Information freedom for open source users.

When the next version of Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) ships tomorrow there will be hundreds of open source applications ready for it, Canonical has announced.

LTS versions of the software ship every two years and are often aimed at software developers. A full list of companies supporting the new release is available here. In keeping with the company’s habit of alliteration the new version is known as Lucid Lynx.

In addition to claiming leadership with open source desktops, Canonical’s aim with the new release is to make it more attractive to proprietary solutions. Adobe, IBM, and VMWare are mentioned specifically in the release.

As always, we at ZDNet are all over this. Sam Diaz notes the software will have new features supporting clouds. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is asking if the new software will lure the social crowd.

I’m most interested in ease of installation for the full stack.

I have a dream (a wonderful dream) that users could go to a single page, select the applications they want added to their distro from a menu, then download a custom stick through BitTorrent they might plug in to unbrick their box.

Gaining support for such a solution from small resellers would be swell. It would be great if an Indian entrepreneur can get some used hardware, take orders, load a stick, test the results and deliver it to customers. He’d have the whole world on a plate.

Maybe starting here, starting now, everything’s coming up roses.

Fedora’s selection of Zarafa as an open source groupware component in Fedora 13 is very interesting.

Zafara

The beta of Fedora 13, code named “Goddard,” was made available on April 13. The final version is expected in mid May.

Red Hat sponsors the open source Linux project and has toyed with the idea of integrating email and calendaring capabilities into its Linux stack from time to time. Novell, of course, promotes its own GroupWise but also endorses other open source offerings for its Linux distribution.

Customers and integrators have often turned to leading open source groupware offerings such as SendMail, OpenXChange, Scalix and Zimbra or proprietary solutions to fill their collaboration requirements.

Zarafa appears to be an interesting alternative, provided that its compatibility claims are solid. Zarafa is based in the Netherlands and Hannover, Germany and its Linux solution is said to be 100 percent compatible with Microsoft Exchange environments.

According to the European company, Zarafa integrates with Linux mail servers, and provides a Microsoft Outlook look-and-feel web access capability, as well as reliable sharing with Outlook email via its 100 percent support for MAPI.

Another major differentiator is its support for native mobile phones, the Z-Push open source project and Active sync compatibility. Z-Push, of course, provides real time push e-mail support.

Zarafa then offers support for Windows Mobile based devices, Apple iPhone, Nokia E-series, Palm Treo 650, 680, 700, Sony Ericsson P990, W950, M600 and Android. Android support is offered through a tool known as Touchdown. It also offers native support for Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Here’s what Red Hat had to say about Zarafa in Fedora 13:

“During its development cycle, Fedora 13 also featured for the first time an installable package of Zarafa, a drop-in groupware replacement for Exchange with full featured email, calendaring, and other collaboration tools for use by both Linux and Microsoft clients. A highly usable, comfortable, and familiar Web interface for users, and support for POP/IMAP and other protocols are included, along with tools for integration with existing Linux services.”

*Editor’s note: Reader informed me that it is the Fedora open source project –and not Red Hat — that selects the components for the Linux code. I regret the error.

I also regret misspelling Zarafa in the first version of this story.

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says.

The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers.

Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Nevertheless, Google will be providing more code upstream to Linus Torvalds’ kernel.org going forward, he said.

“I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years,” DiBona said in an e-mail response to this ZDNet blogger’s questions about the controversy. Android is “no more [a fork] than Red Hat Enterprise Linux or any other distribution vendor. All kernels are in some way a fork for some amount of time, the trick is keeping that delta small. We’re trying to do a better job of keeping a small delta.”

Controversy erupted after the decision to remove Android code from the latest Linux kernel.

DiBona, for his part, maintains that the Android code is a lot different than traditional Linux code and more time is needed before the mobile system is integrated into the kernel.

“For the work we do on our non-mobile systems (our production kernels and the rest) we stay pretty close to the mainline nowadays, but android is not the same as some server sitting on the internet, and thinking Linux on mobile is the same thing as Linux on the server or on the desktop is why, until android came along, Linux on mobile phones was nearly totally unsuccessful,” DiBona wrote in a thread defending Google’s position on Linux 2.6.33. “Also, this whole thing stinks of people not liking Forking. Forking is important and not a bad thing at all. From my perspective, forking is why the Linux kernel is as good as it is.”

