"IBM" Buys "Red Hat", Sort Of....

Well, that gives an idea of the importance of this move for the world of open access:

Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned.

....

Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change. But Cockerill assured editors that a BMC board of trustees "will continue to safeguard BioMed Central's open access policy in the future." Springer "has been notable...for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing," Cockerill said in a release circulated with the email to editors.

When Will They Ever Learn?

Here's some news from Red Hat:

We’ve partnered with Seneca College, one of the leaders in instituting open source software into its coursework, to bring Fedora to the classroom....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Lulu.com for Magazines

I'm a big fan of the print on demand outfit Lulu.com - and not just because it was set up by one of the founders of Red Hat. Here's the same idea, applied to magazines:

MagCloud is an HP Labs research project evaluating new web services that will provide small independent magazine publishers, online content owners, and small businesses the ability to custom publish digitized magazines and economically print and fulfill on demand.

(Via ReadWiteWeb.)

BECTA Rubbishes Almost the Entire UK Open Source Industry

On Open Enterprise blog.

Could Microsoft Buy Red Hat?

An interesting question from Marc Fleury.

The answer: *of course* it could.

Just don't expect many of the top open source hackers working there - and there are many - to stick around long if it did.

Is This the Start of Red Hat 2.0?

On Open Enterprise blog.

BPM + ECM = BPP

On Open Enterprise blog.

Hyperactive Hyperic

On Open Enterprise blog.

So Farewell, Then, Matthew Szulik

The announcement that Red Hat's CEO and President, Matthew Szulik, is moving on (back?) to become its Chairman, is obviously pretty big news, since Szulik has led the company for nearly a decade, a long time in the still-young open source world. His valedictory message is well worth a read; I particularly liked the following section:

My early days at Red Hat were sitting in small office with no door in Durham, NC, across from the free soda machine. People by the hour would stop and punch their selection for Mountain Dew or Coke. My challenge was that I was tasked to go and raise venture money for this free software company. And over the phone, in the middle of my sales pitch, corporate types at Dell, IBM and HP and others would hear the constant banging of soda cans dropping in the soda machine and would ask if there were fights going on outside my office. So, after a while, I told the prospective investors that YES there were fights going on. And yes, these fights happened frequently. It’s how people at Red Hat settled technical issues likes software bugs and features in new releases. Red Hat was a real tough place to work. Dell, HP and IBM became investors because they liked the fighting spirit of Red Hat.

Says it all, really.

Condor Takes Flight as Open Source

Here's something that I'd missed before, since it was buried deep in a press release about Red Hat's Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid), offering:

Red Hat Enterprise MRG enables customers to leverage the full power of distributed computing with commercial-strength grid capabilities, based on the University of Wisconsin's highly respected Condor high-throughput computing project. These capabilities provide customers with a practical means of using their total compute capacity with maximum efficiency and flexibility, while improving the speed and availability of any application. Additionally, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a strategic agreement to make Condor's source code available under an OSI-approved license and jointly fund ongoing co-development at the University of Wisconsin.

As grid guru Ian Foster notes, that last point is particularly good news regarding

the supposedly open source, but never really accessible Condor software

a point confirmed by the Condor manual:

At this time we do not distribute source code publicly, but instead consider requests on a case-by-case basis. If you need the source code, please e-mail us at condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu explaining why, and we'll get back to you.

Free software is already very strong in this sector; open sourcing Condor will only add to its lead there over proprietary solutions.

Textbook Enterprise Open Source

There's no more powerful argument in favour of using GNU/Linux in an enterprise context than big names that are already doing so. Google and Amazon are the obvious ones, but we can now add PayPal to the list:

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.

The article also gives some very concrete advantages of running a GNU/Linux-based grid in this way:

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel (NSDQ: INTC)-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal's 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal's needs faster because they're working in the target environment. That's harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.

Systematising Systems Management

Last year I wrote a review of the open source systems management sector. At that time, it was highly fragmented, symptomatic of the very early days of this area. The market is still fragmented, but there are some clear tectonic movements going on that hint at important consolidations to come.

