, I’d worry if there’s any room left in the market for a Windows 8 tablet.

At the same time, as Microsoft is painfully aware, tablets are becoming popular as desktop replacements. As ZDNet’s own James Kendrick points out, “It is now possible to get a full day’s work from almost anywhere, without compromise,” on a tablet.

So, come the day you go to a Best Buy and all you see is Windows 8 PCs from one end of the store to the other, just remember you do have other, better, options.

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One reason to unify Android? Too many shipping versions.

For all its popularity, Android programming, sales, and marketing has been… chaotic. Every hardware vendor makes its own Android mix, which more often than not is based on an older version, and each company sales and markets their smartphones and tablets independently of each other. That may be changing now. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “Google is shifting its strategy for its Android mobile operating system, in a bid to create a united front with smartphone and tablet makers to take on rivals like Apple and prevent wireless carriers from controlling the devices.”

Wall Street Journal reporter, Amir Efrati reports that “Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter.” In the past, Google would pick a single vendor to introduce major Android updates in lead devices, and then all the other vendors would follow. These devices were then, as now, sold to end-users through wireless carriers or retail outlets.

By the holiday season though, there were be as many as five manufacturers creating a portfolio of “Nexus” lead devices that include smartphones and tablets. While the old sales channels will still be there, Google will sell the gadgets directly to consumers in the U.S., Europe and Asia via its website. These will run on be running Google’s next version of Android, Jelly Bean.

Google did not respond to a request for comments.

So who might these companies be? We don’t know. At a guess, Motorola has to be in there. ASUS, HTC, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson would also seem like natural partners.

This news comes ahead of final approval for Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Many people are speculating that Google is trying to centralize Android programming, sales, and marketing to reassure its partners that Google is going to use Motorola devices to compete with them.

While I certainly think that plays a role, I suspect other factors are involved as well. Android operating system fragmentation is a real problem. The core operating system is always the same, but there are too many shipping versions for end-users or independent software vendors (ISV)s to be happy.

Apple, Android’s only real rival, on the other hand, offers a single, unified software stack. Users who buy an iPad or iPhone don’t have to worry about it they’ll get the newest update. Until Apple stops supporting their particular device, which Apple does do, they’ll know that they’ll get the latest and greatest version. By contrast, Android’s newest shipping version, Ice Cream Sandwich, after first shipping seven months ago, is still on only 5% of Android devices.

Apple is also fighting with Google’s Android partners in courtrooms around the world on various intellectual property (IP) issues. A united Android front could potentially, if nothing else, cut down on Google’s partners’ legal bills.

Put it all together and there are many reasons why a more united Android effort would make sense both for Google and its partners. So, while we don’t for certain that is what Google will really be doing, this centralized development, marketing, and sales plan does make sense. If Google is to get this off the ground by the 2012 holiday season, we’ll soon see if this indeed what Google has been working on.

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Here's last year's winning t-shirt design.

The Linux Foundation, in honor of Linux’s 21st birthday is having another t-shirt competition. So, if you really love Linux, can make cool t-shirt designs (That leaves me right out), then this contest is for you!

This year the theme is “Inspired by Linux” and calls on people from around the world to create a design with that in mind.

You can find the complete rules here, but to cut to the chase, it needs to be an original design.

It has to be in a file that can be no larger “than 640×480 (.jpg, .png, .gif) and must be under 1MB in size. The winner will be required to provide a vectorized version (.svg, .eps, .pdf) of their design to print on the T-shirt.  It may be in any colors you like.”

In addition, “In your description, please tell us how Linux inspires you and explain the inspiration behind the design. The design can depict literally or figuratively the events or ideas that get you pumped up for Linux. Let Linux be your muse.”

For some added inspiration, here’s the Inspired by Linux video:

You have until June 8, 2012 at 11:55 PM Pacific Time to get your designs in so get cracking!

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Red Hat celebrates 10 years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

20 Years of Linux down, and the best is yet to come

Red Hat has seen 10 very good years.

In 2002, Red Hat was perhaps the biggest of the Linux distributors, but the biggest? SUSE and Caldera–before its went over to the dark side and became Darth SCO–were also contenders for the top spot. Behind them, now struggling Linux companies such as Mandriva and deceased businesses Progeny Linux, which tried to take Debian Linux to market, were also potential players. Then, ten-years ago, Red Hat completed the move, which would take it from first among equals to being corporate Linux’s top dog: the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to being the first billion-dollar pure open-source play company.

Today, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies said in a statement that “Red Hat is thankful to the worldwide Linux community and all our partners, and is proud to recognize the achievements we’ve made with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Building on the last decade, today Red Hat enables the most advanced IT environments in organizations that offer products and services that truly enhance the way we work and live. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great example of making disruptive technology an industry standard.”

Indeed it has, but back when Red Hat first made its “disruptive” move, many Linux fans hated Red Hat’s change in direction. They did so because at the same time Red Hat was launching RHEL, it was closing down its low-end Linux distribution: Red Hat Linux (RHL)

The last boxed distribution—yes Linux used to come in boxes—Red Hat Linux 9 was meant for everyone but home users to corporate IT departments. With the release of RHEL and retirement of RHL, Red Hat’s non-business users often felt like they were being forced to upgrade or even abandoned.

Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution was OK, but it wasn’t the same thing. From its first days, it was clear Fedora was meant for developers who wanted the freshest code and not for small office/home office Linux users.

As Cormier told Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register, “We were faced with a really tough decision back then, and we really bet the company on this and it paid off in a billion ways. We made a decision to stop Red Hat Linux, which at the time was the most popular, hobbyist Linux operating system out there. It was a very, very, very unpopular decision with the engineers and with some people in the community. The engineers asked the CEO to fire me at the time.”

They did indeed. I heard all about it at the time from several of them. Red Hat’s timing and how it delivered its message to its users also have been handled better. Red Hat 9 had a very short supported life-span. In addition, Red Hat fans of the day suspected that Red Hat was beginning to move away from the Linux desktop. They were right.

While Red Hat still has a desktop version, RHEL Desktop Red Hat’s real desktop interest, in so much as it has one, is its thin-client Linux desktop model. This is based on a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The bottom line though, as Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO told me last year is that he thinks the “Fat client operating system [the traditional desktop] is becoming a legacy application.” Ubuntu. Linux Mint, MEPIS, and Peppermint OS users, to name a few, would beg to disagree.

All that under the bridge, Red Hat was proven right. The real riches for Linux would come from servers. That’s true to this day. While relatively few people run Red Hat on their desktop, major companies and Web sites rely on Red Hat every day.

As Al Gillen, IDC’s program VP of System Software said in a statement,“Red Hat broke new ground not only for its own benefit, but for a multitude of other business entities that offer commercial support for open source-based products, Try and imagine a world today if Red Hat had not successfully introduced the concept of enterprise-class subscription-based support for an open source product.”

OK, I tried. I can’t. Anyone who’s anyone in open-source software, SugarCRM, Alfresco, and even black-sheep Oracle, rely on enterprise subscription models.

Today, Red Hat is continuing to move forward with its business oriented take on Linux. In a press conference today, Red Hat executives said to forget about Linux. Instead, users should focus on open-source based cloud technologies and virtualization. It is these, and the Linux plumbing that supports them that will keep Red Hat moving ahead and companies like VMWare or Microsoft that try to stick with proprietary ways to deliver enterprise servces will be left behind.

Like that first move to RHEL, these words are going to annoy Linux’s strongest fans. I’ll be willing to bet though that just like the shift to RHEL this approach of focusing on what Linux can deliver rather than on Linux per se will be exactly what businesses want to hear.

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In an hour long webcast today, the Linux leader publicly celebrated the 10th anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its recent success at hitting the $1 billion mark, but more importantly, positioned itself as the heir apparent to the infrastructure throne of the future.

The keys to the kingdom? Red Hat’s open source innovation model and open source architecture, which, executives emphasized, is the foundational layer of cloud computing.

Make no mistake about it, VMware and Microsoft, and any other company trying to reform their proprietary image in the open era: Red Hat has the not-so-secret sauce — the stack of open source technology and open source development model — necessary to make it the king of the cloud era.