So when will the Android code make it into the Linux kernel?

In his online debate, DiBona said he expects to see it done by the time Linux 2.8 hits the streets. But in his email to this blogger, he was wary of framing it that way.

“2.8 is a concept that not all kernel developers embrace, so it may never occur,” DiBona wrote. “I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years.”

“A better question might be ‘”Will we continue to work from the mainline for android?” and the answer is an unqualified, “Yes.”

In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough.

Microsoft.

Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split off the old NetWare business, and auction off Suse Linux.

I doubt Microsoft wants to actually buy that business. Owning a Linux would be a real complication. Suddenly all those patent cross-licenses that claim Microsoft has patent rights to the software take on a different odor, and Microsoft is forced to go down the SCO road to prove its claims.

Microsoft has been doing well against Linux through bluff. What the Elliott move does is threaten to make Microsoft show its hand.

Even the due diligence process could threaten Microsoft. Singer is going to get a look inside that 2006 agreement.

It’s a prime company asset and, even though it’s protected by a non-disclosure agreement, things get out. Stuff leaks. Knowing exactly what Microsoft claims to own in legal documents would tell open source advocates what must be changed to eliminate the threat.

In the Wall Street ocean Novell has become a minnow and Microsoft remains a whale. (Singer’s a shark, and isn’t it gratifying this big GOP contributor now thinks there are greater opportunities here than the Congo.)

Feel free to advise Microsoft in the comments. For now I’ll leave you with Gecko’s greatest hit, from the IMDB database:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Just change Teldar Paper, the fictional firm at the heart of the 1987 movie Wall Street, to Novell. (And here’s a trailer for the sequel.)

Novell would be wise to embrace Xen and KVM — but only if the company has adequate resources to support both sets of customers.

The Waltham, Mass. company is the second biggest Linux distributor and supporting both open source hypervisors would give it a significant differentiator over its key rival, Red Hat, which announced that it will back KVM as its strategic hypervisor over the long haul.

It’s just not clear yet what Novell’s intentions over the long term will be.

Novell has incorporated Xen for some time in its Linux distribution and is a key contributor and member of the Xen project. Yet more recently, Novell introduced a preview of KVM in its version 11 distribution and announced plans to offer full support someday. The company is also sponsoring a KVM performance hypervisor project called AlacrityVM.

Does this mean that Novell, like Red Hat, intends to abandon Xen over the long term?

Is the company simply hedging its bets by supporting both open source hypervisors until the clear “winner” is established?

Some wonder if Novell’s recently announced partnership with Xen sponsor Citrix and its KVM support are at cross purposes, or if there is an internal war going on at Novell over which hypervisor to support.

Simon Crosby, a longtime Xen executive who is now CTO of Citrix’s data center and cloud, is confident that Novell will remain committed to Xen.

Citrix bought XenSource, the first commercial spinoff of the Xen Project. Citrix has always been a very close Microsoft partner and works very closely with Microsoft on Xen and hyper-V interoperability.
Now it is warming up to Novell. No surprise there.

Crosby said in a recent blog it makes perfect sense that Novell is supporting both Xen and KVM and the hoopla in the media about Novell’s KVM commitments is unfounded.

“Novell SUSE Linux is, after all an enterprise Linux distribution. And KVM is just a kernel.org driver that comes with mainline Linux. So it’s logical to expect Novell’s customers to be aware of KVM and to expect them to ship and support it – like any other mainline feature,” Crosby said.

“Novell is also behind an interesting open source project (that is not part of SLE), AlacrityVM, that aims to improve KVM performance and to feed back those changes to mainline Linux. It’s not another hypervisor, but a way to help improve KVM,” Crosby said.

Crosby was also quick to point out that Novell’s support for Xen is srengthening — not waning. Red Hat announced it would continue to support Xen only until 2014.

“As important as their support for Xen, is their support for SLES on Xen,” Crosby said. “Citrix and Novell announced a partnership in which Novell will offer full Support on XenServer for SLES and more than 4,500 enterprise applications certified as Novell Ready on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Importantly, SLES as a guest is hypervisor agnostic and Novell offers support for SLE also on Hyper-V and VMware. Citrix and its partners will gain access to the PlateSpin portfolio to help customers become more effective in their virtualization deployments.”

