Recessionary cost savings: Linux < Windows < Mac

Steve Ballmer argued that it’s foolish to pay extra for a Mac in a recession. Then open source partisan Matt Asay argues that the same could be said about paying extra for a Windoze license on your $400 netbook.

As Asay concluded:

Why pay a few hundred dollars for Windows on a device that costs only a few hundred dollars and drops all the time? The economics of the recession may help Microsoft against Apple, but they're no help against Linux-based Netbooks.

Mobile LinuxWorld: A tale of two Palms

Regular readers know that I spent 15+ years as an Apple Computer ISV and did my dissertation on Apple’s missteps and struggle for survival in the 1990s. I published a book chapter that IMHO is the definitive treatment (thus far of their woes), plus another paper on the operations and e-commerce aspects of their turnaround.

During Apple’s troubles, many of its employees bailed to the next great thing in computing platforms, i.e. Palm Computing, founded in 1992. Palm picked up a lot of Apple people and from the outside it seems like Palm picked up much of the Apple culture. Now it seems to be reprising Apple’s woes, but a decade later and with a different root cause.

Since 2003, the company founded by Jeff Hawkins has been split into two. (In fact, I met my now-coauthor Mike Mace back in May 2002 when we tried to get Palm to let me study the split.) Palm originally split into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software), but PalmOne immediately bought rival Handspring to get Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky back.

When PalmOne (now Palm) bought back an OS license and the trademark from PalmSource, I assumed that its future was stable. Meanwhile, PalmSource — deprived of its only remaining major customer, seemed doomed, particularly after it was bought by Access, an obscure Japanese web browser company.

After my visit to LinuxWorld, I’ve pretty much done a 180°. The PalmSource strategy today makes a lot of sense, whereas I still can’t figure out what Palm Inc. is going to do to survive.

Palm was showing the Foleo, the “mobile companion” unveiled to great hoopla in May. At the booth they said the Foleo is due to ship “this summer” (which I pointed out would have to be sometime in the next 6 weeks).

Fitting the Apple legacy, the Foleo is a lot like the eMate 300 — Apple’s last gasp to save Newton PDA by making one with a bigger screen and a keyboard. The Foleo is somewhere between a PDA and a laptop in price and capabilities. The one difference is that it doesn’t run PalmOS, it runs Linux; during LinuxWorld Palm announced it would use the WindRiver Linux distribution from now on.

I see three problems with the Foleo. First, it’s neither fish nor fowl so the market may not understand it. Although it had some dedicated owners, the eMate was no great market success. And since then, laptop computers have fallen below $800, eliminating the price argument for the most price sensitive.

Second, it’s a new platform, with a new ecosystem and a new user training curve. If desktop Linux were established, a slimmed-down Linux subnotebook could be a smash hit. As it is, there are few desktop Linux apps. Even if there were, they wouldn’t run because Palm went off and invented their own UI because (unlike Motorola or PalmSource) they didn’t like GTK or the other technologies that seem to be coalescing in the Gnome Mobile initiative.

Finally, there are already devices in this intermediate position. They’re called smartphones, specifically the Nokia Communicator series of phones, which have been shipping to European loyalists since 1996.

	Nokia	Palm	HP
	E90	Foleo	nc2400
Price	~~ $1100	$599†	$1400
Weight	7.4 oz	2.5 lbs	2.9 lbs
Screen size		10.2"	12.1"
Resolution	800x352	1024x600	1280x800
Keyboard	mini	compact	standard
Wi-Fi	yes	yes	yes
Phone	GSM	-	-
Optical drive	-	-	CD-RW/DVD-ROM
OS	Symbian 9.2, S60 Rev 3.1	Linux 2.4, proprietary UI	Windows XP
Applications	thousands	built-in	hundreds of thousands

† Before $100 rebate

The Nokia is smaller, more portable, and makes phone calls to boot. Plus the new ones share a common platform with 70+ million S60 phones out there. Ordinary laptops also are available for a slightly higher price at roughly the same weight. So if I were an internal MIS dept., would I choose to develop for the world’s leading cell phone maker (with a 12-year track record on this product family), the ubiquitous PC platform, or the last surviving firm in a dying product category with its brand new and unproven platform?

The only advantage is the price: it’s cheaper than the most portable business-oriented computers (or the Nokia), although still quite a bit above the $200 of today’s OLPC price.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux, mobile phones, Palm

Mobile LinuxWorld: Motorola

In Thursday’s visit to LinuxWorld Expo, I decided to focus on mobile Linux — both because I’m interested, and also (like Linux on the server 5 years ago) because there are a lot of interesting and important changes happening right now.

