Advogato blog for dmarti

Open source and its changing role in the enterprise with Stormy Peters

Tue, 6 May 2008 16:13:07 GMT

2 p.m. – 3 p.m. ET, Thursday, May 15.

Peters can answer your questions about the open-source movement, reality versus hype, managing open source tools and anything else about the software world you want to discuss. Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. OpenLogic offers management tools for enterprise-class open source software. Prior to her role at OpenLogic, Peters founded and managed HP's Open Source Program Office and helped establish its Linux division. "I'm someone who thinks open source software is changing the way software works - bringing better technology solutions to us all faster," she writes in her blog.

No registration necessary. Just show up at http://www.networkworld.com/chat/ and login. Chat room opens one hour before the chat.

Friday links...Thursday!

Thu, 1 May 2008 22:08:10 GMT

Working on a new incarnation of a basic idea I've been kicking around for a while: a Perl script to snarf the links from Planet sites and tell me what people are linking to. So far it likes this one by Joel Spolsky and this one by Ben Collins-Sussman, an announcement from Adobe and this interview with Khoi Vinh of the New York Times. Not bad. Here's the discussion of that Adobe thing at LWN.

Another good one, from an earlier test of the same script. Marc Andreessen explains the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. "This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn't work because the target company's employees would bail and the target company's business would collapse." (That's what I thought. Are there really people who are smart enough to build a whole new version of Microsoft, but too dumb to type "microsoft.com/jobs"?

Cause Caller is a VoIP application for telemarketing, I mean phone banking for advocacy groups. (Via Interprete)

Candlelight vigil against the use of proprietary software—that takes dedication.

COIN without a model for Community Resilience is Futile. How much of your ability to defeat terists depends on a trustworthy local police force? NGOs such as the Red Cross? The repair crews for electrical, gas, and communications utilities?

Matt Cutts explains Google Charts, including the Google-O-Meter.

Robert Love points out the basic economic reason that a "gas tax holiday" is a dumb idea. Since the amount that refineries can produce doesn't go up during the "holiday," the price without the tax tends to come up to where it was with the tax—only the money goes to oil company profits instead of the tax-funded projects.

Yay, 30 years of spam.

How do online social networks survive the end of Bubble 2.0?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:09:42 GMT

Bernard Lunn writes, "Consumer media depends on advertising and advertising gets cut in a recession." So what happens to all those social networking sites that are already having trouble "monetizing" the users? If you're connecting the trend of advertising moving online to the trend of social networks gaining users, and expecting the ad money to make the sites pay, you're probably in for a surprise. Making big money from social networking online is an old idea, and it doesn't work. See theGlobe.com and Friendster. So Lunn poses a good question: what happens to all those places to have conversations online when Bubble 2.0 pops?

First of all, compared to journalism, retail or search, a well-designed social network site is cheap to run. Look at Livejournal or Slashdot. Those sites got stared when web costs were an order of magnitude higher than they are now, and broke-ass hackers could afford to do them then. So the question isn't how can a social network site make New York Times, Google, or Amazon money. It's how can a social network site make a few bucks per user, enough to keep the webmasters fed and the servers on? Easier problem.

And here's one possible solution. Obama's 'Gigantic' Database May Make Him Party's Power Broker. Christopher Stern at Bloomberg News writes, "When supporters join mybarackobama.com, they become part of the campaign, gaining access to phone bank lists, local events and the ability to contact like-minded people or recruit new ones. Mybarackobama.com is also a sophisticated data network that allows the campaign to home in on detailed information such as whether a supporter is more concerned about civil liberties, foreign policy, education or energy policy."

The mybarackobama.com site is a full-scale social network, with a built-in business model: getting the Senator elected President. Tony Steidler-Dennison explains (podcast, 24:05) how social networking tools work as part of the campaign. The Obama campaign is saving money on conventional database marketing, the same way that campaigns and advocacy groups saved money on mass media when they discovered databases.

The power behind the "Reagan Revolution" of 1980 was Richard Viguerie, who borrowed database marketing techniques from the direct mail business. When Reagan appointed James G. Watt as Secretary of the Interior, the US environmental movement caught on to database marketing, too. Every word out of Watt's mouth was a money quote for a direct mail envelope, and environmental groups became direct mail machines.

