Concerted Linux-netbook effort needed to beat Microsoft

Linux offers an opportunity for PC makers to deliver customized netbooks to specific markets and types of user because of the open nature of the code, unlike Windows.

However, manufacturers are simply swapping one operating system - Windows - for another - Linux - on the new netbooks, rather than creating additional value around the machines. In some ways that's good, because companies like Hewlett Packard, Dell and Asus have made sure the Linux works on their machines and it's affordable for ordinary users - ordinary users that want Linux, that is.

"While all that's great, we can do a lot better" Zemlin said.

According to Zemlin, OEMs should start working with alternative business models like those of the telcos. Operating system vendors and Linux integrators, meanwhile, should do a better job of providing crisp web APIs the OEMs can use to enable these telco-like models.

"The typical operating system game is: create operating system, go to vendor, ask them to pay X amount per device, have them ship with device," Zemlin told The Reg. "That's not the only game in town."

"No one has really figured out how to bundle a mix of services and web APIs, or have fulfillment mechanisms and set up a business relationship between operating systems makers, device makers and carriers."

"It's not their [OEMs'] traditional bread and butter: they are great at manufacturing, building a better, faster widget - but that's not the game," he said.

"Learn from Nokia - meld a kick ass, industrial design with customized software experience and have it subsidized by an alternative business model, be that subsidy or services offering, movies and entertainment - that's a better way to skin this cat."

Zemlin said that subsidizing netbooks would help seed the market and make Linux-powered machines widely available.

Google last week indicated it might subsidize Linux-powered netbooks. According to Zemlin, companies could soon make their money back during the lifetime of any contract sold along with a netbook.

"The thing Google can do on a grand scale is customize software and break business models," Zemlin said. Subsidies would mean more access to computing for more people he added. "It's great for Google, great for Linux and great for open source," he said.

US and UK Governments Adopt Openness and Lead Collaborations, Not Mandates

In the Age of Crises the Government of President Barrack Obama of the United States of America and the UK Government had been trying to find new ways to reduce government costs and overheads, among others is in the area of computer operating system and application software to improve productivity. It’s not often you hear a business executive say that government is pushing the envelope on technology. This happened the first time in our 25 years of experience.

The government was observed to adopt collaboration methodologies, open development, and community sourcing to build software that results in lower cost development and deployments, higher quality code and the transparency that we all expect in our applications today.

The indicators that government is beginning to lead in a collaborative approach to building technology are multiple:

The appointment of our first federal CIO Vivek Kundra, an amazing professional dedicated to openness and with years of experience that include successes in both the executive suite and the public office.

• The incredible response and support we’ve received from the Open Letter to President Obama tells us that this is an industry movement, not a handful of companies, that will bring open development to the steps of local, state and federal governments around the world. More than 100 individuals have signed the letter to date.

• Most recently, the UK’s decision to enact a 10-point action plan to encourage greater use of open source software speaks volumes about the benefits of openness in the public sector.

The switch toward the use of open source software was not directly a mandatory. It’s important for software vendors, users and developers to keep things in perspective. One size does not fit all. And, “open” doesn’t have to explicitly translate to mean open source software. There has never been a question in our mind whether IT environments should include only open source software or only proprietary software. A combination is reality, and that reality is achieved through collaboration.

Collaborative methodologies and community sourcing are paving the way for how applications are being developed today and will be developed in the future. A reference is given here for the CSI-sponsored open source project TriSano, because it’s one of the best current examples of collaboration in government. It’s a collaborative effort among government, public health professionals, and software developers that is resulting in a surveillance and outbreak management system built and deployed at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. We see the possibility of replicating this process across government departments and divisions. So, as government continues to push the envelope, there is so much opportunity for collaboration, open development and community sourcing. Let’s not sell ourselves short. If we think in absolutes, such as “all software must be open source or all software must be closed,” we belittle our industry as we represent it to government.

Thus a correct steps in reducing costs and at the same time still maintaining work efficiency and productivity is as shown by the two example governments of the USA and UK by taking leadership and collaboration in the application and development of open source software as much as possible for the government and public sectors, without having it as a mandatory requirement.