First we had Hyperic cosying up to Red Hat:

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that they have extended their agreement to collaborate on the development of a common systems management platform. Development will continue under an open source model.

For years, the JBoss Operations Network team has been developing code on the Hyperic platform. Red Hat will be contributing its updates and enhancements to this new open source project. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project. Additionally, Hyperic and Red Hat will work jointly to include this base in both future Hyperic and Red Hat systems management products.

Now we have Nagios Enterprises and GroundWork getting luvvy-duvvy:

Nagios Enterprises (www.nagios.com), the commercial arm of Nagios, the world’s most popular open source host, service and network monitoring program, and GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT management software, today announced a joint partnership focused on joint market development and shared delivery of services around open source IT monitoring and management.

...

Under the terms of the joint partnership, Nagios Enterprises will soon offer tier three support for Nagios-related aspects of Groundwork Open Source. In addition, GroundWork Open Source and Nagios Enterprises will engage in various market development activities including cross-promotion via advertising, joint marketing efforts, and business referral opportunities.

It's not really clear how all this going to pan out, but it's seems likely that there will only be one or two main players left in a year or two. My bet is that Red Hat will simply buy up all the companies it needs. As Matthew Aslett pointed out recently, Red Hat is pretty voracious when it comes to swallowing other open source companies.

And whatever happens, I do wonder where this leaves the rather, er, quiescent Open Management Consortium, whose blog last had a posting on 21 May of this year....

Red Hat Enters Cloud Cuckoo Land

There has been a lot of interesting blogospheric comment on Red Hat's latest move:

Cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a web-scale virtual computing environment powered by Amazon Web Services. It provides everything needed to develop and host applications: compute capacity, bandwidth, storage, and the leading open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Cloud computing changes the economics of IT by enabling you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use. Compute capacity can be scaled up or down on demand to accommodate changing workloads and business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cloud computing makes it easy to develop, deploy, and manage your new and existing applications in a virtual computing environment.

One point, though, seems not to have been picked up. And that is that open source has unique advantages in the cloud, er, space. Since open source applications are freely available, there is no barrier to expanding your use of the cloud at no extra cost (though I do wonder how support contracts are going to work there). Moreover, anyone can provide cloud computing versions of open source apps running on GNU/Linux, including dedicated services concentrating on specific sectors - leading to a highly efficient market.

I suspect that for the mainstream proprietary apps, the only people who will be able to offer them will be their respective software houses (given the complexities of licensing on in-house servers, imagine how messy it's likely to get with virtual systems potentially varying by the hour). Not much of a market there, methinks.

The Java Phoenix

What a difference a year makes.

In 2006, Java was looking distinctly long in the tooth. Widely used, yes, but hardly an exciting technology. Then Sun finally adopts the GNU GPL, and - whoosh. Two clear signs of this have appeared just recently (it takes that long for these things to work their way through the system.)

The first, obviously, is the gPhone, which seems to be using Java extensively (although it's hard to tell how, just now). The other is Red Hat's agreement with Sun:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to advance open source Java software. Red Hat has signed Sun’s broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

In addition, Red Hat has signed Sun’s OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement. This agreement gives the company access to the test suite that determines whether an implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) platform that is derived from the OpenJDK project complies with the Java SE 6 specification.

Red Hat is the first major software vendor to license the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), in support of Java SE compatibility. To help foster innovation and advancement of the Java technology ecosystem, Red Hat will also share its developers' contributions with Sun as part of the OpenJDK community. These agreements pave the way for Red Hat to create a fully compatible, open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

A Brief History of the Software Patent Mess

As fascinating video of former Red Hat General Counsel, Mark Webbink, explaining where software patents came from in the US, and how Microsoft suddenly became fond of them.

