Category Archives: open source

open source, Sun

UK lagging rest of Europe in open source adoption

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Sun conducted a survey of small and medium-sized businesses (up to 500 employees) to discover their usage and intentions towards open source software and MySQL in particular. I was interested to see the report, particularly after attending an open source round table last week about open source software in government.

The researchers interviewed around 100 people in each of 7 European countries, targetting the “CIO or IT-Manager”. The results were surprising to me. Only 34% of UK (or England; the report uses both terms and does not seem to understand the difference) businesses claim to use open source software, versus 72% in France and 69% in Germany. The only country with lower usage is Sweden on 33%.

I’m sceptical. It seems to me that you have to make some effort to use no open source software anywhere in your business. A web site with PHP and MySQL. Someone editing audio with Audacity, or  using Firefox to browse the web, or Filezilla to upload files. Still, let’s take the report at face value for the moment.

Another question is more interesting, asking what percentage of a business’s IT infrastructure is open source.

Even in Germany, the biggest user, only 2% claimed to be completely open source. 72% were less than half open source, and 31% did not use it at all.

In the UK, none were completely open source, 84% less than half, and 66% have no perceived usage.

Here’s a good result though: among UK companies that do use open source, 65% use it for critical projects. This figure is actually above the European average.

Another striking figure: the biggest driver for open source adoption is to save money (61% in the UK, 66% in Germany). Next comes freedom from lock-in (34% in the UK, 53% in Germany), and after that flexibility (20% in the UK, 34% in Germany). Multi-selection must have been possible as figures add to more than 100%.

This last one gives me pause for thought. Most IT companies claim to save you money; it’s part of the standard sales pitch. Open source software generally does though, partly because the whole concept is a form of commoditization, or pooling of resources for mutual benefit. Is it inevitable that if if open source continues to increase its usage share (as most indicators suggest), that overall revenue in the IT industry will diminish?

You can pose the same question substituting “cloud computing” for “open source”; both together could have a substantial impact.

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.net, microsoft, open source, silverlight, software development, Uncategorized

Microsoft, Moonlight and open source

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I was surprised by the announcement that Silverlight is being ported to Intel’s Moblin Linux, which I’ve already reported both here and on The Register. It feels like a u-turn from Microsoft, which had previously stated that while it would build Silverlight for both Windows and Mac, Linux support was to be done by Novell. This is from the 2007 press release:

Microsoft will work with Novell Inc. to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com … Microsoft is committed to ensuring that organizations have the best tools and resources to begin building Silverlight-based solutions with the broadest possible reach. The decision to work with Novell to offer Silverlight support for the Linux platform is in direct response to customer feedback, and both companies are optimistic about the impact this extended partnership will have in the industry.

Now, given that Microsoft has long expressed an intention to bring Silverlight to mobile devices, and that many mobile devices run some variety of Linux, you can argue that the Moblin announcement is merely in line with that strategy. This is what Brian Goldfarb told me – that the Intel deal is in the “mobile device” category, and therefore distinct from the work with Mono.

That said, if you look at the specs for something like Dell’s Mini 10v with Moblin – 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, 160GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, 10.1" 1024×600 display – it really has more in common with a traditional laptop than with, say, a mobile phone. Further, I’m getting the impression that this will be a full Silverlight 3.0 implementation, not a cut-down version like Flash Lite, complete with the Silverlight version of the .NET Framework.

If Microsoft had announced this kind of deal in the early days of Silverlight, it would have have been encouraging for open source advocates. Even though this Silverlight for Moblin is not an open source project, it extends support for a key Microsoft technology to Linux users. Silverlight developers may well prefer that the same code will be running on Moblin as on Windows or Mac, subject to whatever has to be done to make the port work.

Unfortunately at this point the announcement is having an opposite effect, casting doubt on Microsoft’s ability to work with open source partners. The impression is that Mono was a useful means of ticking the Linux box for Silverlight’s launch – though the version which includes .NET is still not complete – but that when it really wants to support a Linux OS, Microsoft is quick to find another route.

It is stating the obvious to say that the open source community is wary of Microsoft. Everything the company does is eyed with suspicion. Microsoft’s official support for Moonlight, along with great work from people like John Lam who works on IronRuby, was beginning to soften some of that hostility. Miguel de Icaza, leader of the Mono project, has been a great bridgebuilder between Microsoft and the open source community – so much so, that Richard Stallman recently called him “basically a traitor to the free software community”. Stallman has done his cause no credit with this remark. “I think we officially hit a new low here”, says OS news.