Supporting both open source hypervisors would be a win-win for Novell, but only if the company has the resources to support both platforms. Time will tell if that is the plan.

Opsera has a new version of its Opsview open source enterprise management package out, Version 3.6 Enterprise Edition.

If you use the links you will find a mistake in the sentence above. Enterprise Edition is only available to those who pay for support. You freeloaders, however, can still get Version 3.5.2 Community Edition, a perfectly fine little package I understand.

Customers who pay for support get access to source code, as do community members, of course.

The question I want to ask today is, is this a fair compromise?

Not for customers. For Opsera.

For customers it’s free software. There’s no doubt about the value for customers.

Version 3.5.2 Community Edition is a free lunch. Download it and benefit. This is the same software that won the prizes at last year’s LinuxWorld. It monitors all operating systems, and comes with the heritage of Nagios behind it, which has been evolving since 2003.

But enterprises, who pay for support, are going to be working within a limited community. They, and the folks at Opsera, are the only people around who can do current bug reports, and fixes, on Version 3.6. It’s not going to be as bulletproof as the community edition.

You’re going to be paying to make it so.

This is the dilemma facing every corporate-funded open source project. The sponsor needs income. Giving away the whole store means only a few will be converted. In hard times, like these, conversion rates suffer. There may not be enough coming in the door to keep the door open.

Still, you’re asking your very best supporters to take a risk similar to what closed-source customers take, in paying for support first, then getting the code.

My own view is that the answer depends on where the help is coming from. If your software can progress with help from a fraction of your installed base, and your internal resources, I see this as a fair compromise. This seems to be the case with Opsview.

But my point is your mileage will vary. Community support, and the need for community input, need to be evaluated against the needs of any open source enterprise. Both succeed or both fail, together.

Microsoft is retreating to its Windows base in enterprise search, announcing it will stop supporting Unix and Linux cores on its FAST ESP after the next release.

The blog post from FAST CTO Bjorn Olstad was downright apologetic, nothing like the spin Microsoft is noted for.

Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change.

Doesn’t sound like change he believes in, does it?

Microsoft spent $1.2 billion on FAST just two years ago, and critics say many of those users are left stranded by its decision.

But that’s not even approximately true. The Apache Foundation has two open source alternatives, Solr and Lucene. Paid support for both Solr and Lucene is available from Lucid Imagination.

Lucid is already bragging on its Web site that its customers include the White House, Netflix, and C|Net, from which ZDNet emerged. (CBS is now parent to both.) Not bad for an outfit that conjured up its first outside investment just last year. (Note: C|Net blogger Matt Asay is on Lucid’s advisory board.)

On Lucid’s blog, marketing guy David Fishman said the company is unsurprised by the Microsoft decision.

If even the FAST development team itself needed to drop everything to make FAST work on dot-net, how hard would it be for a FAST-on-Not-Windows customer?

Fishman was being polite in placing a picture of Claude Rains as Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca on his blog post. ZDNet does not have to be polite. Hence, Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons.

Researchers at MIT have turned an innovative open source security technology known as Ksplice into a commercial product.

Ksplice Uptrack, whose general availability was announced today, eliminates the need to reboot Linux servers to perform monthly updates and security patches, the Cambridge, Mass. company said.

ZDnet wrote about the technology in early 2008 based on a tip from Linux Foundation’s Ted Ts’o, who saw great promise with the technology.

The subscription service that is based on the MIT technology allows the Linux kernel to be updated live without restarting or disrupting applications: no downtime. This is key because of the frequent updating of the Linux kernel.

Ksplice Uptrack is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, and OpenVZ. The subscription fee is 3.95 per month per system after a 30-day free trial. A free version is available for Ubuntu, the company also announced.

“On the coolness scale, this is like changing out a car’s engine while speeding down the highway,” said Keith Winstein, a business development spokesman for the company.

DreamHost, Media Temple and HostGator are among 40 early adopters of the technology.