Probably the biggest news at LinuxWorld was that Motorola unveiled its new open source initiative at the show. Consistent with Motorola’s youth-oriented (i.e. text messaging) ersatz word construction (rokr, razr, etc.) the Linux initiative is called Motomagx (or MOTOMAGX if you’re screaming). I spent a half hour in the Motorola booth, talking to someone from the UK about the strategy, and then filled in the gaps up with online research.

Motorola has been talking about its Linux phone strategy for more than five years. Unlike Nokia (which has a very consistent platform strategy), Motorola has been dabbling with various technologies, often with no two phones in the same family using the same OS. Thus far, Motorola has mainly used Linux for a series of Chinese smartphones.

This week’s news was about phones, about a new corporate platform strategy, and about Motorola’s embrace of open source. [Since I’m posting a little late, “this week” refers to the week of Aug. 6]

New Phones

This week the Motorola booth was showing two new Linux-based phones: the music-optimized MOTOROKR Z6 and the Motorola RAZR2 V8 handsets, both of which are now shipping. As the press release says, “The RAZR2 V8 will be Motorola’s first Linux-based device bound for North America, representing another milestone in the company’s global mobile Linux leadership.”

I was a little puzzled, because this week it’s called a Motorokr Z6 but 7 months ago it was a Motorizr Z6. (Both were said to be Linux based). Interestingly, the official page for the Motorokr Z6 has a picture link that in the HTML says “Motorizr Z6.” (Today the Motorizr seems to come in a Z3 and Z8 but not a Z6).

Meanwhile, the Motorola RAZR2 V8 was announced in June, and is an EDGE version of the RAZR2 V9 phone for WCDMA networks.

New Platform Strategy

Motorola had a big booth at a Linux show. Although it would love to have attendees buy a phone, the booth (and the full day of training sessions) were intended to attract developers to the Motomagx platform.

As I understand it, Motorola’s new platform strategy segments the handset market into three tiers:

• Low end is Ajar targeted at mass-market phones, which is expected to comprise 30% of unit sales. Oddly, the Ajar website has info for handset vendors, but it’s hard to imagine someone else would license this.
• Mid range is Motomagx (Linux). In (last) Monday’s press release, Motorola said Linux will be 60% of all unit sales “in the next few years.”
• High end is Windows Mobile or Symbian, as represented by its Q phone (as well as the MPx200, MPx220) and Motorizr Z8, respectively.

This is analogous to the Nokia platform strategy, which uses the proprietary S40 for its low-end phones, and S60 (with Symbian) for its high-end phones. Motorola’s difference is that it has unprecedented hopes for going from little to mostly Linux across a broad swath of customers in the developed and developing world; Motorola will either drive Linux adoption in mobile phones, or show why Linux is not yet ready for such widespread usage.

The new Motomagx platform will be replacing Motorola’s existing proprietary platform, Synergy. Motomagx should be comparable to the Synergy UI, as in the V3xx phone being shown in the booth. The features should also be comparable, although (as with any platform) I expect the Motomagx features to grow over time.

Even the names have meaning: Synergy and Ajar sound like code names, while Motomagx is a Motorola vowel-impaired consumer brand. Is this “Intel inside”? To me, a platform brand would imply a common user experience and set of features — not merely an enabling technology for a family of unrelated devices.

The branding ties back to Motorola’s overall phone strategy. As the inventor of the hand-held mobile phone, Motorola seems to be a company that distinguishes itself with hardware design and while software has been just an afterthought. If Motorola is branding a software platform (and not just a family of hardware products), perhaps this is changing.

Open Source Strategy

Unlike earlier one-off Linux efforts aimed at China like the Motoming (A1200), the new phones reflect more of a consistent platform strategy. The new phones use a stock Linux kernel, and the Z6 is “all open source.”

On the one hand, Motorola is being utterly corporate, as befits a company that’s been one of the top 3 mobile phone makers for the past 30 years. It’s got its fingers into all the various Linux standardization initiatives:

• Linux Mobile (LiMo), a gated source effort driven by European mobile phone carriers;
• LinuxFoundation, the main nonprofit promoting Linux for all uses (big and small); Motorola had a director seat for OSDL (before its bailout) and now has one for the Linux Foundation.
• CE Linux Forum, the group intended to commoditize MontaVista Linux.
• Gnome Mobile initiative, the group trying to adapt GNOME and GTK for mobile phones (with support from Intel, Nokia and others)

The one that is missing is the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), another group trying to establish phone-specific Linux standards.