A terrible moment then for Microsoft to snub Moonlight by doing its own thing with Intel for Silverlight on Linux. What was even more striking is that the company seemingly had no idea of the impact of its announcement, and that it might be a sensitive matter, and apparently did nothing to prepare the Mono team in advance for the obvious questions that would be asked.

What is more important – that Silverlight works smoothly on Moblin, or Microsoft’s relationship with the open source community?

database, open source, oracle, Sun

Why the EU should not worry about Oracle and MySQL

The European Commission is examining Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and has concerns about the implications for MySQL:

Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world’s leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open source database company. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover. Databases are a key element of company IT systems. In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective IT solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available”.

The most remarkable thing about this investigation is that it exists. One of the supposed benefits of open source is that, come what may, your product cannot be abandoned at the whim of some commercial giant; you have the code, and as long as a viable community of users and developers exists, its future is in your hands. So why is the EU worried?

The issue I suppose is that while Oracle cannot remove code from the community, it would have it in its power to disrupt MySQL – in fact, that is happening already. It could refuse to invest in further development, and encourage customers with support agreements to move to the latest Oracle solution instead. I am not saying that is likely; I have no idea what Oracle plans, and it already owns Innobase, which supplies the most widely-used transactional engine for MySQL, without obvious adverse affects.

Still, it is important to think clearly about the case. I’ve just been talking to Simon Cattlin at Ingres, who is using the opportunity to mention that worried MySQL customers are making enquiries at his company. He also argues that the EU’s intervention proves the increasing importance of open source technology.

That latter point is true; but there is some doublethink going on here. There are two sides to MySQL. On one side it’s powering a zillion mostly non-critical web applications for free, while on the other it is a serious business contender covered by support contracts. It is all the free users that make it “the world’s leading open source database company”, not the relatively small number of commercial licensees; and it was Sun’s failure to shift users from one to the other that accounted (among other things) for its decline.

So which of these groups is the EU concerned about? If it’s the free users, I don’t think it should worry too much. The existing product works, the community will maintain it, and forks are already appearing, not least MariaDB from a company started by MySQL creator Monty Widenius.

On the other hand, if it is the Enterprise users, I don’t think the EU should worry either, because it is not a big enough deal to warrant anti-competitive concerns. Cattlin told me that Ingres actually had higher revenue that MySQL at the time of the Sun takeover.

It makes no sense to conflate the free and commercial users into one, and use the number of free users to justify action which mainly concerns the commercial users.

That said, it’s true that having an open source product owned and mainly developed by a commercial company is always somewhat uncomfortable. One of the reasons the Apache web server succeeds is because it belongs to an independent foundation. There is rarely a clean separation between what is commercial and what is open source though: the money has to come from somewhere, and entities like Apache and Eclipse survive on staff and funds contributed by profit-making companies.

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linux, mobile, nokia, open source, symbian

Nokia announces N900, juggles three operating systems

Nokia has announced the N900 Internet Tablet running the Linux-based Maemo operating system. This is the latest in a series of Tablets (not to be confused with Microsoft’s Tablet PCs), but the first one to include “cellular features”, which means it can make and receive phone calls, though the press release hardly mentions it.

This is a big deal since this is now in effect a SmartPhone (as the Reg observes) and therefore may be offered with operator subsidies, which seems essential for grabbing market share in the crazy mobile phone business. Nokia needs a success with this one, as its previous Tablets have made little impact beyond an enthusiast niche.

The full specification shows support for quad-band GSM EDGE as well as tri-band WCDMA. There’s also integrated GPS; wi-fi; 5 megapixel camera; Mozilla web browser (not WebKit); Adobe Flash 9.4; Mail for Exchange; 1GB of RAM split between application memory and virtual memory, and 32GB internal storage. Oh, and there’s a slide-out QWERTY keyboard so this could be a great device for messaging.

This comes just after Nokia’s Windows netbook announcement, the Booklet 3G, while the company is also running the Symbian Foundation and supposedly driving Symbian as an open-source mobile OS to rival Google’s Android.

The big question: how many operating systems does Nokia need? I can understand its desire to get on the Windows 7 bandwagon with the Booklet 3G, but why continue with both Maemo and Symbian?

Still, the N900 looks like a neat device; see here for full information and images.

adobe, apple, eclipse, microsoft, mobile, nokia, open source, software development, symbian

Symbian appeals to Traveling Geeks: develop for our platform

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I attended a Traveling Geeks event in London last night, a party sponsored mainly by Symbian and NESTA. I returned with a large pile of business cards from folk involved in a diverse range of initiatives. Kate Arkless Gray told me about Save our Sounds, a BBC World Service project to archive and map interesting and endangered sounds from around the world; while Sarah Blow sought to convince me that I don’t just need Twitter, I need Tweetmeme to track what is happening on the world’s most public short message service.