“We’re straddling both worlds …. we’re driving the future,” said Red Hat’s longtime engineering chief, Paul Cormier, noting that the stack of Red Hat software once described as the Open Source Architecture is the cloud computing platform today.

Cormier said Red Hat’s introduction of an open source software subscription model in 2002 was perhaps the most important event in the company’s history, while its embrace of the open source community led innovation model via its merging with the Fedora project, embrace of the KVM open source hypervisor in the Linux kernel, and its pioneering role as Amazon EC2’s first cloud partner, locks in its future supremacy.

It’s common for US companies to predict triumph well in advance of its fruition. But holding a press conference to announce it is a bit risky, even for an open source company whose software now runs about 20 percent of all servers.

Forget about Linux, executives said. The future is about cloud technologies and virtualization. Red Hat will move well past its 2.5 million subscribers today because customers want an open source infrastructure and an open source hypervisor and there’s nothing that VMWare or Microsoft can do about it, execs insinuated.

Red Hat said little about RHEL 7, which will offer, of course, performance and security improvements and innovations in file systems and hardware.

The goal of today’s webcast was to give notice to Microsoft, the only other viable data center inrastructure provider, and VMware, the only other viable hypervisor, that their days are numbered because of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud environment, which will be the foundation to delivering the IaaS and PaaS in cloud computing.

What do you think? Will the first $1 billion open source company soar to the top in the cloud era?

Fedora 17 with GNOME 3.4 is much better now, but is it good enough?

I have been using Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, since day one back in September 2003 when Red Hat split its commercial Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Back then, people hated Red Hat for this move, but businesses soon learned to love RHEL and Linux fans grew to love Fedora. But, then along came GNOME 3.x, Fedora’s default desktop choice, and it all changed.

GNOME 3.2, which was Fedora 16’s desktop, was dreadful. You don’t have to trust me on that though, just ask Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder. He hated GNOME 3.2.

That was then. This is now. Fedora 17, with the ungainly name Beefy Miracle-no I’m not making that up, that really is its name-is now in late beta and it’s much better than it was.

Finding your way through Fedora 17 (Gallery)

Fedora 17’s final release has been delayed until May 22nd but there’s enough there to see where it’s going. I tested Fedora on my faithful old Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This four year old notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also used it on a VirtualBox virtual machine on one of my Dell Inspiron 530S PCs. This systemis powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This PC has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

Fedora 17 is built on top of the Linux 3.3 kernel. Its default file system though is not, as was once expected, btrfs, aka Butters FS, but ext4 instead.

One fundamental and controversial under the hood change is that Fedora 17 has started work on “getting rid of the separation of /bin and /usr/bin, as well as /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. All files from the directories in / will be merged into their respective counterparts in /usr, and symlinks for the old directories will be created instead.”

The idea behind this switch to a unified file system is that it will increase Linux’s compatibility with other Unix-like systems such as Solaris. Its supporters also argue that it will reduce the complexity of Linux systems and make it easier to run virtual systems, share files, make back-ups simpler, and so on. Fedora is the first of the major Linux distributions to make this move. The critics of this change simply don’t see much point in making such a fundamental transformation to the traditional Linux file systems. For day to day use, you won’t notice any of this.

Fedora 17 also includes a wide variety of open-source programs. These include Firefox 11, for its default Web browser; Evolution 3.4.1 for e-mail, Empathy 3.4 for IM; and the just released GIMP 2.8 for graphics work. Its office-suite, like many Linux distributions these days, is LibreOffice 3.4.3 instead of OpenOffice.

Firewalld is now the Fedora’s standard firewall. Unlike earlier Linux firewalls Firewalld lets you reset your firewall’s rules but never takes it down even for an instance. I like that in a firewall!

As you would expect given Red Hat’s recent interest in high-end and cloud-computing, Fedora includes an improved cluster stack. It also includes built-in support for the Nebula Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the OpenStack cloud. Fedora’s take on OpenStack includes support for OpenStack’s latest edition, 2012.1, aka Essex.

As usual in Fedora, which has always been a Linux distribution, which was first and foremost for developers and bleeding edge users, Fedora includes a pre-release of Juno, the next release of the Eclipse software development kit (SDK). For better or worse, considering how Oracle is being with Java these days, it also comes with Java 7 and OpenJDK 7 as the default Java runtime and Java build toolset. GCC 4.7.x is now Fedora’s primary compiler.

Fedora also includes a lot of D programming language tools. In addition, as you’d expect in a Linux that’s the staging platform for RHEL, which is meant mostly for server use, it includes the latest updates of Ruby, PHP 5.4, and Erlang.

The improvement that everyone wants to know about in Fedora is GNOME 3.4.1. It’s much better than the version of GNOME used in Fedora 16. Unlike earlier versions, GNOME 3.4.x will now run without the need for a 3D driver. This has been a real problem for some users trying to run GNOME in virtual machines.

Borrowing from Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop forks, Unity and Head Up Display, GNOME 3.4 new and improved search function in its activities overview makes it easier to find programs. Search functions in general are much faster than they were than in its interface’s earlier incarnations.

This new edition of GNOME also includes an application level menu that sits on the top of GNOME Shell bar and contains the application’s menu. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s also taken from Ubuntu’s Unity interface. The bad news is that, just like Unity, not all applications use it so the interface has a half-finished feel to it.

It also doesn’t help any that the scrollbars are smaller, and thus harder to use, than ever. Even more annoying, there’s still no easy way to minimize or maximize applications. While it’s better than it was, this is still a design decision that I find annoying.

Still, it’s a lot easer now to use multiple programs and file systems in GNOME than it once was. The new GNOME box interface also makes it easy to use remote systems or virtual machines. The Documents application finally supports search, removable devices, and other features which I have long considered minimum requirements for what was a de facto file manager.

Last, but far from least as silly as it may sound, you can finally easy log out or turn off Fedora. Believe it or not, under GNOME 3.2, simply shutting your PC down was a major chore.

Still, while Fedora 17’s GNOME 3.4 desktop is a lot better than it used to be, I still find it far less useful than Unity or Linux Mint’s recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x interface, Cinnamon. Take a look at them yourself, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

A walk through Mint Linux’s new/old Cinnamon desktop (Gallery)

Ubuntu’s Unity, like GNOME 3.x, is quite different from earlier Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer (WIMP) interfaces, but it’s easy to use. Heck, my 80-year old mother-in-law can use Ubuntu 12.04. And, Cinnamon is a recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x desktop on top of a GNOME 3.x foundation.

That said, I did find this new Fedora with GNOME to be usable. I have to say I didn’t find the last version to be at all useful. Still, I’m left wondering why Fedora and GNOME first went in such a mis-guided direction in the first place. It’s great that Fedora and GNOME are much better than they were, but they’re still not for me, anyway, as useful as the last Fedora with GNOME 2.x was. I can see that Fedora is better, but I’m going to be sticking with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and openSUSE for my daily desktop use.

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Richard M. Stallman, free software's founder falls ill at technology conference.

Richard M. Stallman, aka RMS, creator of the concept of free software, president of the Free Software Foundation, and the primary author of the vital free software/open-source license the Gnu Public License (GPL), became ill during a speech at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain and had to taken to a hospital.

Some reports on Twitter said that Stallman had suffered a heart attack, but that was not the case. He began suffering in the middle of his speech and para-medics were called in Stallman tried to continue his speech, but finally had to give it up. He kept his sense of humor throughout the episode. When he ambulance crew took over 20 minutes to arrive, Stallman made a joke of it saying that due to Spain’s recent austerity cuts “Here’s the truth, [Spain's President Mariano] Rajoy wants to kill us all.” (Spanish language link).

It appears that Stallman was suffering from high blood pressure or hypertension. Officially, according to the FSF, Stallman, who was first treated at the site, was taken to a hospital and later discharged.

Stallman is a father figure of the modern free software movement. While, personally, he objects to the term open-source software, his work is also regarded as one of its ancestors. Stallman also claims that he’s one of the creators of Linux. Supporters of this position call Linux, GNU/Linux.

Over the last few years, Stallman, despite his continuing popularity is free software circles, has become seen as something of a crank. For example, after Steve Jobs’ death, Stallman wrote that while “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.”