On the other hand, what’s most interesting is that Motorola is actually going to be a real open source company — like say an IBM and not like most of the companies using embedded Linux (such as TiVo or Linksys). Rather than testing the letter of the law as to the GPL and embedded Linux, Motorola has decided to comply with the spirit.

It has created its own portal where it hosts open source projects. One of the first things posted was the user interface for the Z6:

ROKR Z6 Open Source Components Released - ROKRZ6
Motorola is pleased to announce the release of the Open Source packages for the ROKR Z6 phone, as required by the terms of the GNU Public License. This release represents the first distribution of open source code used in our next generation Linux-Java mobile phone platform.
Guy Martin - 06/25/2007 2:17 PM CDT

As with any firm-sponsored open source effort, many questions remain, both about Motorola’s intentions for open source and how successful they will be.

Is Motorola just throwing the code over the wall, or does it expect to share development (and decision-making) with outside partners? Does it expect others to use the technology or is this merely just complying with the terms of the GPL (or being a good OSS corporate citizen)? Even though an open source implementation is the most open form of standardization, telling the world “this is an open standard” is unlikely to be enough.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux, mobile phones, Motorola

LinuxWorld is dying

In between teaching and the big annual conference of management professors, Thursday I was able to squeeze in a day at LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco. I don’t particularly like going to SF, but it’s relatively painless with the Caltrain “Baby Bullet” (a misnomer — it’s just a limited stop train).

LinuxWorld Expo was first offered in February 1999 in San José. The show later provided the backdrop for that “most excellent” (80s surfer-speak) Linux documentary, Revolution OS. When there’s time, I show excerpts of the movie to my technology strategy students, particular the LinuxWorld clip involving the Linus Torvalds-Richard Stallman interaction, as well as the interviews showing the conflicting ideologies between “free software” (i.e. Stallman) and “open source” (almost everyone else).

This is my 3rd LinuxWorld, having come in 2003 and 2004 after moving to Northern California. As in the previous shows, it was held in Moscone Center (once filled each year by Macworld Expo), but this year it was only at the comparatively small Moscone North hall. As with previous LinuxWorld and MacWorld shows, the show was managed by IDG with (if past habits hold true to form) extortionate rental rates and onerous big city union rules.

Even allowing for arriving on the third day, it’s quite clear that the excitement has faded from previous years. The show was empty when it opened Thursday, even if attendance picked up after a while. The show didn’t even fill the 4 acres of Moscone North; it was eerie to see the normally bustling (6-acre) Moscone South empty and dark.

If you didn't stop and have a deep conversation at various booths, you could easily do the whole hall in 3 hours — a far cry from LinuxWorld (or MacWorld) at its peak, when you needed to allot multiple days. In fact, it reminded me of Macworld Expo in the late 90s when Apple and its ecosystem were collapsing. Today, the Macworld shows are bigger, but they are padded with schlocky little companies selling iPod cases or speakers.

The speakers were also 2nd tier. In 1999, it was Linus Torvalds. In 2003, I missed my train and thus missed Irving Wladawsky-Berger, then the IBM vice president in charge of open source strategies and the corporate America‘s most powerful open source advocate. This year, it was a bunch of CTOs, someone passed over (twice) for CEO of HP, and the CEO of Novell. (Andrew Morton, number two on the Linux project, would have been worth hearing Monday but I was still in Philadelphia).

I would be surprised if LinuxWorld Expo survives to 2010, although canceling the East Coast show (formerly Boston, now in NYC) might keep the franchise alive a little longer. Since Linux and open source use continue to grow (a statement of fact, not of advocacy) there must be some other explanation. I have two guesses.

One guess is that such tradeshows do their gangbuster business when a technology is new and an industry is rapidly changing and thus people need to gather information in a rapidly-changing, exciting, ambiguous period. Macworld Expo brought a lot of traffic to Moscone in January, originally to see AppleTV but later to see the iPhone once it was announced.

The other guess is that tradeshows are going the way of the retail store, printed newspaper, and other artifacts of our tangible, physical, industrial legacy era. Yes we needed face-to-face markets 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago to sell produce or haggle over rug prices, but today we do our information search on the Internet. The exorbitant prices charged by convention halls, promoters and featherbedding unions make the proposition less attractive every year. Linux isn’t dying, but LinuxWorld Expo is, being killed by LinuxWorld.com, CNET, Ars Technica and their ilk.