Ksplice developer Jeff Arnold, a former MIT graduate student, is Ksplice Inc’s CEO. Here’s what he said upon the product release today: “Now system administrators can keep their systems up to date
without coordinating outages, and they don’t need to come in Sunday at
2 a.m. to take everything down,” Arnold said in a press release. “They can avoid the biggest headache of server maintenance, with better availability and a smaller window of vulnerability than ever before.”

I have a confession to make.

I’m a huge Matt Asay fan (right). Always have been.

Matt is the Anthony Bourdain (below) of open source. By that I mean he cooks better than most cooks, writes better than most writers, and he has made himself a big time brand. He’s also hungry for more.

One might compare his move to Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, with Bourdain’s move to The Travel Channel. It means he now has a palette big enough for his talents.

This should not be taken as a knock against Alfresco. A content management system is an important thing.

But it’s a bit like Food Network. It’s about software, like Food Network is about food. And while Matt Asay can program, while he knows software, he has always shown — especially through his writing at C|Net — that he is about something more than that.

I believe what Matt is about is selling transformation. He’s also about putting things together, and then executing on that understanding.

This is what Canonical, and Ubuntu need. They have a great story to tell. Ubuntu is a big success. But it is a limited one.

Ubuntu sells itself as a desktop, but its money comes from servers. Ubuntu sells itself as universal, but its success comes from localization. Ubuntu is a wonderful dream, but a prosaic reality. It sells itself as the shining city on the hill, when it’s really just a small attractive village.

Matt Asay can change that. His new title is chief operating officer.

“As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company’s strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”

Matt is going to try and make the trains in London run on time from his base in Utah. A neat trick.

But I think he’ll pull it off. He can give Ubuntu strategic, practical directions, and he has the operational experience to know when goals are being met and when they aren’t.

In other words he now has his own show, which he can take anywhere in the world he wants to go. No reservations.

Red Hat has opened a discussion community at Opensource.com.

The site has been pre-loaded with comments from CEO Jim Whitehurst and other Red Hat employees.

The most important is probably Venkatesh Hariharan (right), who goes by the screen name Venky and is listed as head of open source affairs at Red Hat. I see him as key because Venky is a journalist, thus I assume the editor here.

He has already done grand work bringing a South Asian perspective to the open source community through his own blog. He is co-founder of IndLinux, the team that localized both GNOME and KDE for the Indian Linux community and has been a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.

His first contribution to the new site since the launch is a story entitled “Is IP another bubble about to burst.” In it, he argues yes, that it’s like the term “horseless carriage,” hampering innovation when its intent was to encourage it. This a follow-on to an argument against software patents.

Are there more at home like you, Venky? I know there are, and I want to hear their perspectives.

One weakness of American-built community sites, including this one, is a lack of cross-fertilization among software cultures. I write this knowing that ZDNet has sites in England, in Singapore, and elsewhere. But I don’t really know those people, we don’t have a shared perspective, and I regret that.

As of 3 PM Eastern, the only non-employee on the new site’s home page is Chris Grams, a former Red Hat employee who now hangs his shingle at New Kind, where he writes a blog called Dark Matter Matters.

Unfortunately you can’t review a site like this in the way you would a movie or a show. It’s a process. The look-and-feel may be attractive, the first few stories interesting, but what matters is how much feedback such an enterprise generates, how much traffic it wins, and how much mindshare it can gather among people already in the field.

Staying power matters. How will Opensource.com handle trolls, and online disagreements? What will it bring of value to the discussion? Time will tell. Nothing else can.

But since we have a talkback thread, how much buzz do you think Red Hat’s new site will generate?

Open source evangelist Jeremy Allison was in New Zealand yesterday, where he issued dire warnings of Microsoft launching a patent attack against open source to win back mobile market share. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

Allison, who famously quit Novell after it announced its patent pact with Microsoft, told a Linux conference in Wellington that Microsoft has to go to court or Windows Mobile is dead. He called a patent fight its “nuclear option.”

Such threats made sense a few years ago, when Microsoft was Mordor and open source the Shire, but Microsoft now has a ton of open source development going on, its opponents are not small companies but Google, and recent patent decisions have shown the GPL to be just as enforceable as a Microsoft EULA.