Today, if you're running a political campaign or advocacy group, you're already blowing huge amounts of money on direct mail. If you're CIO of an advocacy group, online social networking is looking like a major bargain. Right now, the ACLU and Amnesty International use the web top-down. Even the online-focused EFF is behind the Obama campaign, which draws on ideas from the 2004 Dean and Clark campaigns and Facebook. Stern writes, "Chris Hughes, a 24-year-old Facebook co-founder, has been a fulltime Obama campaign worker for more than a year and helped develop the candidate's site."

All this is good news for the developers who are working on solving the social network portability problem. Advocacy groups often form shifting coalitions, and being able to draw on "social graph" data from other groups could be a potent webmaster weapon against the troll problem. And, if you're looking to make money from a for-profit social network, the advocacy groups could be in a position to undercut you.

Breaking into the enterprise server market

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:12:26 GMT

The big Linux story of the week is Ubuntu Linux takes on enterprise server market with new OS. Looks like a slick job of integration. Hooray—pulseaudio out of the box.

But are the other distributions a bunch of fools for spending so much time on all those complicated upstream kernel changes? Canonical doesn't make the Linux Foundation's list of the top companies supporting kernel development. Oracle, which rebuilds Red Hat Enterprise Linux and resells it under its own name, at least contributes substantially to the upstream kernel. LF has Oracle at number 11, with 1.3% of changes. Where's Canonical?

Canonical has "a fast-moving team of 5+ individuals" working on the kernel, so they're not freeloading, but "enterprise server market?" Last I knew, some of the large-scale Linux customers weren't just getting warm fuzzies from supporting big-name kernel hackers—some of those hackers were working on particularly tough kernel bugs that customer workloads happened to smoke out. Will Canonical's kernel team start to make the list of top contributors?

QoTD: Ali al-Naimi

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:10:59 GMT

"This is not the time to panic and grasp for exotic, unproven solutions."

-- Ali al-Naimi, Petroleum Minister, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Earth Day, 2008

MySQL licensing brouhaha exposed

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:11:23 GMT

Here's a view into the company politics at MySQL from Monty Widenius, who along with with David Axmark started the MySQL project.

(Monty recently appeared on a LinuxWorld podcast, discussing questions such as What impact do advances in hardware and OS design have on the database, and what does Sun's acquisition of MySQL mean for MySQL's performance on Solaris and Linux.)

"The ugly part was of course the announcement that MySQL was planning to change the MySQL server from open source/free software to crippleware by only giving out key parts of MySQL online backup (a server component) as closed source within the Enterprise server offering."

But despite the timing, the "crippleware" plan was a pre-acquisition idea, not a Sun plan. Did Sun even know about it?

"Mårten showed at his keynote a photo of where they were burning the IPO Prospectus for MySQL AB. This was a very cool thing to do! What the MySQL management team forgot to burn, was all the plans they had of how to make more money when MySQL would be a public company. They have apparently not yet realized that when MySQL AB was acquired by Sun, things changed."

It might be worth looking at another European software acquisition by Sun: StarDivision. Sun acquired the proprietary office suite vendor in 1999, and released OpenOffice in 2000. There's still a proprietary StarOffice, but Sun took the project in a more open direction. As a bigger company that doesn't depend only on software, Sun can afford to play open source with products that the original companies kept proprietary.

On the other hand, the parts that MySQL AB intended to keep proprietary might not matter that much to real-world users. Brian Aker explains explains one place where MySQL-related software is already proprietary. Oracle's innodb has a proprietary backup tool. You can still have a working MySQL without it.

Paying for software?

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:12:19 GMT

Jeff Atwood writes about the allure of $0 software. Some developers are attracted to open source not because of access to the source, or the peer review, or the fact that people just write cleaner code when someone might read it, but just because of the price.

Same goes for books. Why spend four hours groveling through free online tutorials when you could find the answer in a few minutes in "Wicked Cool %s" or "%s in a Nutshell"?

The problem isn't how much money is going to the software or publishing company. The problem is the total cost of paying for something in a company environment. You can drop $120 on an expense-account dinner, but $30 for Software? Your time to handle the payment is easily ten times that. It makes a day or so of

And researching software is more fun than navigating the payment system anyway. And it looks more like work.

