LinuxWorld,
Linux and Open SourceWrap-Up
If
anything was clear at LinuxWorld, it was how Linux had moved from an
interesting science project for engineers and hobbyists to a
mainstream operating system for every type of business organization.
The “suits” were out in force.
Every major software and systems company was represented
(except Microsoft, who had decided not to put its “living in the
Linux world without using Linux” booth on the floor this time).
Nearly everyone had some kind of announcement, and there were
definite themes. Prominent
among them were:
Open
Sourcing Previously Commercial Software
Everyone
is jumping onto this bandwagon.
We’ll cover a few big announcements, like IBM’s release
of Cloudscape under an Apache license through the Apache Foundation,
separately, but lots of vendors have decided that you can build good
will among customers generally and in the open source community
(Most of the announcements contain this theme) as well as get
help with the continued support of products that you may not want to
support as commercial offerings (look for this with older products;
it’s not true, of course, when the vendor intends to also base
future commercial offerings of his own on the code).
Discussing
The Protection Of Intellectual Property (IP).
The effect of our increasingly awkward patent laws and the
litigation that they may encourage is creating an industry of its
own. We now have
vendors who offer indemnification (HP, Novell), vendors who
participate in schemes to assist customers who may find themselves
in legal difficulty (participants in OSDL), and risk mitigation
schemes (that look like but aren’t insurance policies), like that
offered by the OTMG. All
were in play at LinuxWorld.
We’d
note that buying Open Source software (or selling it) probably now
requires a knowledgeable lawyer, some understanding of Open Source
licenses (there are 50, but most software is sold under only a few
of them, thank goodness), and perhaps a discussion with your
business insurance broker, who may already be insuring you for
business risks that include (or could be extended to include)
litigation over IP.
IBM
IBM
was everywhere at LinuxWorld. Nick DiNofrio offered a strong (and
marketing-free) keynote, where he promised that IBM would not
exercise their many patents that Linux might infringe, unless IBM
was called upon to defend itself, (loud rounds of applause, and a
suggestion that putting this in writing might be a good idea).
A number of new IBM-Linux customers were announced, including
India’s National Informatics Center (NIC), the State of Hawaii,
the State of Oklahoma and a supercomputer project with the U.S. Army
Shared Resource Center.
But
the big IBM news was IBM’s decision to take its Java database,
Cloudscape, and make it into an open source project, Derby, under
the Apache Software License, and the stewardship of the Apache
Software Foundation. Cloudscape
is used extensively within IBM, appearing in some 17 products,
including the Workplace 2 messaging and document management product,
announced in May.
IBM
hopes that by open sourcing Cloudscape it will encourage the
development of data base Java applications.
IBM will continue to use Cloudscape itself and intends to
offer a commercial version of the product under the IBM name.
It has announced that the IBM version of Cloudscape will
carry no license fee, only charges for maintenance and support.
Cloudscape was acquired by IBM as part of its acquisition of
Informix in 2002.
IBM
has also recently announced its own developer kit in support of the
Eclipse development environment.
The IBM Development Package for Eclipse is an unsupported (by
IBM; technical support is available from www.Eclipse.org
) Eclipse-based development tool which enables developers to build
and run Java applications with its ready-to-run development
environment out of the box. It includes IBM’s latest Java Run-Time
Environment (JRE). Versions are available for both 32-bit Windows
and 32-bit Linux. Applications
developed in this environment can then be readily ported to the
Eclipse-compatible IBM commercial offerings such as WebSphere
Studio. For more
information on the IBM Development Package for Linux and a link to
the download go to http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/eclipse/
.
Computer
Associates (CA)
CA
had already announced (prior to LinuxWorld, at its CAWorld customer
event) that it was open sourcing its Ingres r3 data base under the
CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL); this is a derivative of the
common public license and is Open Source Initiative-compliant.
A version of the software will be available under this
license by September 30.
Developers
can include the Ingres source code in their own projects as long as
any Ingres source code is made available in accordance with the
CATOSL.
CA
will provide support and indemnification for Ingres r3 as an
optional fee item. CA
believes this is the first enterprise-quality data base to be
offered as open source. Some
cynics have commented that this may be a way for CA to continue to
provide the data base while lessening the expense of its ongoing
support.