Digitrad wants me to sign up for yes.tel, which means registering a .tel domain with its service and using it as a public home page, email address and voicemail box. It’s not clear to me what advantage it has over all the other third-parties who want to own my digital identity, except that Digitrad is smaller and therefore less threatening than Google or Facebook. I’m happy with conventional registrars.

From my perspective, Symbian managed to dominate the event with engaging images around the walls and numerous representatives to talk up its mobile platform. The Symbian story is an interesting one. Originally developed by Psion, it was spun off in 1998 into an independent company co-owned by the giants of mobile at the time: Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion itself. Nokia proceeded to acquire more and more of Symbian, achieving greater control but also – it seemed to me – reducing the chance it once had of becoming an industry standard. Other vendors became wary of depending on an operating system controlled by a competitor. Linux had greater appeal – as seen in both the Palm Pre and Google Android – while Apple did its own thing with OS X on the iPhone, and Microsoft ploughed on with Windows Mobile.

Last year Nokia responded to the pressure by announcing plans to acquire Symbian in its entirety and then to give it to a new Symbian Foundation, an open source, collaborative project along the same lines as Eclipse. Developers can sign up to get the tools for programming Symbian applications in C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Adobe Flash, C# or HTML/JavaScript. I was told that Symbian intends to be even more open than Android. It restores Symbian’s cross-industry potential though there is now more competition.

Should you develop for Symbian? The Symbian Foundation is a great move, but in the App Store era I suspect deployment issues are even more critical than the quality of the OS or its development tools. Developers will go where they can find customers. Apple is reaping the rewards of controlling the entire platform and marginalizing the mobile operators.

Still, as long as Apple is content for the iPhone to be punishingly expensive, it leaves space for others. The appeal of Symbian will depend not only on its success among device manufacturers, but also on how easy it is for users to find, purchase and install applications.

There is also the matter of reliable, fast and affordable internet access, the lack of which has so far spoilt every mobile device I have owned.

eclipse, ibm, internet, java, microsoft, open source, oracle, software, software development, visual studio, windows

Eclipse survey shows Windows decline

In May 2009 the open source Eclipse project surveyed its users. Visitors to the Eclipse site were asked to complete a survey, and 1365 did so. That’s out of around 1 million visitors, which shows how much we all hate surveys. Anyway, this report [pdf] was the result. A similar survey [pdf] was carried out in 2007, potentially making a valuable comparison, though the earlier survey has different questions making direct comparisons difficult in most cases, which is a shame. I especially missed the detail on which Eclipse projects are used most which is well covered in the 2007 report.

Here is what I found interesting. First, there’s a shift towards Linux and Apple Mac in the desktops developers use for Eclipse. In 2007 it was 73.8% Windows, 20% Linux and 3.5% Mac. In 2009 it is 64% Windows, 26.9% Linux and 6.9% Mac.

This is echoed in deployment platforms too (client and server). In 2007 it was 46.5% Windows, 36.6% Linux, 1% Mac; today it is 40.5% Windows, 42.7% Linux, 3% Mac.

Those surveyed were asked what other IDEs they used. I noticed that Microsoft Visual Studio and NetBeans feature fairly strongly; I also noticed that Embarcadero’s JBuilder is hardly a blip on the chart – intriguing, given how popular this used to be in the pre-Eclipse era.

The most popular code management tool is Subversion (57.5%) followed by CVS (20%). For build tools, Ant (33.4%) and Maven (18%).

Here’s an intriguing one: I often hear that Java is only successful on the server. That presumption is not supported by this survey. 23.4% said that desktop client apps are the primary type of software they are developing, compared to 30.2% server, and 24.7% web or RIA apps.

The preferred app server is Apache Tomcat (34.8%) followed by JBoss (12.7%) and Websphere (6.9%).

The most popular database manager is MySQL (27.7%) followed by Oracle (27.3%). That’s 55% for Sun+Oracle, of course, though bear in mind that many of the MySQL users are likely attracted by its free licence.

Before drawing too many conclusions, bear in mind that it is a small sample self-selected by people willing to take the survey; apparently it was also featured by a German technology site which resulted in a larger response from German visitors.

Although it suggests a declining use of Windows – which is especially plausible given the trend towards web applications – it does not prove it beyond the Eclipse community.

And next time – how about using the same questions, which would make it possible to identify trends?

