Is Microsoft Blocking Linux Booting on ARM Hardware?

Back in September last year, there was a bit of a to-do about Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot technology in Windows 8, when a Red Hat engineer posted the following:

On Open Enterprise blog.

"An Open-Source World"? Where's The Open Source?

If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching. As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Google Losing it?

Google matters for open source. First and foremost, it is an example of a multi-billion dollar global company that simply would not be possible without an underpinning of free software. Open source's customisability means that its engineers have been able to fine-tune Linux and other code to meet Google's very specific needs. That, and the fact that there is no licensing fee, has allowed the company to scale its operations to unprecedented levels – rumoured to be over a million servers.

On The H Open.

Calling the Anti-Net Neutrality Bluff

One of the key arguments used by companies who want to see the end of net neutrality is that with growing use of high-bandwidth services like video on demand, or video telephony, there isn't enough bandwidth to go around, and that other services will suffer as a result. This leads them to call for differential pricing, charging more for such services. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

An Attack that Goes to the Heart of Free Software

The key hack that made free software possible was a legal one: using copyright to keep software free. It did that by demanding a quid pro quo: if you use software made available under the GNU GPL, modify it and distribute it, you too must make it available under the GNU GPL.

If it were possible to take software released under the GPL, modify it and release it, but without passing on the freedoms to users downstream, the entire edifice of free software would be in trouble. And that, alas, iseems to be precisely what is happening in a German court case:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Do We Still Need the FSF, GNU and GPL?

It's easy to take things for granted – to assume that the world will always be as it is. And then sometimes you receive a mild jolt: some new information appears that makes you sit up and reconsider your preconceptions.

On The H Open.

Who Should Buy SuSE Linux?

In the early days of companies based around open source, the questions were: would they make any money? Would they survive? Once it was clear that they not only could survive, but also make money quite nicely, the next question became: what happens when they become successful enough to get bought by traditional software companies?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Linux is Alpha and Omega

I'm sure most people remember DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation - that later rebranded itself as the singularly unmemorable “Digital” before being swallowed up by Compaq in 1998, which was itself digested by HP a few years later. But I wonder how many people remember the DEC Alpha chip.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux Embeds Itself Yet Further

One of the many confusingly-similar groups in the open source space is Linaro:

a Not For Profit (NFP) organization that aims to make embedded open source development easier and faster. Linaro will create a common software foundation for software stacks and distributions to land on and provide the best open source tools for developers to develop on. The focus is on low level software around the Linux kernel that touches the silicon, key pieces of middleware that enable new markets and tools that help the developer write and debug code. Linaro aims to maximize the potential of the latest features of ARM-based processors, helping provide optimized performance in a lower power envelope.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft: "Linux at the End of its Life Cycle"

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've tracked the rather painful history of attempts to increase the deployment of free software in Russia, notably in its schools. Well, that saga continues, it seems, with doubts being expressed about the creation of a Russian national operating system based on GNU/Linux:

Иногда приходится слышать, что идея национальной программной платформы содержит в себе логическое противоречие. Ведь если такая платформа действительно будет создаваться на базе СПО, то такое программное обеспечение будет более чем на 90% произведено не в России, а за рубежом. Соответственно, и НПП у нас получится, скорее, какая-нибудь американо-германо-индийская, а не российская.

[Google Translate: Sometimes we hear that the idea of a national software platform contains a logical contradiction. After all, if this platform really will be created based on the ACT, then this software will be more than 90% are not produced in Russia and abroad. Accordingly, the NPP, we will, more likely, some kind of US-German-Indian, not Russian.]

That story will doubtless run and run. But what interested me was the accompanying quote from Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft in Russia; it's a corker:

"Компания Microsoft выступает за технологическую нейтральность и считает, что выбор ОС должен быть обусловлен исключительно качествами самой ОС, ее экономической эффективностью, стоящими практическими задачами, безопасностью, а не идеологическими соображениями.

С нашей точки зрения, наиболее эффективным для развития инновационной экономики в стране представляется не создание аналога существующих ОС, на что уйдут огромные средства и много времени, а взяв за основу наиболее распространенную ОС, проверенную российскими спецслужбами, создавать собственные приложения и решения, вкладывая при этом средства в перспективные научные российские разработки. Нужно иметь в виду, что Linux не является российской ОС и, кроме того, находится в конце своего жизненного цикла".

[Google Translate: "Microsoft supports technological neutrality and considers that the choice of OS should be caused solely as the greatest operating system, its economic efficiency, standing practical problems, safety, rather than ideological considerations.