At
LinuxWorld, CA announced a Million Dollar contest, open to members
of the open source development community who create applications to
convert, transform, or migrate data and applications from Oracle,
Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Service, IBM DB2
Universal, IBM Informix Dynamic Server, or MySQL to the Ingres
database. Entrants will
be reviewed and selected by judges from CA and the open source
community and winners will be announced during CAWorld 2005. The contest runs through February 1, 2005.
Links to conference information and rules may be found here:
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Collateral.asp?CID=61137&ID=4900
.
Novell
SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server 9, which incorporates the 2.6 Linux kernel,
was Novell’s major LinuxWorld announcement.
This new version of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server also
incorporates additional management features to lower deployment and
administration costs. The
new release is supported by all of SuSE/Novell’s major partners
including AMD, CA, HP, IBM, Intel, and Oracle.
The
move to the new kernel version is expected to provide higher
performance and advanced memory management.
Class-based kernel resource
management
(CKRM), co-developed with IBM,
allows the dynamic allocation of resources to the Linux server. In
addition, hyperthreading support and NUMA (non-uniform memory
management) support have been improved and provide more effective
scalability across large-scale implementations.
As
we noted earlier, Novell is one of the companies that offers
customers indemnification from third-party copyright litigation.
Supported hardware architectures include
x86, AMD64TM and Intel EM64T, Intel Itanium Processor Family, IBM®
POWERTM, IBM zSeries® and IBM S390®. Yearly maintenance service
subscription for x86 architectures starts at $349 USD per server
with two CPUs.
Novell
was also using LinuxWorld to talk about the availability of its
recently announced Mono 1.0 open source development platform, based
on the .NET framework. It
allows software developers to efficiently build Linux and
cross-platform applications in a familiar environment.
Mono includes a C# compiler, a .NET-compatible runtime and
two stacks of APIs.
Mono
attempts to make it easier and more attractive to develop
applications for the Linux desktop by providing a less technical and
complex development environment, offering a commercial-grade
development platform with a complete set of tools and APIs.
A new Web site -- http://www.mono-project.com
provides tools, resources, project roadmaps and detailed
information about Mono. Since the Mono Beta 1 was released May 4,
Novell notes that more than 50,000 copies of the software have been
downloaded.
Red Hat
In an expected move, Red Hat announced an Open
Source Application Server, extending their product offering.
They claim this will not compete with their business
partners, such as IBM, BEA, and Oracle (all of whom sell their own
application servers) but rather provide an alternative choice to
customers. In any case,
business partners are supporting the announcement and compatibility
with leading application servers and data bases.
Red
Hat’s Application Server
includes:
- JOnAS, ObjectWeb's standards-based middleware
implementation*, with Web-based administration
- Tomcat, the Reference Implementation of Java
Servlet 2.4 and JavaServerPages 2.0 technologies
- Struts, a framework for building Java Web
applications
- Support for all major commercial JVMs (Sun, IBM,
and BEA) and for the Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
databases. (JDBC 2.0 drivers are available from your database
vendor.)
This means Red Hat Application Server includes most of
the commonly used features and functionality found in commercial
J2EE application servers: including an enterprise application
server, a web application server and a developer suite
(Eclipse-based) plus web services, and server management,
scalability, and transaction support.
The Red Hat Application Server supports IA-32, Itanium, and
IBM Power series.
The
new Red Hat Open Source Application Server is subscription priced at
$999 per year; a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is
required. A free,
unsupported download of the Red Hat Open Source Application Server
is available to Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers for their review.
Eclipse
The
Java vendors have selected Eclipse as their standard; everyone in
that community, with the exception of Sun, has joined the effort.
Sun claims that Eclipse doesn’t support some parts of their
Java development environment, although Eclipse execs claim that’s
not true; we’d guess that Sun isn’t ready to give up being able
to completely control its own game here, although the buy-in to
Eclipse is substantial.
Eclipse
has now added a desktop development alternative to Windows with its
rich client environment in Eclipse 3.0.
It is designed to support graphics-rich applications across
different operating systems, making the operating system itself less
important over time. Until
now, this has been accomplished by using applications via a Portal
and a Web browser. This, of course, limits the look-and-feel of the desktop
environments, as well as the complexity of the applications that
might be supported.