If there is an open source Frodo out there he’s probably got his Windows PC in a Microsoft backpack.

While making these predictions Allison apparently wore a Samba t-shirt and agreed that Microsoft’s relations with the open source interoperability project have been good.

A second story in the same publication, APCMag (where Microsoft is a big advertiser) gave another reason why Allison’s crystal ball may be cloudy. An analysis of kernel contributions by LWN.net founder Jonathan Corbet showed 75% of the code contributions during 2009 were from corporations, not individuals.

A sizable number of companies helped build the kernel last year, he said, and reverse engineering is required for drivers a lot less often because their owners often share information on them, or there are alternatives available.

So if Linux is going corporate, and Microsoft is benefiting from open source, why would the company drop a legal nuke that could well turn out to be a dud in court?

We should ask Allison that when he gets back.

If there was one word that could get Open Source readers more passionate than Microsoft in 2009, it was Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is not the most profitable Linux, and it’s not the distro with the biggest penetration of any major market.

But partly due to its commercial arm Canonical, based officially on the Isle of Man but actually located in London, Canonical’s charismatic CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, and to its desktop ambitions, it is the Linux distro you most liked reading about.

I was only dimly aware of this at the start of the year. But I learned.

Ubuntu 9.04 to be available for download Thursday – Here is one place I learned. Paula’s story on the approaching release of Ubuntu 9.04 was the 12th most popular story of the year.

Paula’s story quoted heavily from the Ubuntu Web site. She has a talent for hitting important stories just when they hit the Web. It’s probably one of the reasons y’all like her. I’m a fan, too, as previously noted.

Will Ubuntu remain a minor player — I wrote this soon after returning from Taiwan, where Windows was ubiquitous and Ubuntu barely seen. I was frustrated by the software’s lack of presence in the channel. In a way I felt I’d been had.

You responded to my frustration with 386 talkbacks, a rating of +19, and by turning this into the 5th most popular post of the year. Some were short, some were long. My favorite subject line was probably “Linux is the OS of the future and always will be.”

Ubuntu Karmic Koala launches – I snuck in ahead of Paula on the release of Ubuntu 10, and was rewarded with 174 talkbacks and 54 votes, making this the 3rd most popular post of the year.

One thing that jumped the numbers was that I jumped the gun. I hit publish based on an early version of the release, and when the time came but the software wasn’t there immediately the desk took over.

They issued multiple corrections until the software was posted, mentioned the story in the newsletter, and basically cleaned up after me.

After 5 years at this desk the editors have learned a few lessons too.

We are way past asking how anyone can make money with free, visible software. Many companies do.

So it’s time to ask what makes you a leader in this business. How do you generate the most money from free, visible software. How do you stay ahead of a pack that has access to the same raw material you do?

The answer turns out to be the same as in any business. Scaled resources. Just as the big mining company is going to have the biggest machines, you scale programming resources to bring in the big bucks from open source software.

This is the lesson of Red Hat, my open source company of the decade.

Red Hat doesn’t worry about rival CentOS getting corporate support from OpenLogic because OpenLogic doesn’t bring the scaled resources Red Hat brings to the party.

Red Hat has about 1,500 developers, a division run out of Massachusetts, meaning it can evaluate changes enterprises make to the system, incorporate what works best, keep the code base stable, and provide enterprise-grade support.

While most open source attention has been focused on the West Coast game of alliances, announcements, rumors and venture capital, Red Hat has been playing an East Coast game that’s the tech equivalent of blocking-and-tackling.

The result is we wake up after a decade and find Red Hat has gone from a retail model to an enterprise model, with solid revenue streams, blue chip customers, and no serious drama.

What can you do with that? You can push into related technologies. For Red Hat, that means Java. Enterprises are distracted by the Sun-Oracle deal? Maybe they would like some JBOSS.

The key metric of success for Red Hat is mind share among people who willingly write big checks for support. The people we used to call mainframe customers aren’t into flash and show.

This may not be the key in broader markets. When the checks get small and the customer counts ginormous sizzle matters.

But you can make a good living on the high end of the market, even if what you’re selling is free, and one of the key questions for the next decade is how Red Hat will use the power it has earned.