Revenue Model for Open Source Software Business

Revenue models for creating a product from FOSS:

1. Per-unit royalties. Who said open source was free? While the Linux kernel may be accessible to anyone with a web browser (subject to GPL terms), there is a huge leap between a kernel and a fully integrated, optimised, customised, certified and stable operating system. That’s why vendors like Azingo, ALP, Purple Labs and Mizi Research do charge royalties for the Linux-based software stacks.

2. NREs (non-recurring engineering fees) for integration & productisation. Most open source projects are designed to be 90% complete.. but the remaining 10% of pushing a project to ’shrink-wrap’ product status requires an entity with commercial interests to the deliver the project to the finishing line. As such, system integrators and software vendors such as MontaVista and WindRiver will happily engage in integration and productisation project for Linux-based OSes, in exchange for professional services or NRE fees.

3. Subscriptions for product updates & support. This revenue model is common with dual-licensed open-source products, where the product is branched into a version that’s available under GPL non-commercial terms and one that’s available under commercial non-copyleft terms. Companies like Funambol, Volantis, and Trolltech offer paid-for subscriptions to product updates as a service to customers of the commercial product branch and an incentive to move from trying the GPL branch to to buying/licensing the commercial branch. This revenue model presents a growing opportunity for any system integrator involved in the mobile industry, as both device-side and network-side software products based on open source are becoming increasingly used, while at the same time lacking support contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) that customers have come to rely on.

4. Certification and compliance testing fees. In the case where open-source-based products need to be certified or pass a compliance test - as is the case with Java JSRs - an additional fee may be leveraged for undergoing these tests - as is the case with the TCKs for Sun-owned JSRs, specifically the phoneME MIDP2 implementation.

5. Hardware sales. A more subtle revenue model is that of making the software available for free, but charging for the hardware. Taiwanese manufacturer FIC practices this model for OpenMoko, the distribution which is almost 100% open source. Here customers have a reason to go to FIC to build OpenMoko-based devices for them, so as to leverage from the product know-how and hardware integration expertise that the manufacturer has on OpenMoko.

6. Insurance for product liability and indemnification. This is a straightforward insurance service that software vendors often provide as a premium, which indemnifies or insures the customer of an open-source software product against liabilities.

7. Sharing development costs. Last and certainly not least, open source licensing can be used as a modern approach to shaving costs off software development, by pooling that development effort across multiple industry participants. Companies participating for example in Eclipse, Webkit, Maemo and Android projects seek to share their development costs of a commoditising software base with other peers (even competitors), while leveraging on that base to build essential value add.

Indian Prime Minisrer Office dumped MS Outlook after it lost important emails caused by virus attack

The office of the Indian Prime Minister has reportedly ditched Microsoft's Outlook for open-source email following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications.

The PMO has dumped Outlook Express for SquirrelMail, it has emerged, following an outage that saw emails go missing and unanswered during a three-month period last year.

Among the lost emails sent to India's PM were those of a retired air commodore.

In a hearing of the Indian Central Information Commission, the PMO's office admitted: "Many mails reportedly sent were not received in the Outlook Express and subsequently the Outlook Express was discontinued and the SquirrelMail was used."

SquirrelMail is a PHP program that renders in HTML 4.0 and supports IMAP and SMTP. Started in 1999, SquirrelMail is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

While the migration from Outlook to open-source is a black eye for Microsoft, it does beg the question why it took so long for the problem to be detected - unless, of course, the Indian PM isn't actually using email and the account is for show.

As one observer put it: "WTF and WTS (What the Satyam!). It took the Government techies so much time to realize that the email system of the most powerful man in India was not working properly for 3 months!"

Free Software "HADOOP' finds new use beyond Search Engines

Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search Engines

By ASHLEE VANCE

BURLINGAME, Calif. — In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo’s homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook.

It has achieved this by making it easier and cheaper than ever to analyze and access the unprecedented volumes of data churned out by the Internet. By mapping information spread across thousands of cheap computers and by creating an easier means for writing analytical queries, engineers no longer have to solve a grand computer science challenge every time they want to dig into data. Instead, they simply ask a question.

“It’s a breakthrough,” said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “I think this type of technology will solve a whole new class of problems and open new services.”

Three top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with a former executive from Oracle, are betting it will. They announced a start-up Monday called Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., that will try to bring Hadoop’s capabilities to industries as far afield as genomics, retailing and finance.

The core concepts behind the software were nurtured at Google.