If that’s the future, I’ll be sorry to see the trade show go. I found them a very handy way to gather market intelligence, first as an entrepreneur, then as an academic researcher and teacher. With a good trade show, in day you can go from knowing little to having a very good sense of the state of the market. (I learned a lot this trip). You can also collect a lot of business cards and meet a lot of people — I’d be sorry to lose that, and even more sorry if my daughter’s era does not include that.

I used to enjoy a day trip to see COMDEX, for decades the PC industry’s mother-of-all-shows. When I last went in 2003, the show was clearly in decline, but still its termination (2003 was the end) came as a shock. COMDEX has been largely replaced by CES (both as a convergence play and also under better management), so I guess I need to start going again despite the schedule conflict (usually with my HICSS obligations).

More importantly, I need to go back to CeBIT, the massive German trade show combining COMDEX with a mobile phone and electrical appliance show. Once I assumed that the Berlin Wall would always be there — and then it was gone — so I should assume that CeBIT will also someday join COMDEX without prior notice.

Picture credit: Photo of Tim O’Reilly and Richard Stallman from the O’Reilly Network, © 2002 Julian Cash

Technorati Tags: conferences, Linux

Moblins run loose

For its Mobile Internet Device initiative, Intel has decided to brand its sponsored open source project “Moblin.” [YALBNdtCS]†

Most of the code is GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1. Intel admits its complete debt to Nokia’s maemo project: “Porting applications from maemo.org to mobile Internet devices and vice versa will be straightforward.”

In my own research with Siobhán O’Mahony, we have found, however, that there’s more to open source openness than just a license, i.e. control over development and governance. Intel has historically had tight control of standards consortia that it sponsored (such as USB 2), so that pattern seems likely to continue here. As with other tightly-controlled sponsored projects, this means hackers can use the code but rivals will have little or no influence over its direction, let alone ability to use it for their own strategic goals. (Yes, the case of controlling GPL licensed Linux code is a little more complex than say MySQL or Sleepycat).

Intel’s goal is to sell more chips and crush ARM. Open source is a means to that end, not a goal in itself. Commodity software is bad for a company that sells software but good for a company that sells chips.

Just an aside: does “moblin” rhyme with “goblin”? I know bugs are often “gremlins,” but are they also “goblins”? What does this say about code quality?

† This is coming up so often that from now on I’ll just use the YALBNdtCS acronym for “Yet Another Lousy Brand Name due to CyberSquatters”

Technorati Tags: Intel, Linux, mobile phones, Nokia

Intel the one trick pony

Normally I think about the battle for total world domination as Microsoft vs. Google. An occasional wise guy might suggest Apple, Nokia or Yahoo, but they are definitely 2nd-tier contenders.

The end of the tech bubble made it easier to forget about the other half of the Wintel duoopoly. Yes, Intel’s stock has been falling over the past three years, but they’re still a $40 billion/year company with at net profit margin in excess of 20%.

Somehow I’d missed Intel’s declaration of war against ARM and its chokehold on the mobile phone processor market. Once upon a time, they were going to work with ARM via their XScale processor, but they dumped that off almost a year ago to Marvel, a SV startup that hopes to succeed where Intel failed.

In April in China, they unveiled the Linux-based “Mobile Internet Device,” in some ways an extension to their Ultramobile PC and in other ways a knock-off (as well as building upon) Nokia’s open source work in its 770 and N800 tablets. (If you’ve been living under a rock, these are non-GSM WiFi devices). The Intel products (to be made by various ODMs — see also the Japanese report) are due early next year.

There’s no way for Intel to succeed without besting ARM, who (according to a May shareholder presentation) have better than an 80% market share for its architecture. Intel has the sole PC architecture (since Apple switched) and the vast majority of chip sales in that architecture, and of course the 25+ year old ecosystem that goes with the x86. So this is really a war not only between two companies, and two architectures, but two ecosystems: given Intel’s resources, it at best will be a WWE-style SmackDown, and at worst, a fight to the death.

This harkens back to Intel’s decision in the 1980s to kill its RISC architecture, the iAPX 432. There are two ways to interpret this.

On the one hand, as Andy Grove recounted in his 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel’s support for the i432 was diverting resources and sending a mixed message to the market. Instead, Intel put all its market and R&D power behind the x86, and they did pretty well by that until the bubble burst.

On the other hand, Intel is out of DRAMs and probably going to bail out of flash memory too. It tried motherboards and gave up. Its other comm chips went to Marvel. In short, it’s failed at everything other than follow-ons to the 8086. So in the 29 years since the x86 was born, it hasn’t really created any new lines of business. Apple went from Apple II to Mac to iPod (and maybe even iPhone). Microsoft went from Basic interpreters to operating systems to business productivity to server software — and created a whole new videogame platform while it was at it. IBM of course has the broadest revenue stream of anyone.