From our point of view, the most effective for the development of an innovative economy in the country seems not to create an analogue of the existing OS, which will take huge amounts of money and time, and taking as basis the most popular operating systems, proven by Russian security services, to create custom applications and solutions, investing in this funds in promising scientific Russian developments. We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."]

The idea that "Linux is at the end of its life cycle" is rather rich coming from the vendor of a platform that is increasingly losing market share, both at the top and bottom end of the market, while Linux just gets stronger. I'd wager that variants of Linux will be around rather longer than Windows.

Update: the Russian publication CNews Open, from which the story above was taken, points out that Russia is aiming to create a national software platform, not a national operating system. Quite what this means seems to be somewhat unclear:

даже российским участникам сообщества сегодня по-прежнему трудно понять, что конкретно представляет собой российская национальная программная платформа

[Google Translate: even the Russian participants of the community today is still difficult to understand exactly what constitutes Russia's national software platform.]

Let's hope things become a little clearer in due course: with its wealth of top-class programmers, Russia has the potential to become a key player the free software world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Microsoft: Super - But Not Quite Super Enough

Once upon a time, the Netcraft Web server market share was reported upon eagerly every month for the fact that it showed open source soundly trouncing its proprietary rivals. We don't hear much about that survey these days - not because things have changed, but for that very reason: it's now just become a boring fact of life that Apache has always been the top Web server, still is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I think we're fast approaching that situation with the top500 supercomputing table.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is it Time for Free Software to Move on?

A remarkable continuity underlies free software, going all the way back to Richard Stallman's first programs for his new GNU project. And yet within that continuity, there have been major shifts: are we due for another such leap?

On The H Open.

Linux Embeds Itself Even Deeper

Because anyone can take Linux and use it as they wish without needing to ask permission (provided they comply with the licence), it ends up being used in lots of places that we rarely hear about. This contrasts with proprietary operating systems, which only get used if they are licensed directly, which means that the licensor always knows exactly what is going on - and can issue yet another boring press release accordingly.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Project Canvas Will be *Linux* Based

I've been pretty sceptical - and critical - of the BBC's TV over IP efforts, including Project Canvas:

Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between Arqiva, the BBC, BT, C4, Channel Five, ITV and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform, subject to BBC Trust approval.

The partners intend to form a venture to promote the platform to consumers and the content, service and developer community.

Like the UK's current free-to-air brands Freeview and Freesat - a consumer brand (not canvas) will be created, and licensed to device manufacturers, and internet service providers owners who meet the specifications.

‘Canvas compliant’ devices (eg set-top boxes), built to a common technical standard, would provide seamless access to a range of third-party services through a common, simple, user experience.

That's despite - or maybe even *because* - it proclaims itself as "open":

A technology project to build an open, internet-connected TV platform

As well as a lack of standards in the internet-connected TV market, there is no open platform. This creates two main problems:

* The UK's current free to air TV platforms Freeview and Freesat have been unable to evolve and keep pace with technical innovation in the consumer electronics industry. While some internet services are emerging on some commercially-owned/ pay-TV platforms - these platforms are working to their own (proprietary) closed standards. A fragmented market is emerging, which could put internet-connected TV out of the reach of consumers who don't want to subscribe to pay-TV.
* The internet services need to have a commercial relationship with the TV platform to obtain a route to the shared screen. This, combined with a fragmented market of varying standards, is slowing the development of internet-connected TV services.

Project Canvas intends to build, run and promote a platform that solves both problems: providing an upgrade for free-to-air TV, and an open platform of scale that will bring a wide range of internet services to the shared screen.

We all know how debased the term "open" has become, so frankly I expected the worst when the technical details were released. Looks like I was wrong [.pdf]:

Linux has been selected as the Operating System for the Device.

Linux has been ported to run on a large number of silicon products, and is currently supported by the vast majority of hardware and software vendors in the connected television ecosystem. Porting to new hardware is a relatively simple due to the architecture of the kernel and the features that it supports. The Linux environment provides the following functionality as a basis for the development and operation of the Device software:

• Multi-processing.
• Real-time constraints and priority-based scheduling.
• Dynamic memory management.
• A robust security model.
• A mature and full-featured IP stack.

Linux is deployed on millions of PCs and consumer electronics devices, and the skills to develop and optimise for it are common in the industry. In addition, a wide range of open source products have been developed for, or ported to Linux.

It's pretty amazing to read this panegyric to Linux: it shows just how far Linux has come, and how it is taking over the embedded world.