Under Slashdot's Bonnet

Everybody knows that Google runs on scadzillions of GNU/Linux boxes, but now we also know the details about Slashdot's Penguin power:

Slashdot currently has 16 web servers all of which are running Red Hat 9. Two serve static content: javascript, images, and the front page for non logged-in users. Four serve the front page to logged in users. And the remaining ten handle comment pages. All web servers are Rackable 1U servers with 2 Xeon 2.66Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 2x80GB IDE hard drives. The web servers all NFS mount the NFS server, which is a Rackable 2U with 2 Xeon 2.4Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI drives.

Impressive what you can do with 16 boxes.

Behold: Son of SCO

Well, that nice Mr. Ballmer did warn us, and here it is:

Plaintiffs, IP Innovation L.L.C. and Technology Licensing Corporation (collectively “Plaintiffs”) complain of defendants Red Hat Inc. (“Red Hat”) and Novell Inc. (“Novell”) as follows:

1. This is a claim for patent infringement arising under the patent laws of the United States, Title 35 of the United States Code.

Of course, this is replete with ironies.

First, "IP Innovation" - as in, zero innovation. These are patent trolls, and the patent - which looks like basic windowing technology - is both obvious and probably covered by prior art.

Secondly, poor old Novell: they probably thought they were immune to this kind of thing. But their deal with Microsoft says nothing about not getting sued by trolls. Or rather, trolls with interesting connections to Microsoft:

So in July one Microsoft executive arrives [at IP Innovation]; then as of October 1, there is the second, a patent guy. October 9, IP Innovation, a subsidiary, sues Red Hat. And Novell. So much for being Microsoft's little buddy.

The good news is that this is all too late: even in the US, a modicum of sanity is returning to patents as the US Supreme Court begins to rein in some of the excesses that have spawned in the last decade. The other good news is that Microsoft will come out of this looking bad, again. However much they huff and puff, the clear link back to them shows them not only to be underhand, but cowards, too.

A380 + Red Hat = Double Geek Heaven

Nice, if ecologically dubious:

Singapore Airlines is to install a PC running Red Hat Linux operating system in every seat on its newest A380 superjumbo.

O'Reilly? I Think Not

Once again, Matt gets it, and Tim doesn't:

"I will predict that virtually every open source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company."

Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf-life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance.

There's something more fundamental going on here than "Proprietary software meets open source. Proprietary software decides to commandeer open source. Open source proves to be a nice lapdog to proprietary software." I actually believe that open source, not proprietary software, is the natural state of the industry, and that Tim's proprietary world is anomalous.

I particularly liked this distinction between the service aspects of software, and the attempts to view it as an instantiation of various intellectual monopolies:

Suddenly, the license matters more, not less, because it is the license that ensures the conversation focuses on the right topic - service - rather than on inane jabberings that only vendors care about. You know, like intellectual property.

And there's another crucial reason why proprietary software companies can't just open their chequebooks and acquire those pesky open source upstarts. Unlike companies who seem to think that they are co-extensive with the intellectual monopolies they foist on customers, open source outfits know they are defined by the high-quality people - both employees and those out in the community - that code for the customers.

For example, one reason people take out subscriptions to Red Hat's offerings is that they get to stand in line for the use of Alan Cox's brain. Imagine, now, that proprietary company X "buys" Red Hat: well, what exactly does it buy? Certainly not Alan Cox's brain, which will leave with him (one hopes) when he moves immediately to another open source company (or just hacks away in Wales for pleasure). Sure, the purchaser will have all kinds of impressive legal documents spelling out what it "owns" - but precious little to offer customers anymore, who are likely to follow wherever Alan Cox and his ilk go.

Amazon Goes Lulu

I'm a big fan of Lulu.com, the self-publishing company, not least because the man behind it, Bob Young, also co-founded Red Hat, and is one of the most passionate defenders of the open source way I have come across.

So the news that CreateSpace is going into the on-demand publishing business is interesting - especially since the company is a subsidiary of Amazon, which means that self-published authors will be able to hitch a ride on the Amazon behemoth. But as far as I can tell, Lulu still offers a more thorough vision, with its global reach and finer-grained publishing options. But if nothing else, Amazon's entry into this space will serve to validate the whole idea in the eyes of doubters.