By 2003, Google found it increasingly difficult to ingest and index the entire Internet on a regular basis. Adding to these woes, Google lacked a relatively easy to use means of analyzing its vast stores of information to figure out the quality of search results and how people behaved across its numerous online services.

To address those issues, a pair of Google engineers invented a technology called MapReduce that, when paired with the intricate file management technology the company uses to index and catalog the Web, solved the problem.

The MapReduce technology makes it possible to break large sets of data into little chunks, spread that information across thousands of computers, ask the computers questions and receive cohesive answers. Google rewrote its entire search index system to take advantage of MapReduce’s ability to analyze all of this information and its ability to keep complex jobs working even when lots of computers die.

MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.

“It’s a really big hammer,” said Christophe Bisciglia, 28, a former Google engineer and a founder of Cloudera. “When you have a really big hammer, everything becomes a nail.”

The technology opened the possibility of asking a question about Google’s data — like what did all the people search for before they searched for BMW — and it began ascertaining more and more about the relationships between groups of Web sites, pictures and documents. In short, Google got smarter.

The MapReduce technology helps do grunt work, too. For example, it grabs huge quantities of images — like satellite photos — from many sources and assembles that information into one picture. The result is improved versions of products like Google Maps and Google Earth.

Google has kept the inner workings of MapReduce and related file management software a secret, but it did publish papers on some of the underlying techniques. That bit of information was enough for Doug Cutting, who had been working as a software consultant, to create his own version of the technology, called Hadoop. (The name came from his son’s plush toy elephant, which has since been banished to a sock drawer.)

People at Yahoo had read the same papers as Mr. Cutting, and thought they needed to even the playing field with their search and advertising competitor. So Yahoo hired Mr. Cutting and set to work.

“The thinking was if we had a big team of guys, we could really make this rock,” Mr. Cutting said. “Within six months, Hadoop was a critical part of Yahoo and within a year or two it became supercritical.”

A Hadoop-powered analysis also determines what 300 million people a month see. Yahoo tracks peoples’ behavior to gauge what types of stories and other content they like and tries to alter its homepage accordingly. Similar software tries to match ads with certain types of stories. And the better the ad, the more Yahoo can charge for it.

Yahoo is estimated to have spent tens of millions of dollars developing Hadoop, which remains open-source software that anyone can use or modify.

It then began to spread through Silicon Valley and tech companies beyond.

Microsoft became a Hadoop fan when it bought a start-up called Powerset to improve its search system. Historically hostile to open-source software, Microsoft nevertheless altered internal policies to let members of the Powerset team continue developing Hadoop.

“We are realizing that we have real problems to solve that affect businesses, and business intelligence and data analytics is a huge part of that,” said Sam Ramji, the senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

Facebook uses it to manage the 40 billion photos it stores. “It’s how Facebook figures out how closely you are linked to every other person,” said Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer and a co-founder of Cloudera.

Eyealike, a start-up, relies on Hadoop for performing facial recognition on photos while Fox Interactive Media mines data with it. Google and I.B.M. have financed a program to teach Hadoop to university students.

Autodesk, a maker of design software, used it to create an online catalog of products like sinks, gutters and toilets to help builders plan projects.. The company looks to make money by tapping Hadoop for analysis on how popular certain items are and selling that detailed information to manufacturers.

These types of applications drew the Cloudera founders toward starting a business around Hadoop.

“What if Google decided to sell the ability to do amazing things with data instead of selling advertising?” Mr. Hammerbacher asked.

Mr. Hammerbacher and Mr. Bisciglia were joined by Amr Awadallah, a former Yahoo engineer, and Michael Olson, the company’s chief executive, who sold a an open-source software company to Oracle in 2006.

The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

The executives point out that things like data copies of the human genome, oil reservoirs and sales data require immense storage systems.

Welcome to the Open Source Software Blog

This Bolg is dedicated for the development, distribution and applications of Open Source Software for the benefit of all mankind of the world and particulary the developing nations, including Indonesia, in an attemp to narrow the digital divide and improve their people's standard of living, and speed up national progress and development.

We deeply convinced that the use of this particular Information Technology developed through the Open Source community worldwide will ensure lowest possible cost and maximum performance for the benefit of all mankind.

Let us work hand-in-hand to develop, distribute and use this powerful technology for creating a prosperous and peaceful world.