Be that as it may, Stallman was the primary creator of the GPL and GNU C and many other important free software development tools under the GNU name. Without his programming and licensing work, the modern Linux and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) world wouldn’t exist. Health permitting, he will continue to fight for his vision of free software.

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In the beginning: Linux circa 1991

Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

First, the Linux giant said it expected to launch its fee-based version of OpenShift with support later this year.

The developer preview has been available since May of 2011. Last month,  Red Hat announced an open source project — OpenShift Origin —  to grow and evolve the core PaaS platform.

To date, the core focus has been on serving developers needs including the demand to quickly build and deploy applications in automated fashion. The next step, Red Hat said today, is to develop the platform to better serve enterprise needs.

As part of that, the Linux company will deliver a number of integrated solutions built on the company’s software stack beginning this summer that will allow customers to deploy PaaS on premise and deploy it on a variety of cloud and virtualization providers.

These include:

a DevOps model for developers to deploy application on OpenShift.com, another Public PaaS or a private Paas with OpenShift on premise.

an ITOps model that allows IT administrators and operations specialists to extend the PaaS to developers while also maintaining control of applications and infrastructure via Red Hat’s CloudForms offering.

An offline model that allows developers to self manage and run OpenShift on a laptop. The online OpenShift PaaS for developers is available today.

Red Hat was not prepared to offer specific availability or pricing on these solutions (which will include the Linux OS, JBoss Middleware and PaaS) but said the first deliverables are expected beginning this summer.

Red Hat also enlisted the help of analysts and service provider Accenture to identify the PaaS market opportunity and define what enterprises need.

Enterprise use of PaaS is still very limited but is expected to grow quickly, to a $3 billion [NOTE:correction] market by 2015, the 451Group research shows.

The first stage, DevOps, is the do-it-yourself brand of application development  and deployment largely being practiced today by developers on today’s PaaS.

But the strong move to the cloud , fueled in part by the driving need for faster and flexible application development and deployment, as well as the need to innovate quicker and migrate existing .NET and Java and legacy applications to the cloud, will enable the PaaS market to overpace the Software-as-a-Service market in the next year, one 451 analyst said.

Enterprises want the rapid pace of innovation and change enabled by PaaS platforms. Accenture used a PaaS, or example, to deliver for its telecom clients an agile, flexible  reservation system for pre-ordering new iPhones in four weeks that was able to seamlessly handle demand that far exceeded the initial forecasts.

Accenture has worked with 52 of the Fortune 100 on developing cloud strategies. It’s still early, but enterprises will catch on quick to the benefitsof PaaS once their cloud architectures are in place, said Adam Burden, global lead of Accenture’s Cloud Applications and Platforms.

“Today a lot of demand is focused on defining  strategy.  Many enterprise customers are dipping their toe in the water,’ said Burden. “We’ve seen with the largest enterrpises investment in constructing those platforms [but]the biggest inhibiitor has been general availability and supportable alternatives like those that will be in place in the near future.”

“Having these PaaS architectures on premise is pretty new,” Burden said. “But over the next yer we’ll see tremendous uptake in building and deploying those offerings.”

During a webcast, Red Hat VP Scott Crenshaw said OpenShift will compete head on with another relatively new open source Paas, VMware’s Cloud Foundry, but will offer three key differentiators that will distinguish it from its rival — a world class open source operating system that powers many of the world’s biggest clouds, a rich appdev and middleware platform and built-in two tiered multi-tenancy support in its Linux distribution that will allow enterprises to run multiple application instances on a single VM securely.

“We’re glad that VMware has decided on something in the open source space and is providing  relatively open platform for developers,” Crenshaw said when asked about the competition. “We applaud them or joining us and leading the charge for an open PaaS but openShift and Cloud Foundry are competitive and developers have to choose,” he said.

Dell is working on an Ubuntu laptop just for developers.

Dell has been on good-terms with Linux vendors for ages. The Austin, Texas-based company was the first major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to ship an Ubuntu Linux PC. Long before that, Dell was shipping Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on its server lines. Now, Dell is renewing its Linux ties with a new Ubuntu Linux-based developer laptop.

Barton George, director of marketing for Dell’s Web vertical, announced that Dell is working on creating an open-source laptop targeted directly at developers. It is based on the brand new Ubuntu 12.04 and Dell’s XPS13 Ultrabook.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

George explained that Dell is doing this “to better understand and serve the needs of developers in Web companies. We want to finds ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible.  And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.”

Specifically, Dell started this effort, codenamed Project Sputnik, to focus on companies who use the Internet as their platform. Analysts, customers, and developers kept suggesting Ubuntu Linux as their operating system of choice, so since to Dell’s knowledge, “no other OEM has yet made a system specifically targeted at devs and figured it was time to see what that might mean.  When the XPS13 launched we realized that we found the perfect platform to start with and when Dell’s incubation program was announced we knew I had the vehicle to get the effort kick started.”

George added “that Ubuntu was a natural choice not only because of its popularity in the Web world but Dell has quite a bit of experience with it. In fact Dell has enabled and pre-installed out-of-the-factory Ubuntu on more computer models than any other OEM.”

System76 and ZaReason would disagree with that. Dell’s support for Ubuntu Linux desktops has waxed and waned over the years. At the moment, I am unable to find any shipping Dell laptops or PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed in the U.S. market.

That said, Dell is working hard on this project. An Ubuntu ISO image of this developer release is already available for download. for users who are comfortable with bleeding edge technology.

It’s not perfect. Dell had some hardware drivers problems. Most of those have been licked now though. The remaining one, dealing with multi-touch on the touchpad, is proving tougher to knock out. Dell is working with the vendor though for a permanent fix and with Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, for a temporary patch to deal with the problem.

But, George, continued, “Where Sputnik starts to get interesting is when we talk about profiles.  No two developers are alike so instead of stuffing the system with every possible tool or app a developer could possibly want, we are trying a different approach. As mentioned above, the actual “stuff” on the install image is pretty basic, instead we are working with a few developers to put together a tool that can go out to a github repository and pull down various developer profiles. The first profiles we are targeting are Android, Ruby and JavaScript.”

One goal of the project though is to provide a “meta-system to manage your developer configuration.” With it, programmers could set up their tools just the way they wanted, store them in a repository, and then configure any system with their customized development environment. If they can pull this off, I can see this feature being very popular.

Want to join in on the this project? You can. Dell has set up a wiki for developers to get their say in what should be in Sputnik.

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Enterprises: Embrace open source development or go extinct

The really important issue in Oracle vs. Google is what it will mean for copyrights and APIs.

We still don’t know what will happen with Oracle’s accusations that Google violated its patents. Given that Oracle itself doesn’t value the two remaining patents as being worth much, that decision won’t matter much. No, the real question is what will U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup will do with notion that Java’s application programming interfaces (API)s, and hence all APIs, could be copyrighted. That’s the real $64-million (billion?) question

Alsup instructed the jury to treat APIs as if they could be copyrighted, and they agreed with him on that. What they couldn’t do is decide though whether Google had violated fair use in what it did with Java’s APIs in creating Android.

As Pamela Jones, intellectual property law reporter, paralegal, and founder of Groklaw explained to me, “The jury didn’t decide API are copyrightable. They can’t. That’s a question of law, and the judge is the one that has to decide that issue.”

Jones stated that Alsup “decided that he’d let the jury decide the fair use issue first, and then if they found fair use, he wouldn’t have to reach that decision. But if they found infringement and no fair use, then he would decide if APIs are copyrightable and more specifically if their arrangement is protectible.”

Is it? Oracle would have it that APIs are like music. Yes, APIs are just made up of descriptions of inputs and outputs, but then music is just made up of notes.

To this argument, Thomas Carey, a partner at Sunstein, a major intellectual property (IP) law firm and chair of its Business Department said, “Oracle’s lawyers compared the creation of APIs to writing a piece of music, to which I say ‘Balderdash.’”

The First Circuit opinion in Lotus v. Borland found the command structure of Lotus 1-2-3 to be unprotectible under copyright because it was functional, not expressive. According to that opinion, the IP protection for functionality is to be found, if at all, under the patent laws, not under copyright.