Oracle is a one trick pony, and Larry Ellison is still worth billions. WordPerfect and Lotus were one trick ponies (OK, Lotus came up with a 2nd trick) and they’re gone, just as Novell is in the process of disappearing. Intel is a lot bigger than those companies, but right now it seems to be saying that its growth will come from repackaging the same old same old, rather than creating some new product family or market.

Technorati Tags: Intel, Linux, mobile phones

Dueling Linux standards

My friend Bill Weinberg sent a link to a Linux Devices column about his work on the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum.

The column is interesting because it contrasts LiMo with LiPS more clearly than anything I’ve seen before.

Why do we need two standards bodies for embedded Linux for the handset? As with any other case of dueling consortia, it’s due to the egos of the sponsoring companies, in this case Europe’s two largest mobile phone carriers. LiMo is backed by Vodafone and LiPS is backed by Orange.

Would like to comment more, but time spent on blogging is already having a negative impact on my day job.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux

Red Hat’s limited greed

I guess the theme du jour is the motivating power of greed. It was going to be du jour but I didn’t get time to post before leaving.

Long overdue, I’m busy working on my presentation for the conference next Monday in Copenhagen. In trying to explain openness to fellow academics, I’m interested in the “open” strategies that really aren’t — or, perhaps to be more fair, are only partly open.

Red Hat is one of the examples that comes to mind, since their per-CPU license fee looks a lot like Microsoft’s. This is oft-remarked among open source users occasionally gets noticed, although apparently not that often in print.

One example where it was is when Sun CO Jonathan Schwartz referred to Red Hat as “"a proprietary Linux distribution.” He’s not the most objective commentator, but Ian Murdock (the Ian of Debian Linux) agreed. And perhaps the comment was provoked by (never bashful) Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann criticizing “Java apartheid” — which would be fighting words around here.

Criticism from the community side was published in January by Ubuntu Project founder Mark Shuttleworth, who wrote:

As free software becomes more successful and more pervasive there will be an increasing desire on the part of companies to make it more proprietary. We’ve already seen that with Red Hat and Novell, which essentially offer free software on proprietary terms - their “really free” editions are not certified, carry no support and receive no systematic security patching. In other words - they’re beta or test versions. If you want the best that free software can deliver, a rock solid, widely certified, secure platform, from either of those companies then you have to pay, and you pay the same price whether you are Goldman Sachs or a startup in Rio de Janeiro.

Of course, firms have to make a profit and I’m the first to praise such motivations. I just think some of the claims of openness in the industry are disingenuous — in a few cases, it's no more than a marketing slogan (like the late lamented “OpenVMS”).

BTW, if you want to know what Red Hat’s business model is, Matt Asay spells it out, based on a Red Hat presentation. To my mind, he draws only a nuanced distinction to the proprietary source model:

The model requires constant innovation. This is not good if you're trying to milk a product for monopoly rents ("Monopoly" here referring to the limited monopolies afforded through copyrights and patents).

My problem with this claim of Red Hat innovation is that any software company finds it easy to innovate when it’s young. The key is whether it can continue to provide incremental improvements, valued by customers, long after the core features have been implemented.

In my first job out of college, back in 1979 or 1980, my supervisor (our office had only one “boss”) Glenn D. Johnson said something to the effect that all operating systems stop at 8. With each major release, the cost of upward compatibility becomes worse and worse until eventually the delay between releases becomes infinite. He was thinking of IBM’s MVS (later abandoned), but it also matches my experience. Mac OS ended with 9.2.2, but it skipped directly from 1.x to 4.x. Also, Apple renumbered 7.7 to 8.0 to trigger the Copland clause (and kill cloners). So that means Mac OS had 6 or 7 major releases, not 9.

Technorati Tags: business models, Linux, Red Hat

FSF seems to listen

In response to criticism of the earlier drafts of GPLv3, on Wednesday the Free Software Foundation announced a third draft of the proposed GPLv3.

Linus Torvalds, who hated the previous draft, seems to find this one much improved, particularly on the patent retaliation clause 7(b). While he seems unconvinced that it’s better than GPLv2, he’s now willing to consider migrating the Linux kernel over to v3.

Of course, more aggressively protecting free software users from software patents is one of the major goal of the GPLv3. FSF “licensing compliance engineer” Brett Smith notes that the latest draft was deliberately crafted to undercut the Microsoft-Novell deal and its controversial terms about patent indemnification.

