OStatic

Google kicked off the launch of its Chromium OS project today with a presentation on Chrome OS. The first thing you'll notice is that the name of Google's consumer product will be Chrome OS, while the open source project is named Chromium OS. My guess: Google will bless the usage of the Chrome OS name by granting trademark rights to those who comply with Google's standards. Google didn't say that, but that's what I would do. Word is that the video of today's announcement will be available on YouTube in a day or so.

The next thing I noticed is that Chrome OS will be completely cloud-based . As in, no local data. As in, all web apps all the time. As in, it's only useful to the extent that there's an internet connection. This will likely prove to be a Google Rohrschach test. Those already predisposed to disliking anything Google does will find this horrifying. Those who think Google is the bee's knees will conclude that it's not completely evil and, indeed, is the next logical evolution of desktops-in-the-cloud technology.?

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. In the summer and fall of 1999 I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would eventually become the world's
largest open source development site.

I refer, of course, to SourceForge.net, which launched on November 17,
1999. The history and beginnings of SourceForge.net can teach executives and managers today the value of trying crazy things that might (and probably will) fail; of letting your young guns run wild with imagination; and not squashing innovation within your company. This post is about SourceForge.net, the site that was before its time and how it came to be.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

?In October, the Symbian Foundation released the Symbian kernel sources to the world, and the rest of the world (read: developers) collectively responded, Great. Where's my Android phone? I've often lauded Google for its ability to fuse the marketing, PR and developer benefits of open source projects into one seemless operation. It would seem that Symbian could stand to learn a few things. The question is, is it too late?

It's been a week since Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmic Koala, was unleashed on the world. I wanted to post a general review after having used the special K since it went RC in late September and early October. In general, I've been very impressed, especially in comparison to another, recently released, operating system.

Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over who's open source? It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or any other moniker, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in A Remarkable Reversal - his critique of Richard Stallman's joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.

For the first time, there seems to be a growing concensus that an OSI-compliant license alone is not enough to define one's position on the openness spectrum. As Phipps notes, community governance, trademark and copyright ownership and administration, the percentage of core function in the commons... need to be taken together to get the full view.

In a case reminiscent of the DVD hacking cases from the early 2000's, Oregon cable modem hacker and author of Hacking the Cable Modem has been charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting wire fraud. This is another sad commentary on a criminal justice system that prosecutes the toolmaker without noting the legitimate uses of hardware hacking and modding.?

The art of taking an existing product and modifying it in ways never intended by the original manufacturer has been a core tenet of the open source and free culture movements from the beginning. It is long past time for more sanity when considering these issues and crafting public policy.

The Apache Software Foundation is celebrating 10 years since its incorporation, and so we're partying like it's 1999 here at ApacheCon. By which I mean ApacheCon has remained true to its roots with a community-driven feel that seemed more common in the Open Source events of 10 years ago.

The big news today is that the Subversion project is joining the Apache Software Foundation. To mark the announcement, representatives from the Apache Software Foundation, the Subversion Project and CollabNet held a joint press conference at the downtown Oakland Marriott in a cozy, if poorly ventilated, hotel conference room. Read on for more details, as well as news about Git repositories and comparing the ASF to the new Codeplex Foundation.

In the world of open source, there's a narrative that has predominated since the time that the term open source was coined - that being the need for the underlying platform to be open source. We can tolerate proprietary software on an open platform, such as Linux, much more than we tolerate free software on a closed platform, like Windows.

For all of open source's self-professed pragmatism, there is a noticeable gap between how Linux users are supported and how Windows users are supported. If we are truly as pragmatic as we like to think, perhaps the time has come to close that gap.

It seems that we can never quite get away from our industry's version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Namely, how open source are you? Or, as it is usually expressed: I'm more open source than you. I'm 'the real' open source, whereas you're just badgeware/runtware/freeware/fauxpen source. Sun's Simon Phipps has re-opened this debate by proposing a software freedom scorecard that the OSI can use to gauge the openness of open source participants.

If you read my previous blog entry about open core, you may notice a slight contradiction there. That's because I'm conflicted on this issue. On one hand,I was the guy who pointed out that the major impetus towards open source was economic, and that the trends which made an open source ecosystem possible would only intensify - the pragmatic case, you might say. On the other hand, I also recognize that taking these trends and turning it into a regulated market - which is essentially what the OSI has done - does not happen by accident. It happens because a few stakeholders with a vision of how they wanted the industry to behave formulated a plan and executed it. Their primary question was how can we make free software palatable to mainstream IT? That question is not merely an expression of pragmatic concern. There's an idealist quality to it, too, because many of us wanted a more transparent IT ecosystem that didn't actively screw over customers, with far-reaching ramifications that transcended the immediate benefits.?

For the most part, I agree with Simon's proposal, with some reservations, and I'll explain why.

Reading Sam Dean's piece on the absence of linux marketing brought back memories, many of them painful, of my involvement in Linux International, back in the day. For you kids today who only know your Linux Foundation, Linux International (LI) was founded by Jon 'maddog' Hall as a vendor-driven organization to, among other things, protect the Linux trademark. One of LI's initiatives that began in early 2000 was a marketing plan to be jointly funded by the vendors. You can read my call to action from that time begging and pleading for the members of LI to band together to do *something*.

Then, as now, the problem was the cacaphony of noise from various vendors, each with their own spin on Linux. Was it a desktop thing as Eazel and Ximian proclaimed at the time? Was it an enterprise dark horse as backed by IBM? Was it a really great web server, as VA Linux and Red Hat were promoting? All of the above? While multiple Linux markets have continued to grow since then, there does not appear to be a solution to the general problem.?