Even though content will be "protected" - from you, the user, that is - which means the platform can't really be regarded as totally open, the Project Canvas designers and managers still deserve kudos for opting for Linux, and for publicly extolling its virtues in this way.

Update: I haven't really made clear why that's a good thing, so here are some thoughts.

Obviously, this is not a pure free software project: it's a walled garden with DRM. But there are still advantages for open source.

For example, assuming this project doesn't crash and burn, I expect it will influence similar moves elsewhere in the world, which may be encouraged to use Linux too. Even if that doesn't happen, its use by Project Canvas will increase the profile of Linux, and also the demand for people who are skilled in this area (thus probably helping to drive up salaries of Linux coders.) More generally, the Linux ecosystem will grow as a result of this choice, even if there are non-free elements higher up the stack. Correspondingly, non-free solutions will lose market share and developer mind-share.

And finally, having Linux at the heart of the Project Canvas project will surely make it easier to root...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Why GNU/Linux is Unmatched – and Unmatchable

Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the flamewars that flare up regularly across the Web. The core focus of those arguments is well established by now: against Mac fans, it's about the virtues of true openness and freedom; against Windows fans (do they still exist?) it's about those, as well as security, speed, stability, etc. But there's another aspect that rarely gets discussed, and yet it represents one of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths: the breadth of hardware platforms supported.

On The H Open.

Open Sourcing Politics

“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond's analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU/Linux *Does* Scale – and How

As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom. Against that background, it's no wonder that one of Microsoft's approaches to attacking GNU/Linux has been to dismiss it on technical grounds: after all, such a rag-bag of code written by long-haired hippies and near-teenagers could hardly be compared with the product of decades of serious, top-down planning by some of best coding professionals money can buy, could it?

On Open Enterprise blog.

The GNU/Linux Code of Life

After I published Rebel Code in 2001, there was a natural instinct to think about writing another book (a natural masochistic instinct, I suppose, given the work involved.) I decided to write about bioinformatics – the use of computers to store, search through, and analyse the billions of DNA letters that started pouring out of the genomics projects of the 1990s, culminating in the sequencing of the human genome in 2001.

One reason I chose this area was the amazing congruence between the battle between free and closed-source software and the fight to place genomic data in the public domain, for all to use, rather than having it locked up in proprietary databases and enclosed by gene patents. As I like to say, Digital Code of Life is really the same story as Rebel Code, with just a few words changed.

Another reason for the similarity between the stories is the fact that genomes can be considered as a kind of program – the “digital code” of my title. As I wrote in the book:

In 1953, computers were so new that the idea of DNA as not just a huge digital store but a fully-fledged digital program of instructions was not immediately obvious. But this was one of the many profound implications of Watson and Crick's work. For if DNA was a digital store of genetic information that guided the construction of an entire organism from the fertilised egg, then it followed that it did indeed contain a preprogrammed sequence of events that created that organism – a program that ran in the fertilised cell, albeit one that might be affected by external signals. Moreover, since a copy of DNA existed within practically every cell in the body, this meant that the program was not only running in the original cell but in all cells, determining their unique characteristics.

That characterisation of the genome is something of a cliché these days, but back in 2003, when I wrote Digital Code of Life, it was less common. Of course, the interesting question is: to what extent is the genome *really* like an operating system? What are the similarities and differences? That's what a bunch of researchers wanted to find out by comparing the Linux kernel's control structure to that of the bacterium Escherichia coli:

The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism. A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell. To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution.

We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network.

We further develop a way to measure evolutionary rates comparably between the two networks and explain this difference in terms of network evolution. The process of biological evolution via random mutation and subsequent selection tightly constrains the evolution of regulatory network hubs. The call graph, however, exhibits rapid evolution of its highly connected generic components, made possible by designers' continual fine-tuning. These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software system.

The paper's well-worth reading, but if you find it heavy going (it's really designed for bioinformaticians and their ilk), there's an excellent, easy-to-read summary and analysis by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine. Alternatively, you could just buy a copy of Digital Code of Life...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Is Microsoft Afraid to Say the “L”-word?

It seems that, having lost its position as monarch of the world of computing, Microsoft has decided to become the industry jester. Last week I wrote about its amusing suggestion that we should all be taxed to clean up the mess its software has caused. Now we have this witty post on Microsoft's Port 25 site, which involves writing about open source software applications and the platforms they run on without mentioning “Linux” once.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Android and the Fear of Fragmentation

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

On The H.