“Is there anything more functional and less expressive than an API?” continued Carey. I don’t think so, and I suspect that you don’t either. Thus, the infringement of APIs should not be possible unless they are patented. The First Circuit [which ruled in Borland's favor in this important case over a program's menu interface] got the principle right (even if I disagree with them about the command structure of 1-2-3).”

So why did the jury find “Balderdash?” Jones thinks it because the final jury instructions led the jury to find “infringement because they thought they were supposed to.” In the end, the jury came up with a conclusion that leaves the question of whether APIs can be copyrighted in the judge’s hands.

What happens next? Matthew Levy, a partner with the small IP firm, Cloudigy Law, said: Judge Alsup has not made any decision yet as to whether APIs are copyrightable. And it’s very likely that whatever decision he makes will be appealed to the 9th Circuit, so we won’t know the answer for some time.”

Levy continued, “Even if Judge Alsup holds that Java’s APIs are copyrightable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all APIs are copyrightable. Other languages use header files for APIs; a header file contains little more than method/function signatures, type definitions, exposed variable names, and constants. Those are completely dictated by the function of the code. Arguably, the way those things are arranged in a header file requires some creativity, but I think that’s stretching the law too far.”

If the judge finds that APIs can be copyrighted, “I see a couple of big problems with allowing all APIs to be copyrightable. First, developers will have to be very careful in choosing a programming language. The reality is that things won’t change a lot (although Java will take a hit), because most programming languages already come with fairly broad licenses. Still, I expect that developers will start to read those licenses a lot more carefully. But the bigger problem is for consumers. If all APIs are copyrightable, we can end up with a situation where a company builds a specialized API to control a device or other platform and then locks down the market for after-market components using copyright of the API combined with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Levy concluded.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a far darker view of what the world would be like if APIs could be copyrighted. “Treating APIs as copyrightable would have a profound negative impact on interoperability, and, therefore, innovation. APIs are ubiquitous and fundamental to all kinds of program development. It is safe to say that all software developers use APIs to make their software work with other software. For example, the developers of an application like Firefox use APIs to make their application work with various OSes by asking the OS to do things like make network connections, open files, and display windows on the screen. Allowing a party to assert control over APIs means that a party can determine who can make compatible and interoperable software, an idea that is anathema to those who create the software we rely on everyday. Put clearly, the developer of a platform should not be able to control add-on software development for that platform.”

The EFF then gives two concrete examples: “Take, for example, a free and open source project like Samba, which runs the shared folders and network drives in millions of organizations. If Samba could be held to have infringed the Microsoft’s copyright in its SMB protocol and API, with which it inter-operates, it could find itself on the hook for astronomical damages or facing an injunction requiring that it stop providing its API and related services, leaving users to fend for themselves.”

“Another example is the AOL instant messaging program, which used a proprietary API. AOL tried to prevent people from making alternative IM programs that could speak to AOL’s users. Despite that, others successfully built their own implementations of the API from the client’s side. If copyright had given AOL a weapon to prevent interoperability by its competitors, the outcome for the public would have been unfortunate.”

Let’s hope, oh how we should hope, it doesn’t come to that.

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Oracle vs. Google: Dead lawsuit walking

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Writer

The list of new bells and whistles — such as improved ODF support, including new ODF 1.2 encryption option, new spreadsheet functions, an enhanced pivot table support in Calc and enhanced graphics — is welcome news.

Gallery: Apache OpenOffice 3.4 makes official debut (screenshots)

But for the Apache Software Foundation — and for long term supporters of the open source Office suite — this next stage of development , free from vendor control — offers its best chance to date to attract more users and backers. IBM, which discontinued its own Symphony suite some time ago, is reportedly planning a new product based on the Apache OpenOffice.

As noted by the ASF today, Sun acquired the former StarOffice suite (developed by StarDivision in Germany) in 1999. Oracle renamed it Oracle OpenOffice after acquiring Sun but discontinued its development in mid 2010. Oracle announced its donation to the ASF in mid 2011.

It has been in incubation since then and is being officially released by the ASF under the Apache 2.0 license today free of charge.

Not all would agree with Apache’s point of view. The Document Foundation, which developed its own LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice after Oracle signaled its intention to cease development of the office suite, holds that its own organization is independent of vendor control and is the leading open source developer of OpenOffice today.

It has received the support of SUSE , Ubuntu and Intel. The Document Foundation is incorporated in Germany.

One LibreOffice spokesman, a longtime OpenOffiice developer and top SUSE engineer, disputed that the Apache license is the best open source license.

“We find this announcement particularly interesting as, a year after Oracle shuttered OpenOffice.org, the Incubator (also cited as Apache) now have their release out. As we said when this move was announced, this has a positive angle, allowing LibreOffice to adopt a more future-proof copy-left licensing model.  It also goes without saying that SUSE continues to provide a fully supported SUSE LibreOffice product on Windows and Linux built from the same code base.  I have a more detailed comparison on my blog, but let me focus on the great things that are happening in LibreOffice Land.

“We’ve got our monthly release of 3.5.3 out, steadily increasing quality, and our 3.6 release is one month away from feature freeze and looking great - so we continue to execute on our time-based release schedule. Also, yesterday we announced an exciting certification program to increase the confidence of purchasers of support and services around LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, Distinguished Engineer at SUSE.

Let the games begin.

Not counting the APIs, here's how much code Google was found to have copied from Java.

On the surface, it may look like Oracle won the first round of its intellectual property (IP) lawsuit with Google. Look again. No one’s won anything and that includes Oracle.

While we wait to see what the jury has to say about the two remaining patents, let’s take a closer look at what the jury decided. They said that Google’s Android mobile platform infringed on part of the Java programming language. So, could this be, as one writer would have it, “be a major blow to Android, Google’s mobile operating system?” Nope.

You see the jury, however, couldn’t decide if Google’s violations of Java and its application programming interfaces (API)s were actually OK because its use of them in Android fell under fair use. Ack!

Google, immediately asked for a mis-trial. Judge William Alsup, who’s presiding over this case, had previously said, that “I’m not going to let this court go to waste.” It sure looks like a waste to me.

Google also claimed that pending further rulings by Judge Alsup, there is “zero finding of copyright liability” outside of nine lines of code—nine lines that Oracle has attributed “no value” to in its damages report.

Those nine lines of code? Not counting the APIs, which the jury has awarded Oracle, is all Oracle has that was “copied” from Java into Android. Amazing isn’t it?

Whether Alsup grants a mis-trail or not isn’t really material though. Regardless of who won, lost, or drew this case, it was destined to be appealed. After all, does anyone seriously think a jury made up of, among others, of a plumber, a nurse, a retired photographer, and a postal worker was going to get the final word on a major IP lawsuit involving two of the largest companies in the world? I don’t think so.

And, indeed, this is just the kind of bad decision you’d expect from a jury in a case over its head. As it is, they’ve decided that APIs can be copyrighted but that, in the case of Java, they can’t decide if anyone using them can actually get into any trouble.

This is the worst of all possible worlds. Oracle won’t see any money—not that I think Oracle has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning anything in this case anyway–but the jury did decide that APIs can be copyrighted. That’s not good.

As my CNET colleague Stephen Shankland reports, RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady thinks “A decision in favor of copyrightable APIs is likely to be at least as damaging as the patent system is today. And, my just look at how well IP patents have turned out for everyone!

As Andrew Binstock, editor in chief for the venerable programmers publication Dr Dobbs wrote, “If Oracle prevails in its claim that APIs can be copyrighted, nearly every aspect of programming will be changed for the worse.”

Specifically, Binstock continued, should APIs be ruled subject to copyright, “Numerous products will suddenly find themselves on an uncertain legal standing in which the previously benign but now newly empowered copyright holders might assert punitive copyright claims. Chief among these would be any re-implementation of an existing language. So, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy for Python; JRuby, IronRuby, and Rubinius for Ruby; Mono for C# and VB; possibly C++ for C, GCC for C and C++ and Objective-C; and so forth. And of course, all the various browsers that use JavaScript might owe royalties to the acquirers of Netscape’s intellectual property.”

Microsoft, by the by, is the one that’s buying the rights to JavaScript. So, if APIs can indeed be copyrighted, all of us who use programs based on these languages—that would be everyone on the planet—will face much higher software prices.