I’ve also written about Eclipse here: The Eclipse Conundrum: can it grow without hurting its contributors?

delphi, eclipse, embarcadero, open source, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Survey ranks developer tools, and reveals what developers care about most

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Evans Data has published its 2009 Software Development Platforms survey, to which around 1200 developers contributed, scoring their chosen development tools in eighteen different categories.

The tools covered are Eclipse, Embarcadero’s Delphi, IBM’s Rational Suite, IntelliJ, Microsoft’s Visual Studio, NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper and Sun Studio.

I was sorry not to see more products covered. Flex Builder Flash Builder, Zend Studio, Aptana and JBuilder would all have been interesting, for example. Each developer only scored the product they actually use (a good thing), so the sample is not as big as it first appears.

I’m also mistrustful of the survey results, particularly when you look at it in detail. For example, one of the categories is “Support for frameworks”.  Visual Studio came top, while Eclipse was last. But hang on: in Visual Studio (for example) are we talking MFC, or .NET Framework? The development experience for each is totally different. And were developers primarily judging on the framework tools, or the framework itself? It is hard to attach much meaning to the scores in this category.

Another flaw: the versions of the products is not specified. That means a weakness may have been fixed in a later version, but the survey does not tell you.

A third flaw: some tools are weak in several categories, dragging down their overall score, but that does not matter to developers who do not use them for that purpose. It is hard to compare like with like.

Still, while I’m wary of the survey overall, I though it brought out some interesting points. One is that developers were asked what features matter most to them. So:

The three things developers care about most (highest priority first):

1. Basic tools (editor/compiler/debugger)

2. Documentation

3. Tool integration

The things developers care about least (lowest priority first):

1. Support for remote development

2. Support for parallel programming (sorry Intel!)

3. App Modeling tools

What about the winners and losers in the survey? I almost forgot. IBM’s Rational Suite came top, followed by Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Eclipse came last, though it still got a decent score, well below its rival NetBeans.

The low ranking for Eclipse (which is nevertheless wildly popular) deserves some comment, particularly as the top tool, IBM Rational Suite, is built on Eclipse. I spoke to Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich while researching this Register piece recently. One of the points we discussed was the tension (if there is one, which he disputes) between tools vendors sharing resources to build the best possible platform, and holding resources back to retain commercial differentiation. I’ll write this up in more detail shortly; but it shows why certain areas in Eclipse may not receive the attention they deserve – localization was a specific example.

Another problem with Eclipse is that it is all a bit messy, confusing and hard to manage, particularly in a team where you want every member to have an identical setup. It is still worth it though, for the riches it provides for free.

.net, microsoft, open source, silverlight, software development, web authoring

First baby steps for Moonlight 2.0: Silverlight for Linux

Miguel de Icaza has announced the first preview release of Moonlight 2.0. This is the one that counts, in that it brings the .NET runtime to Silverlight applets running on Linux:

This is the ECMA VM running inside the browser and powering C# and any other CIL-compatible languages like Ruby, Python, Boo and others. You can use Moonlight/Silverlight as a GUI (this is what most folks do) or you can use it as the engine to power your Python/Ruby scripting in the browser.

The download page has plenty of health warnings:

Keep in mind this preview release is not feature complete. Most importantly not all security features are present or fully enabled in this release. Even existing security features have, at this stage, received only minimal testing and no security audit of the source code (mono or moonlight) has yet been done.

Undeterred, I installed it into FireFox 3.0, running on Ubuntu Linux. The download is under 9 MB. My first effort was unsuccessful; the plug-in appeared to load OK, but no Silverlight apps displayed. My second attempt in a VM worked. Naturally I went along to my Silverlight database example which as it happens runs on Mono. Here it is:

This is what it should look like (Silverlight on Windows):

Well, it is only an alpha preview, and it shows. On the plus side, the data is displayed, the search works, and the buttons operate. It is a considerable achievement. But don’t plan to move your users onto Moonlight applications just yet.

adobe, flash, internet, open source, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Flex Builder for Linux on hold: another sign of financial stress at Adobe?

On 21st April Adobe’s Ben Forta told a user group that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is on hold, citing lack of requisition, which is corp-speak for lack of demand.

Note that the Flex SDK does run on Linux. It is just the official IDE that is in question.

Linux is a free operating system, and this could be evidence that users of a free OS are less likely to purchase software than users of a paid-for OS. Or it could simply reflect poor market share for Linux outside servers. Even if it has just hit 1%, as hitslink reports, it is still barely more than 10% of the Mac share and a little over 1% of the Windows share. Some of those Linux machines will also be netbooks – secondary systems for users with a Windows or Mac for serious work such as design and development.