The FSF claims is this is the penultimate draft — to be discussed for 60 days — followed by the final draft open for discussion for another 30 days. They really want this train to leave the station in 2007, whether or not everyone is on board.

Still, given the tendency of the FSF and its supporters to be ideologues (or “purists”) in opposition to the broader “open source” community, the willingness of the GPLv3 license developers to listen and respond to external criticisms is an encouraging sign.

Technorati Tags: GPL, Linus Torvalds, Linux, open source licenses

Who runs the Linux Foundation?

The Free Standards Group has finished its friendly bailout of Open Source Development Labs, with the announcement Tuesday of election results for the Linux Foundation merged board of directors. The result seems to be an entity that is governed according to the FSG, but run more by the OSDL than the FSG.

The old FSG board had 9 members, and the OSDL board had 14 (later 12) members. The carryovers to the 14-member 15-member LF board are unsurprising:

• James Bottomley (SteelEye), Dan Frye (IBM), Hsashi Hashimoto (Hitachi) and Tsugikazu Shibata (NEC) from the OSDL board;
• Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu) and Andrew Updegrove (law firm Gesmer Updegrove) from the FSG board;
• Masahiro Date (Fujitsu) and Markus Rex (Novell, formerly of SuSE) from both boards; and
• Doug Fisher of Intel, replacing two Intel representative: Fisher (former OSDL chairman) and Dirk Hohndel (of FSG)

Slightly more interesting are a few new faces:

• Christine Martino of HP replaces Steve Geary of HP from both boards;
• Wim Coekaerts, the main Linux person at Oracle;
• Christy Wyatt of Motorola;
• Tim Golden of Bank of America;
• Brian Pawlowski of NetApp; and
• Marc Miller of AMD. This never would have happened at OSDL with Intel as one of its key founders and one of the largest (if not the largest) investor.

The most interesting to me were the names that were dropped:

• From FSG: Theodore Ts'o (top Linux lieutenant) and two nonprofit reps, Jim Lacey of the Linux Professional Institute and John Weathersby of the Open Source Software Institute;
• From OSDL: Stuart Cohen (who quit as CEO in December), his predecessor Jerry Greenberg (ex-TurboLinux, later OSDL CEO from 2002 to 2003), Larry Augustin (founder of VA Software), and Frank Fanzilli (retired CIO of CSFB).

The LF board looks very very corporate, with the same heavy Japanese representation as OSDL. The LF did away with the two dedicated non-profit seats, although it keeps three at-large seats; the remaining seats are reserved for paying members. As with FSG, there are tiers of members and directors, and in fact the LF retains the same membership tiers (and the website still lists the same members) as the FSG. However, the election doesn’t seem to conform to the Linux Foundation bylaws.

The eight Platinum members who pay $500k/year are each guaranteed a seat, which explains the holdovers (Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell) and the new Oracle rep. The Gold members who pay $200k/year are promised three seats: AMD, NetApp and BofA Motorola. The Silver who pay $20k/year get one director, apparently BofA. And then the three at large directors: one required by the bylaws to represent the technical advisory board (Bottomley) and two other at-large directors (Shuttleworth, Updegrove).

Another measure of who won the merger is infrastructure. The directory structure of www.Linux-Foundation.org is that of the old www.FreeStandards.org, and the LF headquarters is in San Francisco (as in FSG) and not Oregon (as was OSDL).

Update 8:30 p.m.: Mea culpa. I had several initial mistakes which led me to believe there was a gap between the bylaws and the new directors. The StandardsBlog posting omitted Wyatt of Motorola (a Gold member) and thus implied there were 14 members; the official press release is complete. Amanda McPherson of LF e-mailed to clarify that BofA is a Silver member (although they are still not listed among the official members on the website.)

Technorati Tags: consortia, Linux, open source, standardization

Linus again disses GPLv3

In an e-mail interview published Monday by Information Week, Linus Torvalds again expresses his preference for GPLv2 over GPLv3. He lists a number of reasons:

First off, I don’t even know what the GPLv3 will look like. I would be totally crazy to accept a license for my code sight unseen. I think people who just say “version 2 or any later version” on their code probably don’t care about the license of their code enough. Before I say that “yes, you can use my code under license X,” I’d better know *what* that license is.

He lists other points. He thinks the v3 drafts so far are worse than v2, including “glaring technical problems.” But then he gets to the rub:

Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn’t have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral.

Me, I just don’t care about proprietary software. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating code.