I hope, oh how I hope, this part of the Oracle vs. Google ruling is over-turned as fast as possible. Or, better still Judge Alsup rules that APIs can’t be copyrighted. It’s within his power to do so.  If not, and APIs can be copyrighted, everything about programming is going to change and not in a good way.

Related Stories:

After mixed copyright win over Google, Oracle looks towards patents

Oracle wins on infringement; jury stuck on Google’s fair use argument

Oracle vs. Google: Dead lawsuit walking

CNET: Oracle gets a chance to rewrite software law

CNET: Android, Java, and the tech behind Oracle v. Google (FAQ)

Windows 8 Metro vs. Ubuntu 12.04 Unity

2012 has already seen a major update of what’s arguably the most important Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 and we’re also seeing the most radical update of Windows with Windows 8 Metro coming since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1. So, which will end up the better for its change?

1. Desktop interface

Ubuntu replaced the popular GNOME 2.x interface with Unity when their developers decided the GNOME 3.x shell wasn’t for them. Some people, like the developers behind Linux Mint, decided to recreate the GNOME 2.x desktop with Cinnamon, but Ubuntu took its own path with Unity.

In Unity’s desktop geography, your most used applications are kept in the left Unity Launcher bar on the left. If you need a particular application or file, you use Unity’s built-in Dash application. Dash is a dual purpose desktop search engine and file and program manager that lives on the top of the Unity menu Launcher.

Its drawback, for Ubuntu power-users, is that it makes it harder to adjust Ubuntu’s settings manually. On the other hand, most users, especially ones who are new to Ubuntu, find it very easy to use. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has made it clear that regardless of whether you use Ubuntu on a desktop, tablet or smartphone the Unity interface is going to be there and it’s going to look the same.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

Windows 8 Metro is, if anything, even more of a departure from its predecessor than Unity. At least with Unity, you’re still working with a windows, icons, menus, and pointers (WIMP). Metro has replaced icons with tiles. In addition, by default, you can only work with applications in tiles or in full-screen format. Even such familiar friends as the Start button are missing.

I’ve been working with Metro for months now. After all that time, I still think Windows 8 with Metro will be dead on arrival. Even people who really like Metro say things like “the default presentation is ugly and impersonal.” You can make Metro a lot more usable, but that’s a lot of work to make an interface that’s already ugly prettier and, when you’re done, you’re still left with an interface that doesn’t look or work the way you’ve been using Windows for years.

True, there’s also the Windows 8 Desktop, which still doesn’t have a Start button, but otherwise looks and works like the Windows 7 Aero interface, but it’s a sop to users who don’t want Metro. Sooner rather than later, Microsoft wants everyone on Metro. Of course on some platforms, such as Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 for ARM tablets, Metro is the only choice.

2. Applications

For ages one of the bogus raps against desktop Linux has been that there hasn’t been enough applications for it. That was never true. What Linux didn’t have was the same applications as Windows. To an extent, that’s still true. You can’t still get say Quicken, Outlook, or Photoshop natively on Linux. Of course, with the use of WINE and its commercial big brother Codeweaver’s Crossover, you can run these, and other Windows programs, on top of Linux.

On the other hand, I find some Linux programs, such as Evolution for e-mail, an optional program in Ubuntu, to be far better than their Windows equivalents. In addition, if like more and more people these days the program you really use all the time is a Web browser for everything then Windows has no advantage what-so-ever. Chrome, as my testing has shown time and again, is the best Web browser around runs equally well on Ubuntu and Windows. On both, however, you’ll need to download it. Ubuntu defaults to using Firefox and Windows 8, of course, uses Internet Explorer.

What I find really interesting though is that Microsoft is actually removing functionality from Windows 8. If you want to play DVDs on Windows 8 or use it as a media center, you’ll need to play extra. DVD-players and the power to stream media remain free options in Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions.

3. Security

There has been a lot of talk lately about malware on Macs and it’s true. Macs are vulnerable to security breeches. So, for that matter, are Linux systems. But never, ever forget that for every single Mac virus or worm, there have been thousands of Windows attackers. And, that while Linux can be attacked as well, in practice, it’ more secure than either Mac OS X or Windows and there has never been a significant Linux desktop security worm.

Could it happen? Sure. But, get real, I do run Linux with virus protection, ClamAV, but I’m paranoid, and even so I’ve never seen a single attacker, much less suffered a successful attack, in almost twenty years of using Linux desktops. I wish I could say the same of my Windows systems.

4. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Thanks for Active Directory (AD), it’s long been easy to manage Windows desktops, but then thanks to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and tools like Landscape, it’s no problem in Ubuntu Linux either. Indeed, since you won’t be able to use AD to manage Windows RT systems, Ubuntu Linux actually provides a more unified management system.

Also, remember what I said about security? You can’t forget anti-virus software or patching Windows for a minute. Linux? Yes, you should use anti-virus programs and patch regularly, but relax, you’re not asking for zero-day doom all the time the way you are with Windows.
Besides, the upfront cost of Linux? Zero. Windows 8? We don’t know yet, but we do know that Windows 8 PCs will be more expensive than their Windows 7 brothers.

If you’re really serious about cutting your desktop costs, Linux is the way to go.

5. Ease of use

One of the perpetual myths about Linux is how hard it is to use. Oh really? Don’t tell my 80-year old Ubuntu-using mother-in-law or Jason Perlow’s Linux user mom-in-law. They’re both using Ubuntu 12.04 and loving it. Why? Because it’s so easy to use.

Metro, on the other hand… well you know I don’t like it, but I think it’s telling that a Bing search-not Google, Bing-showed 3.32-million results for “Windows 8 Metro sucks.” Many users, including our own Scott Raymond, would like it if Microsoft gave users the option to turn Metro off. That’s not going to happen.

Another plus for Ubuntu is, say you really can’t stand Unity. No problem, you can switch to GNOME 3.x, Cinnamon, KDE, whatever. With Ubuntu while they want you to use Unity, you can choose to use another Linux desktop interface. With Windows 8, you’re stuck with half-Metro and half-desktop.

Put it all together and what do you get? Well, I don’t see Ubuntu overcoming Windows on the desktop. There are just too many Windows users out there. The Linux desktop will never catch up with it.

My question though wasn’t who was going to end up the most popular desktop. It was “which will end up the better for its change?” To that question, there’s only one answer: Ubuntu is the winner. I foresee Windows XP and 7 using sticking to their operating systems and giving Windows 8 the same cold shoulder they gave Vista and Millennium Edition.

That will end up being a real problem for Windows. Back in the day, their iron-grip on the desktop meant they could have flops and still not lose much. Today, though, we’re moving away from the desktop to a world where we do much of our work on the cloud and for that we can use tablets and smartphones as well. And, on tablets and smartphones, Microsoft has yet to show that Windows can play a role. Thanks to Android, we already know Linux is a major player on those, and Ubuntu is already making a desktop/Android smartphone partnership play.

All-in-all, Ubuntu is going to be far more successful for its changes than Microsoft will be with its operating system transformations.

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Google's Linux-based Chrome OS Aura interface has a new friend: Linus Torvalds.

Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, hasn’t been happy with the direction his formerly favorite Linux desktop interface, GNOME, has gone. In fact, Torvalds downright hates GNOME 3.x. He’ll get no argument from me. I hate GNOME 3.x too. Recently though, Torvalds has start toying with Google’s new Chrome operating system’s Aura interface and, guess what, he kind of likes it.

Torvalds wrote, “And I haven’t really played around with it all that much, but as a desktop it really doesn’t look that bad. I could name worse desktops (cough cough).” That would be GNOME 3.x of course.

Torvalds continued, “It allows such radical notions as having easy mouse configurability for things like how to launch applications. Things gnome removed because those kinds of things were “too confusing”, and in the process made useless. And an auto-hide application dock at the bottom. Revolutionary, I know.”

Say hello to Google’s new, old Chrome OS (gallery)

He added, “It also seems to improve on the experience even in the non-laptop mode. Making the calendar start as a “window” instead of as a browser tab also means that when you use it in the single-use mode that we traditionally did, the app takes up the whole screen, without the browser buttons etc.”