Nevertheless, I suspect there is more to it than that. I suspect Adobe would like to support Linux, because it wants to portray Flex as an open platform – the SDK is open source, though managed by Adobe, but the runtime engine is closed-source and proprietary. This may be another sign of Adobe’s financial stress. The company reported reduced quarter-on-quarter revenue for the the 3 months ending February 2009, and has been cutting staff numbers.

The backdrop to this, in contrast, is that Adobe is having great success with its Flash platform. There is no sign of Microsoft’s Silverlight denting the popularity of Flash on web sites, either for applets or media streaming.

The recession then? Partly; but this is also about Adobe’s business model. Adobe does not break out its figures in detail as far as I know: the last financial statement merely shows that its revenue is nearly 95% from product sales, the rest being services and support. Still, I’d guess that the largest component of its product sales must be Creative Suite. In other words, its business model is based on selling tools and giving away runtimes. When 47 million people watch Susan Boyle on YouTube, Adobe doesn’t make a penny, even though they are almost all using Flash to do so.

The tools market is a difficult one for various reasons, including competition from free products and the fact that the number of people needing development or design tools is always much smaller than the number needing runtimes. In a recession, deferring a tools upgrade is a obvious way for businesses to save money. Remaining primarily a tools company is a limit to Adobe’s growth and ultimately its profitability.

This is of concern to all Flash platform users. Adobe has proved to date a good steward of the technology. Some of us would like the balance of proprietary vs open tilted further towards open, but I doubt many would welcome a takeover or merger such as we have seen with Sun and Oracle (and there are a few parallels there).

There would also be many cries of “foul” if Adobe sought to further monetize Flash by starting to sell, say, a premium version of the Flash runtime.

Adobe is still a profitable company, and maybe when the economy recovers all this stress will be forgotten. Still, I’d guess that long-term Adobe will want to shift away from its dependency on sales of tools; and how and what it does to achieve that will have a big influence on the future of its RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform.

microsoft, open source, xml

OpenDocument comes to Microsoft Word and Excel

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After the intense interest in OOXML vs ODF during last year’s ISO document standardisation wars, I’m surprised that the inclusion of OpenDocument support in the newly-released Office 2007 SP2 has attracted so little attention. Well, not really surprised. The general public doesn’t care much about document formats as such, just that the documents they send and receive open OK. The anti-OOXML fervour was about exploiting a chink in the armour of Microsoft’s de facto near-monopoly in Office suites.

Well, Microsoft has ticked the box now. I haven’t done exhaustive tests; but I did some sanity checks. I opened a .docx (OOXML) in Word, saved it as OpenDocument Text; opened in OpenOffice.org, saved it out to a new .odt document, opened that in Word, saved it out as docx. And you know what? It looks the same. Even the styles are still there. What’s more the conversion was fast and convenient, just a Save As. All in all, a contrast with the wretched experience I had with the earlier Microsoft-sponsored converter.

Next, I tried a small stress-test; a .doc bidding card for Contract Bridge that has some tricky tables. This document crashed WordPerfect’s .odt converter. Word could happily save it as .odt and reopen. Opening the exported .odt in OpenOffice showed some minor differences – part of the table went slightly out of alignment, as the illustration shows (Word is on the left, OpenOffice 3.0 on the right), but nothing drastic.

Is this the end of the format wars? Not quite; there is still a long list of features not supported by the conversion, and if you want an easy life it still pays to stay with one vendor’s Office suite. My impression though is that Microsoft has done a decent job, and that for everyday documents the conversion will work as expected.

For the OpenDocument crowd, getting the format incorporated into Microsoft Office is a victory of sorts, but not the real goal, which is to establish it as the universal document format. Microsoft is betting that its inclusion will help it sell Office, but that customers will still mostly use .doc or .docx (and the Excel equivalents). If enough institutions mandate OpenDocument, that bet could yet fail, but right now that looks unlikely.

Update

Ivan Zlatev reports on a less successful import here.

Update 2

While word processing import and export is reasonable in some circumstances, there is a deal-breaking problem with spreadsheet import and export: all formulae are either ignored or broken. That is, you can save from Excel to .ods, open in OpenOffice.org Calc, and get cells like msoxl:=SUM(C6:C8) (in plain text). You can save from OpenOffice.org Calc, open in Excel, and find formulae converted to plain text. If you save and open sheets from Excel, but in .ods format, it works; the clue why is in the OpenOffice.org rendering. It appears Microsoft has stuck by the letter of the standard, which does not specify how formulae work, but broken any kind of meaningful interoperability.