The
desktop development environment was originally created by IBM but
supports a variety of plug-in development tools.
It is already implemented, forming the basis of the rich
client environment in IBM’s Workplace 2 offering.
Eclipse
has also recently announced initiatives to support Apache Beehive,
to provide additional Eclipse Web Platform Tools, and to provide an
open Test and Performance tool set.
Sun
Sun’s
LinuxWorld announcement, code-named Project Janus, is the ability to
run Linux binary applications unchanged on the Solaris 10 version of
Sun’s proprietary version of its UNIX operating system on –x86
platforms.
Sun
has been pushing hard the concept that running Solaris on each
platform level, PC to biggest system, is preferable, and this would
allow customers who want to both follow that concept and maintain
accessibility to Linux applications while (according to Sun) being
able to reduce the cost of maintaining separate development
environments, the administration costs of operating in a
heterogeneous environment, or the need to sacrifice performance,
scalability, or manageability.
Sun
has tested applications such as
Adobe Acrobat Reader, Oracle 9.2.i, SAS, BEA WebLogic and
others using Project Janus. A complete list of tested applications
will be available when the Solaris 10 operating system is released
later this year.
Solaris
customers who select Project Janus can use their Linux applications
in an environment which is supported by all of the Solaris tools
including Dynamic Tracing (a tool for analyzing and diagnosing
problems in real-time), Predictive Self Healing (an approach to
service availability with online error detection and auto recovery),
Solaris Rights Management, Process Rights Management and N1 Grid
Container software.
Sun
also announced the extension of its Sun Ray ultra thin client
technology to the Linux platform.
This will occur when Sun Ray Server Software 3.0 ships
shortly. In the Sun Ray architecture, the desktop device does not
require an operating system. It
is entirely centrally administered, lowering administration costs
and increasing security. The
user sessions run on the server, where all computation and rendering
occurs. A JavaCard can permit users to sign onto any SunRay and call
up their own desktop,
OSDL
The
Open Source Development Labs have announced a new college and
university affiliate program, to extend support for Linux research
and deployment in the university community.
First to join are Marist College, Oregon State, Stanford,
Tokyo University, and Waseda University (Japan).
The
new program allows colleges and universities to participate, along
with their corporate peers, in initiatives such as the OSDL Carrier
Grade Linux, Data Center Linux, and Desktop Linux working groups.
The goal is to provide a forum where commercial Linux vendors
and the academic Linux community can come together to share ideas
and address common problems. In
addition, university researchers can access the OSDL's data center
computing facilities in the United States and Japan.
OSDL
is working with participating colleges and universities on a program
to advance Linux by:
-
Providing
a vendor neutral environment for collaboration
-
Linking
universities with industry to improve opportunities for research
projects and student placement
-
Creating
a forum for cross-institutional sharing of curriculum and other
academic issues related to open source
-
Providing
insight on open source projects that are well suited for higher
education development
-
Fostering
dialog between University and Commercial CIOs
Beyond
working group participation, college and university affiliates will
participate in a "Linux in higher-education" forum hosted
by OSDL. This program
will begin as an on-line forum, but is expected to expand into
regularly scheduled conferences hosted at member institutions'
campuses
OSDL
University Members can participate as non-voting affiliates for
$1,000 per organization per year, joining technical and marketing
workgroups and attending meetings.
OSDL is at the beginnings of its academic recruiting efforts,
currently talking to about 15 institutions.
Unisys at LinuxWorld
Unisys
announced the availability of Linux on its ES7000 servers.
Working with Novell and Red Hat, it will provide the first
dynamic partitioning capability on Linux for Intel-based servers.
Unisys believes this will provide a new alternative to
proprietary RISC-based systems, typically more expensive.
Unisys
has also optimized its Server Sentinel software, which manages both
Windows and Linux environments from one screen: enhancements to the
Sentinel offering include Application Sentinel, DatabaseSentinel and
Security Sentinel.
Unisys
believes it is a combination of its enterprise class experience and
the standardization of x-86 level components that allows them to
bring a server with these characteristics and pricing to the
marketplace.
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