“So the new Aura approach seems to work both as a traditional window manager and as a more limited “apps take up the whole screen”. Maybe this whole ‘browser as an app’ thing can really work,” Torvalds concluded.

In short, he found, as I have when I tested Chrome OS Aura, that Google has taken its hybrid Linux desktop/cloud-based and given it a really useful retro desktop look. Personally, I’ll take this kind of desktop, or the Linux distribution’s Mint new take on the GNOME 2 interface, Cinnamon over such new and improved desktop interfaces as GNOME 3.x or Windows 8 Metro any day of the week.

The current generation of Chromebooks though, which is where most people including Torvalds use Chrome OS, are another matter. Torvalds wrote, “The whole point of a laptop for me is that you can take it on the road and do your work. And that, to me, means “compile stuff and use git”. And no, “use ssh [Secure Shell] in a browser to compile on some other machine” does not count. The laptop is the only thing I have with me. So for it to count as a real laptop, I need to be able to do real work locally too. I like having lots of connected options, but they can’t be the only options.”

Of course you don’t need a Chromebook to run Chrome OS. You can run it on any PC. It’s just that it’s not packaged that way. In fact, I run Chrome OS in virtual machines all the time. Personally, though, my Samsung Series 5 Chromebook has become my grab and go laptop.

On the other hand, I just use Web applications like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Voice on it. I don’t try to use git, never-mind compile anything on it! For those uses, it would be great if, as it appears might be the case, the next generation of Chromebooks will be built on Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips.

In the meantime though, as Torvalds said in a comment, “I was pleasantly surprised by the new interface - it seems to be going very much in the right direction. Give it a few years (and better hardware), and I can really see it happening. As it is, it’s clearly useful for some people, judging by the comments here. It’s not there for me now. But the new interface is better even just for the limited use I put the thing to.”

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The Origin project will serve as the upstream for code and improvements to OpenShift, Red Hat’s PaaS, which today runs on Amazon Web Services cloud and competes against VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry.

One Red Hat PaaS Evangelist defines a PaaS as an application platform with operating system and middleware included to run applications on the cloud. PaaS allows developers to quickly deploy and scale their applications on the cloud.

The Origin open source code made available today will allow developers to run OpenShift on a laptop, or on a server inside an intranet or in the datacenter, Red Hat notes. Origin will be accessible at GitHub.

In a thinly veiled swipe at VMware, Red Hat hints that the rival Cloud Foundry open source code is too controlled by VMware.

“OpenShift Origin will be run as a true open source project,” Red Hat execs wrote on a blog. Taking lessons-learned from Fedora, JBoss and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), OpenShift Origin looks to be unique among PaaS projects in that it is a meritocratic community project, regardless of developer affiliation …. [and] the codebase is licensed under the Apache License, v2, which enables a wide audience of users, developers and vendors.”

“The reasons for the above are clear: The cloud in general, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and PaaS implementations specifically, should not be vehicles that promote vendor lock-in, nor should they be under the control or “guidance” of vendors,” Red Hat noted. “For the cloud to remain open and vibrant, implementations should be truly open, not only in license, but in governance. The OpenShift Origin project sets a high bar for PaaS offerings, developed and governed by developers, for developers.”

.

I predict Windows RT Nook Tablets for the holidays.

Last year, Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble for breaking patents in its Android-based e-readers. Most companies, like Samsung, when sued by Microsoft over similar claims folded and paid off Microsoft. That’s why Microsoft makes more money from Android than it does from its own mobile operating system offerings. But, Barnes & Noble didn’t roll over. Instead, the last big bookstore company counter-attacked and they were winning. The International Trade Commission (ITC) seemed to be siding with Barnes & Noble. Uh-oh. So, Microsoft played let’s make a deal and created a new partnership with Barnes & Noble.

So, did Microsoft do the deal just because they realized that if their anti-Android patents would be ruled to be FUD? No, but it did have a heck of a lot to do with it. As Alison Frankel, senior writer at The American Lawyer, commented, “Microsoft paid B&N, the patent defendant, a sum of money that exceeded the marketplace value of its investment. How often does a patent plaintiff pay the defendant in a settlement? Especially when that defendant is on the ropes and urgently searching for a strategic investor?”

I know the answer to that one: Never.

If Microsoft had lost this case, they would have had every company that ever signed an Android patent deal with them coming back armed to the teeth with lawyers. It’s still going to mean legal trouble though for Microsoft. Frankel added, “So if you’re another Android user thinking about saying no to Microsoft when it comes around with a licensing demand, you have to be emboldened by the B&N story: After enduring a year under scrutiny as a defendant, Barnes & Noble ends up with $300 million and drastically improved business prospects. That’s not the scorched-earth result you might fear from taking on Microsoft and its lawyers.”

I know some Android fans hate this deal. They wanted to see Microsoft’s patents taken to the cleaners. I did too, but Barnes & Noble is a bookstore company that’s been struggling and trying to find a nook for itself in the e-book world. That hasn’t been easy.

While I like the Barnes & Noble Nook family, and I probably use my Nook Tablet more than any other tablet in my house, most people want iPads or, if they are going to buy an Android tablet, they’re going to get Barnes & Noble arch-rival Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

So, put yourself in Barnes & Noble’s shoes. Would you fight, and probably win, a patent lawsuit that would take years to resolve? Or, would you make a deal and create a subsidiary with a net-value that’s greater than your market-cap? Of course you would.

Microsoft had more than the fear of seeing its patent troll ways over-turned driving it to the deal. While Windows 8 has its fans, many other people, like yours truly, thinks Windows 8 will be dead on arrival. Still, as much as I dislike Metro on the desktop, I’ll concede Metro might have a shot on a smartphone or tablet… if Microsoft could only get someone to buy a Windows-powered device.

Microsoft owns the desktop, albeit its decade old Windows XP is really what most people use, but it a total non-player on tablets and smartphones. I don’t care if Metro on tablets can slide, dice, and more, Microsoft needed a partner who already has a real presence in tablets—sorry Dell, HP, you’re fine for PCs and servers, but tablets? I think not—and that company was Barnes & Noble.

Now, we don’t know that we’re going to see a Windows 8-powered Nook tablet (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/will-barnes-noble-and-nook-usher-in-a-199-windows-metro-tablet/20389), but I’d bet on it. Nooks don’t sell as well as the Kindle Free, but they do sell, they have fans, and with this one move Microsoft can place Windows 8 devices in Barnes & Noble stores around the country.

These Nooks will not be dedicated e-readers. Dedicated e-readers are history. We’ll also see a Nook reader app. for other Windows RT devices, but that will be small potatoes.

To be exact, I predict we’ll see Windows RT (Windows on ARM) powered Nook tablets in Barnes & Noble stores by the 2012 holiday season. To help create a market for them, Microsoft will arrange for them to be sold for less than cost. I expect, we’ll also continue to see Android-based Nooks.

Taken all-in-all, both Barnes & Noble and Microsoft won here. Barnes & Noble got a welcome injection of cash. Yes, I know the history of companies that have partnered with Microsoft—Nokia and Novell for instance—has not been good, but Barnes & Noble needed a deal like this. Microsoft gets to continue, for now, to shake down Android vendors. The boys from Redmond also get a consumer brand and sales channel for its long-suffering device lines.

The losers? Android supporters and software patent opponents. Still, this deal can also be seen a sign of weakness by Microsoft. Other Android companies are going to be a lot less likely to sign on the dotted line when Microsoft’s lawyers come calling.

Related Stories:

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Will Barnes & Noble and Nook usher in a $199 Windows Metro tablet?

Is there a Windows-based Barnes & Noble reader in the works?

Windows Phone Nook: The best device Microsoft’s money can buy

Barnes & Noble cuts Nook eReader prices ahead of Mother’s Day

Consider this. The 17-year-old foundation — whose namesake HTTP Server is the most popular web server on the Internet with more than 60 percent market share– now governs more than 150 open source software projects, including recent additions of mega projects OpenOffice and Cloudstack, whose proprietary corporate sponsors were only too happy to hand off the code to a willing party.