He also notes that the GPLv2 is about enabling collaboration, whereas the changes in the GPLv3 emphasize what can’t be done (e.g., DRM support).

If the most popular GPL software isn’t going to adopt GPLv3, then it perhaps it is dead on arrival. This is also consistent with the hilarious (albeit understated) rivalry scene with Torvalds and Richard Stallman in the documentary Revolution OS.

Hat tip: Matt Asay and his Open Sources blog.

Technorati Tags: GPL, Linux, open source licenses, Linus Torvalds

Sun’s Rebound Continues

Back in 2001-2002 when I was researching my second open source article — eventually published in 2003 in Research Policy — I ended up studying three companies: Apple, IBM and Sun. I guess the editors of the special issue liked it because it was one of the first academic articles to treat open source as a corporate strategy rather than merely a way of collaborating to produce technology.

The Apple and IBM strategies were relatively straightforward. Not surprisingly, Apple was selectively open — what I called back then “opening parts.” And, as will be familiar to anyone today, IBM is cross-subsidizing “free” (whatever that means) software with expensive hardware and services.

I never quite got Sun. On the one hand, they had claimed to be about “open standards” for decades, and had promulgated a few pieces of code (like NFS) for the rest of the world to enjoy. On the other hand, they had been at the center of the Unix wars and (like all the other Unix vendors) wanted a few little switching costs to make it more likely enterprise customers would stay with them. So when it came to open source, Sun’s strategy 5 years ago had an element of ambivalence to it. Meanwhile, in the post-bubble era IT managers who preferred Sun’s elegant systems went out and bought Lintel boxes because they were good enough.

Under Jonathan Schwartz, the company has been more aggressively open in its IT strategies — which is risky, but it was clear the old cautious approach to wrenching industry change was on a terminal glide slope. They started the process of open sourcing Solaris in 2004 — nearly 5 years later than when it would have really mattered, but still a positive step to deal with the flood of industry change.

Today, Ian Murdock joined Sun Microsystems to, as he says, both help it respond to Linux and also to work more closely with it. He is the “ian” in Debian, former CTO of the Linux Foundation (née Free Standards Group) and apparently a longtime Unix fanatic and Sun fan. While it’s initially impossible to distinguish a symbolic hire from a substantive one, Sun’s ability to attract Murdock and its (presumed) willingness to listen to his ideas is a positive sign for a company that several years many gave up for dead. Perhaps they’ll enjoy an Apple-like revival.

Technorati Tags: Linux, open source, open standards, Sun Microsystems

What’s open about Open Source?

At a conference in January, Michael Tiemann got mad at me for one slide suggesting open source was antithetical to profits. In trying to flip 14 slides in 12 minutes on a complex topic, I was grossly oversimplifying, and I grudgingly conceded that my point (that many FSF-types don’t want money made off of software) could be misinterpreted, although I don’t think that’s true of the written version.

Friday I was catching up on other blogs and found Matt Asay’s entry about his own participation in (and endorsement of) the Red Hat Exchange. Now I get Tiemann’s point.

The Red Hat business model has always been about creating switching costs — getting buyers to adopt and find “sticky” the Red Hat implementation rather than embracing a truly open (and thus commoditized) open standard. Red Hat Exchange they have added vertical integration as well: a one-stop shopping for support for a wide range of open source packages. This seems to be in competition with IBM, which might seem strange since in 1999 IBM put them on the map. OTOH, Microsoft and Intel didn’t pay a price for ingratitude, either.

In our research on Linux adoption, Jason Dedrick & I found that Red Hat buyers ascribed an option value (in the sense of a stock option) to the possibility of getting an alternate supplier for Linux — something they obviously didn’t have with Windows. But if this is an option that is never exercised — or from a practical standpoint, can’t be exercised due to “stickiness” around the service offering — how is Red Hat’s business model different from Microsoft’s? Other than they only have to pay for roughly 13% of their R&D instead of 100%?

I’m surprised that the Microsoft-like property of Red Hat wasn’t mentioned by Matt — who competed with Red Hat when he worked for Novell (until he bailed), and who’s thought more about open source business than anyone I know in industry. Certainly the possibility of Red Hat as the next Microsoft is oft-reported news — in 1999, several times in 2002 (at NewsForge, eWeek & ZDNET) and earlier this week — as well as Red Hat’s stated ambition. Larry Ellison doesn’t think it will happen, but then Larry’s not God.

Is Red Hat one of a kind, or leading the way for a whole wave of not-very-open “open source” business models? Open standards (when they worked) were about low switching costs, and thus about choice. Is “open source” destined to become just a marketing slogan, akin to OpenVMS?