Open source might be nipping at the ankles of large software companies, but it devastated the companies that take the 1/4 page ads in the back of Dr. Dobbs'. Big companies can sell you a huge package of code, which spread out the transaction costs. Maybe book publishers should do something similar. Get companies to pay once and get n copies of everything.

Would you use more paid-license software if it were easier to pay?

Friday links: routers, rockets, comics

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:13:07 GMT

Good essay on how direct mail advice from the 1930s applies to today's search engine marketing: "The List-Offer-Package Rule states that when you are trying to sell something remotely, the list (who you are communicating with) is more important than the offer (the details of what you are selling, the item, the pricing, the guarantee), and the list and the offer are more important than the package (how it looks, the copy, the artwork, color and typography)."

So, if you have a magic machine that automatically puts the offer in front of the right list, you make a lot of money.

Nice one from the Overspend on IT For No Reason Department. Of course, you can run your DHCP and your routing on the same machine. And of course it makes sense for that machine to run Linux. The question is: is that machine a $2,000-4000 generic box, or a >$10,000 Cisco router? Converge all you want. It makes sense. But if you're going to be down to one box, why not lose the expensive box instead of the cheap one? Generic Linux/x86 boxes quickly displaced Unix servers for tasks such as print spooling and inbound SMTP, and now they're set to do the same for routing.

The main reason that they haven't yet is that the best mass training program covering Internet protocols calls itself "Cisco certification." When do we get something similar from the upstart Linux router vendors?

John Robb looks at the homemade rocket threat. If you were at SCALE, the avionics he links to are actually a little behind the cutting edge, and there's better stuff on the way. (I am glad that Fox News didn't show up at SCALE. Between the rockets and the Boeing 747 simulator, they would have had a great scare story.

Meanwhile, if you liked Brave New War, you'll love the new Iron Man villain: "open source terrorist."

But why would terrorists "go ballistic" (literally) when they can get better results with drones based on model airplane technology? If you're lucky, the target government will cut loose with anti-aircraft fire, magnifying the terror effect of your tiny drone.

Hooray! free comic books!

New kernel puts a spotlight on memory hogs

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:12:18 GMT

Jon Corbet analyzes the 2.6.25 kernel, out last night.

After 2.6.21, which came out about a year ago, we started to be able to use PowerTOP to spot problem applications that wake up the processor and waste power. (See "Linux tool points out power-wasting applications")

At Google last year, Andrew Morton said, "I don't think we expose enough stuff to sophisticated programmers to tell them what's going on in the kernel." New kernel work is changing that. This time, the measurement feature is more accurage measurements of memory consumption, thanks to Matt Mackall's "pagemap" patches.

Measuring memory use has been a problem spot. Using the standard tools, it's possible to see how much memory you're using, but applications share pages, so you can't tell how much memory you would save if you killed a given application.

With pagemap, you can see exactly which pages each process is using, so you can accurately account for shared pages. Matt impressed the crowd at last year's Embedded Linux Conference, showing off a new tool that gives you new "proportional set size" and "unique set size" metrics to work with. Proportional set size allocates pages among all the processes that share them, and unique set size counts pages that only one process is using.

With every new metric comes a list of bottom performers, so watch for reports based on pagemap stats to put some attention on the greediest of your system's memory hogs.

Question about ad networks and patents

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:14:46 GMT

Just wondering about something.

Microsoft takes the position that Linux users infringe some of its patents.

Microsoft has been expanding its presence in the Internet ad serving business, with the acquisition of aQuantive last year, and Yahoo this year.

HTTP requests, even if you modify the headers, leak information about the OS you're running.

Ad networks track information about you that's sufficient to find you.

So, should you as a Linux user be giving information about yourself that could be used as evidence in a patent suit? Even if the desktop OS is something else, if the NAT box is Linux the ad network would likely be able to pick up on it.

When a company threatens to sue you (or "protect" you by taking money not to sue you) the reasonable thing to do is to stop giving them information unless a court makes you do it. So is ad blocking a reasonable response to broad patent threats?

And when you get a chance to set up a browser on a non-Linux system, should you block the Microsoft ad networks, since it's likely that at some time the system will connect from behind a Linux NAT device?