Yet in that same timeframe, NGINX has established itself as the other (and fast growing) leading open source web server running roughly 70 million web sites — about 10 percent of the total on the web.  And its customers are household names; more than 25 percent are among the top 1,000 busiest including facebook, Zappos, Groupon and WordPress, the company claims.

In a recent telephone interview, ASF President Jim Jagielski said any perception that the ASF has become the dumping ground for challenged open source projects — while its core code business is being eaten away — is off base.

“I wouldn’t consider them software dumps,” said Jagielski, who has been with the organization since its inception and has served as a developer and in technical leadership roles at Zend, VMware/SpringSource and currently Red Hat.

“Whether or not Citrix thought they could or couldn’t build a community [is irrelevant]. Apache is known for building healthy, vibrant successful communities around software projects because when it’s an Apache project, it’s not dictated by proprietary commercial vendors. It’s a safe neutral placefor open source projects to grow and thrive.”

Take OpenOffice., which is expected to announce its first official release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 sometime this week.

Since taking over the reigns from Oracle last June, Apache has seen renewed interest in the code from the likes of Intel and IBM — which abandoned its OpenOffice product in January –and plans to re-enter the market with an Apache OpenOffice brand, the ASF President said.

The open source CloudStack project, like OpenOffice, is now in incubation at Apache but has attracted more developer interest since Citrix donated the code to the ASF earlier this month, he said, hinting that big news is coming soon. “It’s still so so early but a lot of people are chomping at the bit. In a month there will be a lot of advances made in that area.”

Jagielski sees a continuing bright future for the ASF regardless of the number of projects it takes on. He pointed to other leading Apache projects like Hadoop and TomCat and expects that Deltacloud — which was donated to the ASF by Red Hat — will be big.

The ASF, he point out, is an umbrella organization that provides the infrastructure and legal protection to open source communities but each project is self-governing and self sustaining. The Apache licensing model makes open source code more attractive to enterprise users. Today, there are more than 600 bug fixers and code committers and a group of between 30 and 35 developers who can actually touch the code.

The ASF’s track record of incubating and growing successful open source projects is unrivaled, Jagielski claims. Recently, Apache’s Hadoop open source project reached a major milestone that makes the big data project far more appealing to enterprises.

“Up until recently, you’d need to go to other entities to get a code release but now ou’ll see much more predictable release of software,” he said.

What’s coming down the pike? You’ll see a lot more “cloud computing stuff” coming out of Apache.

And he insists that the recently released Apache HTTP Server 2.4 is far better at use cases — such as handling concurrent requests — where NGINX has dominated most recently.

“NGINX has found a nice use case where Apache has historically not been as successful . Apache tried to be a generic web server with a bunch of use cases and NGINX is for one specific use case,” Jagielski said, noting he does not begrudge NGINX its success but he believes that the burgeoning web server may have seen its peak in the days when memory was expensive and cloud computing was in its infancy.

“The real demand for that [high concurrency] architecture has been reduced after a while… there’s always going to be a subset of system administrators designed for high concurrency with small memory utilization as possible,” he noted, adding that lowered costs for memory and access to cloud computing resources on the fly makes NGINX less compelling.

And the next generation production ready Apache HTTP Server 2.6 — with many cloud enhancements and filtering that gives flexibility to change data on-the-fly — is on tap for release in 2013.

In the past few days, Apache has released a significant upgrade of its Cassandra 1.1 NoSQL database for big data uses and just today its 300 percent faster TomEE 1.0 Java enterprise edition application server — designed especially for cloud computing — made its debut.

What about Apache projects like the Lucene search engine — which hasn’t seemed to fare well against the proprietary giants Google and Microsoft?

Jagielski acknowledges the project — which announced a major 3.6 upgrade on April 12 — has not gotten the attention it deserves, but he contends it continues to score major wins against rivals.

“A lot of hashtag searches that Twitter does uses Lucene internally and it forms the basic search for Wikipedia,” he said. “I’m surprised it doesn’t get the same kudos of other projects as successful as it is. Unfortunately, search is seen as a boring technology. But it isn’t boring and it’s there for developers willing to make it important to them.”

And let’s not forget the genesis of the organization, which incorporated in 1999 but actually got off the ground in 1995. Jagielski, one of the eight founding members of the ASF, pointed out that the origin of the Apache HTTP Server is Netscape - whose browser and web server were the first major open source projects to challenge proprietary incumbent Microsoft.

“One of the great things about the way this nfoundation is structured is that the day-to-day management is done by the projects themselves and there’s no vendor lock in,” he said, noting that projects are only required to do quarterly reports to the board. “The board doesn’t manage the web server or Hadoop. The foundation is lightweight and there’s no direct management so we can scale easily.”

Parties at OpenStack enterprise cloud operating system developer Piston Cloud Computing said it has partnered with VMware to build an OpenStack layer to VMware’s recently unveiled Bosh open source toolchain for Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform.

VMware rival Citrix recently donated a rival open source cloud platform — CloudStack — to the Apache Software Foundation.

Christopher MacGown, Co-founder and CTO of Piston, said a VMware team attended the recent OpenStack conference and tried to enlist the help of developers to build a cloud provider interface between Bosh and OpenStack in order to grow VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry.

VMware — whose proprietary hypervisor and virtualization platform leads in the marketplace — got a decidedly lukewarm response from the open source crowd. But VMware, which has opened sourced its Cloud Foundry PaaS, means business, he said.

“There’s an imperative from VMware to say they support open APIs,” McGown said. ”

Piston is wriitng an OpenStack layer for the Bosh installation layer for Cloud Foundry. Piston owns the copyright and the Apache 2 licensed software code to the OpenStack layer, which will be in the base release of Cloud Foundry.

VMware’s Bosh toolchain is designed as a PaaS for the Cloud Foundry Paas and enables release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management for large scale distributed services.

Oh, it’s possible that the jury will award Oracle something, but in the end Oracle will lose in this court and any other court they try to take their case to. I can say that without any fear of doubt because, just as with the SCO case in its early days, anyone with a real clue about the issues already knows that neither SCO then, nor Oracle now, has a leg to stand on.

There are several reasons why the case continues to get so much attention. First is is Oracle going after Google over the most popular of all the mobile operating systems, Android. The other reason is that, frankly a lot of the coverage of the trial and the events leading up to it has made it seem like Oracle actually had a case. They didn’t. They don’t.

Android strategy on display in Oracle v. Google showdown (images)

Part of the reason for this popular misconception came about because many people took the word of Florian Müller, a patent lobbyist, as an objective reporter on the case. If you cover intellectual property law issues for years, as I had, you knew that while Müller started as an anti-patent activist, in recent years hes been an analyst for hire for Microsoft and Oracle. Essentially, he’s a lobbyist for Oracle. Never-the-less, many reports used his pro-Oracle/anti-Google takes as facts in their news stories.

Back in 2010, when Oracle first sued Google for Java copyright and patent violations, Oracle’s Java lawsuit was a shocking move. Oracle, a founding members of the Linux Foundation, was suing a company over Android, which is a mobile Linux distribution!?

As Stephen O’Grady, one of the founders of Red Monk, the developer-oriented analysis firm, said at the time, “This is simply a case of Oracle being less concerned than Sun about being perceived as a bad actor. It is interesting, however, that Oracle appears to be willing to trade short-term transactional gains for long-term ecosystem health.”

Sun’s insiders like James Gosling, Java’s creator, weren’t surprised though. As Gosling said then, “Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. ” However, “Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code.” Suing other businesses though, as SAP can attest,  is in Oracle’s genes.

Oracle chief financial officer and president Safra Catz’s claim that Oracle “never wanted to be in this litigation with Google” is nonsense on one level. On another, it’s not. What Oracle really wanted was Google to be so terrified by Oracle’s demand for $6.1-billion to scare them into forking over say, half-a-billion to make the lawsuit go away. Google didn’t scare.

Oracle has two major complaints. First, Google with Android violated its Java software patents. Leaving aside that software patents are evil and should be ripped out of the pages of the law, Oracle’s patent claims have been chopped into kindling. All but one of Oracle’s patents have either been kicked out of existence by the Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) or by Judge William H. Alsup. Of the little that’s left of this side of the case, Oracle’s own expert, Boston University professor Iain Cockburn estimate of damages, said it estimated the maximum damages would $32.3-million. At an informed guess, Oracle’s spent more on this case this year alone.

