OS/2: the Open Source Laboratory

Remember OS/2? It was the going to be the “real” operating system that took over from the mickey mouse Windows.... Somehow, that never quite happened (can't imagine why), but OS/2 aficionados remain as loyal to their OS as any Mac fanboy. One interesting suggestion that crops up periodically is that IBM should open source OS/2....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Olympian Apache

Here's a nice reminder that open source - in the form of Apache - has been head of the field for more than 12 years, despite what certain companies would have us believe:

In 1996 the World Wide Web was truly in its very early stages. The Olympics took place less than a year after Netscape went public, which many consider the key event marking the transition of the Internet from a research network used primarily by the technical community to the commercial behemoth that it went on to become.

The new World Wide Web had the feeling of magic, but, in 1996, it was pretty primitive magic. To begin with, the vast majority of people accessing the Web at the time were doing so over slow dial-up modems with bandwidths of 56 kilobits per second or less. Only at work, if you were lucky, did you have access to faster broadband speeds. It wasn't until years later that broadband usage in the home became commonplace.

As we were planning the IT infrastructure for the Olympics website, hardware was not an issue. We used IBM's SP family of parallel supercomputers which we were confident would provide us with all the computing power we could want.

But the software for web servers was quite immature. Netscape's web software was the most widely used in those days, and while it was adequate for small workloads, its scalability was suspect. We could not use it. Instead, we used the open source Apache Server as the basic web server, and custom built the extensions needed to support its content, applications and other capabilities.

We were pretty sure that the Atlanta Olympics website was the largest such web project anyone had undertaken so far. Because it was all so new, we did not know how many people would come to our website and what features they would use once they got there. We were well aware of the considerable risks inherent in doing such a complex, new project on such a global stage. We knew, for example, that beyond a certain number of users, the response time would start to degrade, and if sufficiently stressed beyond its capabilities, the system could become unstable and crash.

...

Our Olympics website worked quite well, except for some unduly slow response times when traffic got very heavy. Overall, the site handled 187 million hits – that is, individual pieces of information served to users. We learned a lot about the requirements for building and operating large, complex websites. All in all, it was a very successful experiment.

Big Blue is Back

On Open Enterprise blog.

Welcome to the Open Grid

On Open Enterprise blog.

Beyond Second Life: Virtual Worlds' Second Wind

On Open Enterprise blog.

Come On, IBM, Pull Your Socks Up

On Open Enterprise blog.

To Open DB2, or Not To Open DB2: That is the Question

Interesting:

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 database-management software under an open-source licence.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open-source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's UK director of information management software.

Your Private Second Life

It's been an open secret for some time that IBM has been creating intranet-based virtual worlds, but this seems to be the first official news about it:

IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

...

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

Time for Sun to Join the Eclipse Empire?

On Open Enterprise blog.

OSS in Russia

Wondering what was happening on the free software front in Russia? Wonder no more:

Recent interest towards FOSS from the Russian government has boosted commercial activity in this field. No longer than a year ago there was no single large company that would say it is capable of doing FOSS system integration projects. Now there are three, and the number will probably grow.

Nobody is particularly sure about how to do business with FOSS, but it is already evident that it can be done somehow. That is why the larger ones are jumping on the bandwagon simply not to be late.

OpenID - and Openness - Is Winning

I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as -- at least for me personally -- the hope that we will be able to get a decentralized federated single sign-on technology across the internet.

Nearly there....

Running the Internet - All of It - on GNU/Linux

Everyone knows that Google uses hundreds of thousands of commodity PCs running GNU/Linux to power its services. Well, IBM wants to go one further: running everything - the entire Internet, for example - on an Blue Gene/P supercomputer running GNU/Linux:

In this paper we described the vision and exploration of Project Kittyhawk, an ongoing effort at IBM Research which explores the construction of a next-generation compute platform capable of simultaneously hosting many web-scale workloads. At scales of potentially millions of connected computers, efficient provisioning, powering, cooling, and management are paramount.

...

To test our hypothesis, we are prototyping a stack consisting of a network-enabled firmware layer to bootstrap nodes, the L4 hypervisor for partitioning and security enforcement, Linux as a standard operating system, and an efficient software pack-
aging and provisioning system. An important aspect is that while these building blocks allow us to run a large variety of standard workloads, none of these components are required and therefore can be replaced as necessary to accommodate many diverse workloads. This flexibility, efficiency, and unprecedented scale makes Blue Gene a powerhouse for running computation at Internet scale.

(Via The Reg.)

Fighting Words

Here, take this spoon:

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.

That’s according to two blog postings from the end of last week by Microsoft execs involved in the OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) standards battle.

Update: Rob Weir offers the customary razor-sharp analysis to sort out what's really going on.

Beaten to the Blog

News that IBM was buying Solid Information Technology, a company with close ties to MySQL, set off a distant bell ringing in my head in connection with something I'd written a while back, but I didn't have the time to pursue it.

Now, it seems, I don't need to:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

MM: I was getting more aware of it, and I was getting excited about it. At Solid, I drove an initiative of not open-sourcing the product, but making it very popular on the Linux platform--and that was why I was an advertiser in Linux Journal, because we were the leading Linux database in the world in 1996. We gave it away free of charge, so we had taken a step in that direction.