Technorati Tags: business models, Linux, open source, Red Hat

GPLv3: Stallman’s “New Coke”

The storm over the Free Software Foundation’s proposed version 3 of the GPL has been brewing for several years, far longer than the 16 days this blog has been around. Driven by Richard Stallman’s desire to expand ““software freedom,”” the FSF’s proposed license changes have spawned various controversies over the anti-DRM clause, patent retaliation, license compatibility, and a more expansive definition of distribution. Even though the aggregation clause is an improvement, it retains deliberate ambiguities by avoiding standard legal terminology.

Most significantly, the new license has been criticized by Linus Torvalds and his lieutenants, mainly over the DRM issues. It is possible that Linux may not move to the new license, but instead accept patches only under a “GPL v2 or later” provision, since right now the leaders have absolute authority over what to accept. Certainly there is no requirement that existing GPLv2 packages switch to GPLv3; for example, MySQL has changed its terms so that it is not required to automatically update to the new license.

It seems clear that the GPL needs Linux more than the other way around. IMHO, the tremendous mindshare of the GPL has been due to its adoption by Linux rather than the other way around. One of my favorite open source books, the autobiographical Just for Fun (pp 96-97) makes it clear that the then 22-year-old Finnish college student picked the GPL as an afterthought in 1992 when he needed to have some way to distribute his increasingly popular operating system.

Andrew Morton and 9 other kernel maintainers said it best:

The current version (Discussion Draft 2) of GPLv3 on first reading fails the necessity test of section 1 on the grounds that there's no substantial and identified problem with GPLv2 that it is trying to solve.

On Friday, Bill Weinberg (of the late OSDL) wrote a detailed column about the issues he has seen in 7 years as an embedded Linux advocate, including how FSF thinking got us to this point. His conclusion:

The FSF role will shrink to marginal proportions, and GPLv3 will become, sadly, just another license.

Sounds a lot like “New Coke” to me.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, GPL, Linux, open source licenses

Enforcing the GPL on Embedded Linux

Presumably by now everyone knows about the GPL and (depending on who you ask) its reciprocal aka “viral” properties. In the past, to avoid being a propagandist for either side I’ve called this “compulsory sharing” although the reality is that no shorthand description will make everyone happy.

To me, the remarkable thing has been how little enforcement there has been of the GPL on Linux (as opposed to dual license sponsored projects like MySQL). Maybe it's because those Linux proponents promoting Linux adoption don't want to discourage adoption. Or because of the legally unresolved question as to whether linking constitutes a derivative work. Or perhaps it’s because (for server and desktop use) there's the fig leaf of doing separate installs — shipping a CD with a Linux install and (say) a proprietary application, which are thus installed separately and thus the application doesn't fall under the “work based on the Program” clause of the GPLv2.

No such fig leaf exists if you have a WiFi router or a DVD player or a cellphone that uses embedded Linux. When I first started researching embedded Linux, one of the embedded BSD vendors argued that this made the more mature and non-GPL BSD operating system more suitable for embedded use.

This week Cisco admitted to violating the GPL on its iPhone (the one no one’s buying, not to be confused with the much-hyped Apple vaporware). They didn't volunteer it, but had to be prodded by someone who reverse-engineered the firmware and figured it out. This sort of GPL violation is probably pretty common, and obviously a big company like Cisco is an attractive target, but there were two interesting points. One is that the the inquisitive engineer was from the formal GPL Violations Project. The other was that the alleged violation was over Cisco not disclosing its own software, rather than over modifications to the Linux software (which would also be violations of the LGPL, MPL, EPL, etc. etc.).

Such disclosure of one’s own software is exactly the unresolved legal question that Larry Rosen (and others) have been pointing out with the Free Software Foundation's interpretation of “derivative work.” It could have huge implications for the many mobile phone manufacturers who are today shipping Linux-phones with unshared proprietary modifications.

If such enforcement becomes common, then it is going to change the nature of innovation in segments that use embedded Linux, forcing them to become more open in their innovation practices. Some would choose to make sharing a virtue and to actively collaborate, while others might decide the cost of sharing is not worth the incremental value of Linux over non-GPL alternatives. On the other hand, if the current regime of sporadic ad hoc enforcement continues, then it isn't going to serve as a deterrent for most vendors, and lots of little schlocky little companies are going to design business plans assuming they can fly under the radar and not get caught.

It would be helpful for all concerned if there a test case that told us what the law actually is. Of course, if the GPL were tested in a US court, it’s possible it could lose, which could account for the lack of a test case.