Oracle also claimed that Google had violated the Java language and application programming interface (API)’s copyright. Leaving aside the question of whether you can copyright either a computer language or an API and it’s not at all clear that you can, that leaves one itty-bitty problem: Sun, Java’s parent compnay had open-sourced Java under the GPLv2 in early November 2006.

What that means, of course, is that even if Oracle is ruled right in every particular about the copyright issues none of it matters. Sun, Java’s creator and previous owner, has opened Java up for anyone to take the code and do with what they wished so long as they obeyed the rule of the GPLv2.

Worse still from Oracle’s viewpoint, when Google introduced Android with its clear Java legacy a year later in 2007 what did Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz do? Did he say that Google had gone too far? That’s they’d stolen from Sun? Nope. He said, and I quote, Sun has “obviously done a ton of work to support developers on all Java based platforms, and we’re pleased to add Google’s Android to the list.”

Then, at the trial, Schwartz reaffirmed that under his rule, Sun wanted to be as open and popular as possible and that meant supporting what Google was doing with Android Would he have liked to work closer with Google? Sure. Was they going to try to sue them? No, As Schwartz explained on the stand, “You’re now married, and you have to find out a way to get along,” Sun wanted to “find ways to make Google comfortable,” so when Google made it clear that they’d like to do their own spin on Java, that “they felt they could better execute on their own and didn’t need what we had to offer,” then so be it.

As Schwartz explained when Oracle tried to spin his testimony, so long as someone didn’t try to call their Java-based “You’re now married, and you have to find out a way to get along.” Oracle clearly wants a divorce, but with their lack of significant patent proof and Sun’s open-source prenuptial agreement, they’re going to have a heck of getting any intellectual property alimony from Google.

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It's morning for the latest Ubuntu desktop Linux release.

The wait is over. The final version of Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin is out. To download your copy of this popular Linux distribution head to the Ubuntu download page. If you’re already using the last version, Ubuntu 11.10 you can now upgrade automatically upgrade to 12.04 with Update Manager. If you need more help with your upgrade see the Upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 LTS page.

LTS, you ask? That stands for long term support. This is the Ubuntu version that will be supported for five years, through April 2017. If you have a business, and you’ve been thinking about using Ubuntu on your desktops or servers, this is the version you want.

However, before leaping to the Ubuntu site to download the freshest bytes and bits, you may want to wait for a bit. Canonical tells me that the site is currently getting overwhelmed and some people are not being able to get into it. For me, the site and download links worked, but at speeds of about 100Kbps, they certainly aren’t fast.

If you really can’t stand to wait for a minute, take Jorge Castro, a Canonical staffer’s suggestion, and use one of “mirrors hosted on Amazon’s S3 service, which has a bunch of capacity and should be fast for users where an Amazon region is close:”

You should use whichever region is closest to you, you can either manually add these to

/etc/apt/sources.list/

file or paste them into the custom URL field of the software sources application.

East Coast US:
deb http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

West Coast US (California):
deb http://us-west-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

West Coast US (Oregon)
deb http://us-west-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

South America (São Paulo, Brazil)
deb http://sa-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

Western Europe (Dublin, Ireland)
deb http://eu-west-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

SouthEast Asia (Singapore)
deb http://ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

NorthEast Asia (Tokyo)
deb http://ap-northeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse

I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 in beta for two months now. I’ve found it to be an excellent, stable, and extremely end-user friendly desktop operating system. Note, I didn’t say a really welcoming Linux desktop, I said an end-user friendly desktop operating system. I was able to get my Spanish-speaking mother-in-law on Ubuntu Linux and she was able to just use it without any fuss or muss.

A big reason why was because Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is so darn easy to new-comers to you. She literally never had a single question in three weeks of using as her only computer. True, she wasn’t asking it to do much-Web browsing, watching video, doing e-mail, writing documents-but is that all most people ask of their computers most days?

A first look at Ubuntu Linux 12.04’s Unity desktop (Gallery)

Yes, I know some of you really don’t like Ubuntu’s Unity desktop with its dash of Head Up Display (HUD). This latest update of Unity is based on GNOME 3.4.1, but the disagreeable GNOME default interface is hidden away.

I know some of you still want a more traditional GNOME 2.x style desktop. I get that. It’s why my primary Linux desktop is Mint 12 with its Cinnamon GNOME 2 retake.

A walk through Mint Linux’s new/old Cinnamon desktop (Gallery)

That said, if you haven’t tried Unity for a while, give it a try. Yes, it is different, and yes it is easy–it’s hard to feel like a cutting edge operating system guru when you know a semi-computer illiterate 80-year old can work the basics as well as you can–but if you put that “It’s different and I don’t like it!” mindset aside you may just be pleasantly surprised.

However you should also know that Unity/HUD is a “What you see is what you get” desktops. For example, the Unity launchbar, short of major tweaking beyond what most casual users can do, is permanently glued to the left of the screen. I was also somewhat puzzled by Ubuntu’s new default black display. It’s easy enough to put up a wallpaper–just right click on it and pick Change Desktop Background–but matte black by default? Really?

Technically speaking, the new Ubuntu is based, as always, on Debian Linux. For its Linux kernel, 12.04 uses the 3.2 Linux kernel. It also supports the full range of Linux file systems including Btfrs (aka Butter), ext3, ext4, JFS, ReiserFS, and XFS. By default, it uses ext4.

You can run Ubuntu on as little as 512MBs of RAM and with a 486 processor. Faster is better, but for practical purpose any recent system with one GB of RAM will work just fine with Ubuntu.

I have it running on a wide variety of systems and I haven’t seen a single glitch on any of them. Let me add to that despite the cries of some Linux haters, I also didn’t find any peripherals it wouldn’t work either either. Wi-Fi cards, multi-function printers, scanners, all worked just fine with this release.

If you happen to have a system with an Intel Sandy Bridge chipset, you’ll also see much better power management. Starting with this version, Ubuntu can turn the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) all the way down to zero watts if it’s not being used. Canonical claims that “comparing under idle loads with machine state where RC6 is disabled, improved power usage of around 40-60% has been witnessed.” I didn’t see that much difference, but I did notice that my battery life on my new Lenovo ThinkPad, which uses the latest Sandy Bridge chipset, idled for much longer than I’d expected.

There have also been some desktop software changes. The default music player has is now Rhythmbox, instead of Banshee. I’m still a Banshee fan, but no worries, with the Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu’s take on an app store, it was easy for me to bring it back.

The office suite is still LibreOffice, but it’s been updated to 3.5.2. That’s a pure win in my book since I think LibreOffice is the best office suite around on any platform these days.

Unfortunately, LibreOffice still isn’t completely integrated with Unity. It still uses its own menu interface instead of Unity’s universal menu. This doesn’t get in the way of using the program at all, but by now I’d expected them to have integrated it into the interface the way they have Firefox.

Firefox remains Ubuntu’s default Web browser. I could have lived without that but you can always download Chrome or get its pure open-source brother Chromium from the Ubuntu Software Center.

Another program, which hasn’t been changed out, is Thunderbird for e-mail. I just don’t get this. Evolution is simply the best e-mail client on any operating system and it’s already a GNOME-based program so adding it to Ubuntu is trivial. Oh well, the Software Center once more came to my rescue.

There are some nice little extras. For example the video lens, a Head Up Display view for searching for videos, makes it easy to search for videos no matter whether they’re on your local PC, your media server, or on YouTube.

When all is said and done, Ubuntu 12.04 is an outstanding Linux desktop distribution. I’m still going to stick with Mint myself for day-in and day-out work, but if I were going to start a new user on Linux, who wasn’t interested in the technology, and just wanted a fast, easy-to-use, and secure desktop, I’d give them the new Ubuntu in a New York minute.

Related Stories:

Say hello to Canonical’s new Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 beta review

If my mother-in-law can use Ubuntu Linux, anyone can

20-million new Ubuntu Linux PCs in 2012?

Next Ubuntu Q to bring font, icon, Quantum OpenStack service to Linux

Red Hat and SUSE join IBM in new Linux system, Canonical opts out