Then Solid decided to cancel the project and just focus on high-end customers, and that's when I left the company. So in that sense, when I got to MySQL, I had some unfinished business. By that time, I had completely bought into the notion of code being open.

Thanks, Matt, for beating me to it....

Copping a Load of COPU

As I've lamented before, open source usage in China is hard for us outside to gauge. Even the open source structures there are difficult to discern. So news that the Linux Foundation is linking up with something called the Chinese OSS Promotion Union is interesting:

COPU now has over 300 members, covering nearly all the domestic enterprises and public institution units in the field of open source, including all the Linux distributions including Red Flag, Co-Create, China Standard Soft, TurboLinux, and Sun Wah, universities (over 200), and institutes for scientific research, standard, law and industry. COPU also has over 20 multinational companies as its members who have their representative offices or branches in China including IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Oracle, SAP, NEC, CA, BEA, Hitachi, Sybase, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Google.

How the Future Web Played Midwife to the IBM PC

Fascinating:

In 1978, I.B.M. was beginning to design its PC, which was a radical break for a company that had until then resisted open architectures and industry standards. Mr. Lowe invited Mr. Nelson to the company’s offices in Atlanta for a 90-minute presentation.

The resulting slide show, in which Mr. Nelson sketched out a world in which computer users would be able to retrieve information wherever they were, came as a shock to the blue-suited I.B.M. executives, Mr. Lowe said. It gave a hint of the world that the PC would bring, and even though the I.B.M.-ers were getting ready to transform a hobbyist business into one of the world’s major industries, they had no clue of the broader social implications.

Where Are My Yobibytes?

This post says:

I just learned that in a Scale Out File Services (SOFS) solution a customer can implement a global filesystem (with clustering/replication) that has a maximum filesystem capacity of 33554432 Yobibytes.

I can't find the original reference to those yummy yobibytes (1024 zebibytes, in case you were wondering), but I have no reason to think they're not there, somewhere, it's just a question of searching....

The Foundational Ted Ts'o

Ted Ts'o is not widely known outside hacker circles, and yet he has played an important role in the development of Linux right from the start. He was using it from version 0.02 or 0.03 of the kernel, and contributed code to 0.10; he also set up the first site in the US that carried Linux and related software. Since then:

Ts'o is also a Linux filesystem maintainer, a role in which he maintains several packages including e2fsprogs. He currently serves on the board of USENIX, is the founder and chair of the annual Linux Kernel Developers' Summit and regularly teaches tutorials on Linux and other open source software. Ts'o was project leader for Kerberos, a network authentication system used by Red Hat Enteprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows. He was also a member of Security Area Directorate for the Internet Engineering Task Force where he chaired the IP Security (ipsec) Working Group and was a founding board member of the Free Standards Group (FSG).

That's from the Linux Foundation press release announcing that Ts'o would be joining that organisation as "chief platform strategist" during a two-year fellowship, before returning to IBM, his current employer.

Given the key roles he played in the early days, it's good to see him getting some recognition in this way. It's also a reflection of the growing maturity of the Linux ecosystem that such roles as "chief platform strategist" exist at all.

Eben on Software Ecology

Eben Moglen is probably the most fluent and engaging speaker it has ever been my privilege to interview; proof of his enduring appeal can be found in the fact that I don't get tired reading yet more interviews with him, like this one, which includes the following suggestive passage:

One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable, natural resource. You can treat software like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere. We package them for your advantage, things you didn't have to make because you were given them by the bounty of nature.

And this one, too:

If you've become dependent on a commons, for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don't strip mine the forest, you don't fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea and you don't want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected. What I do is to train forest rangers ... to work in a forest that some people love because it's free and other people love because it produces great trees cheaply. But both sides want the forest to exist pristine and undesecrated by greedy behavior by anybody else. Nobody wants to see the thing burn down for one group's profit. Everybody needs it. So whether you are IBM, which has one strategy about the commoditization of software, or you're Hewlett-Packard, which has another, whatever your particular relationship to that reality is, everybody's beginning to get it. In the 21st century economy, it isn't factories and it isn't people that make things -- it's communities.

The beauty of all this analysis is that the ideas flow both ways: if free software is a commons like the forests or the seas, then it follows that the forest and the seas share many characteristics of free software. Which is why you read about them all the time on this blog. (Via Linux Today.)

Dealing with Disabilities

One of the problems raised with the use of ODF in Massachusetts was its lack of support for people with disabilities. That has now been sorted out, but it's probably generally true that open source has not addressed this issue as well as it could, not least because hackers tend to be young and hale, and therefore less aware of the problems faced by those who are not, for example.

So it's good to hear that some work is being done on precisely this area:

IBM and the researchers at the University of Dundee School of Computing (UK) and the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine are collaborating to develop open source software technology tools to accommodate the needs of older workers to help them adapt to and remain productive in the changing workplace of the 21st century.

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One way to support maturing workers who have age-related disabilities is to find new ways to increase their comfort level and ability to use technology.

(Via Daniweb.)