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Apple is targeting students and more people than ever want a
Mac. Is that the future to its success? You better believe it!

Open Season Episode 10: The MySQL acquisition forces us off our respective couches.

I wish someone would give me $1 billion after a five week courtship.

I have no problem with commercial entities using open source without paying for it, but they should participate in the relevant communities from which they gather code. This means giving back code.

When you work your [butt] off to build something special such as OpenNMS, it’s hard to watch someone come and steal it and no one really give a damn. Even though when we add latency measurement support, a release later Cittio adds latency measurement support (Watchtower 2.4). We add SNMPv3 support, Cittio adds SNMPv3 support (version 3.1). Heck, we can only collect on one community string per IP, and so can Cittio. The list goes on.

It reminds us of a few things:

There are a lot of allegations flying around relative to Cittio’s (allegedly improper) use of the OpenNMS code without contributing code back, in apparent violation of the GPL. The best post on the subject is this one, in my opinion.

We don’t actually know how Cittio is using OpenNMS, in part because Cittio is keeping the whole thing under wraps and has been very sneaky about it.
Regardless of #1, Cittio would have to be clever indeed to have found a way to bury GPL code in their proprietary product without giving a single line of code back to the OpenNMS project.
No matter #2, Cittio’s stripmining of the OpenNMS community is in poor form.
Irrespective of #3, Cittio apparently doesn’t let its customers know that it is shipping them GPL code. I bet those customers would like to know this and, as a lawyer, I’d strongly suggest that Cittio has a duty to inform its customers of this fact.

Ultimately, as Tarus Balog (founder of OpenNMS) notes, open source is a matter of trust. Cittio has demonstrated that it knows little about open source and deserves precious little trust.

Cittio is a parasite. Tarus wrote to me:

Do I think Cittio is stealing from the OpenNMS community? It’s still hard to determine if they are actually in non-compliance with the GPL. They may well have found a way to abide by the GPL’s letter. As for the spirit of the GPL, they have clearly trashed it.

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Fontana, however, is no stranger to open source:

Think that will come in handy at Red Hat? Yep. Me, too.

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Fontana most recently served as Counsel for the Software Freedom Law Center, where he partnered with Eben Moglen to advise the Free Software Foundation on the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. In this role, Fontana drafted GPLv3 license provisions, analyzed and advised clients on competing proposals, conducted the public GPLv3 discussion process, led GPLv3 discussion committees and researched matters of U.S. and international copyright and patent law.

Given the importance of licensing to open source, it should come as no surprise that Red Hat just announced the addition of two heavy-hitters to its legal team. Richard Fontana and Robert Tiller. I don’t know Robert Tiller but he brings significant technology litigation experience.

Reading through this Wall Street Journal article, I’m increasingly worried about Zimbra. The article traces Microsoft’s efforts to buy Yahoo!’s search business while leaving the rest of its business(es) to an AOL Time Warner or News Corp. This might be good for Microsoft, and it might be good for Yahoo!, but where would it leave Zimbra?

As a Zimbra customer, I want it to stick around. I love the Zimbra experience, even despite some glitches. With a Yahoo! bifurcation into search/everything else, however, I’m worried about what will happen to Zimbra.

Zimbra doesn’t fit any of these companies. Arguably, it could fit well inside Microsoft (if Microsoft wanted a serious upgrade to its web-based Outlook, something extensible that could attract a development community, contrary to Paula’s well-reasoned opinion), and still has a future within Yahoo!. But these others?

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Microsoft is smart enough to recognize great technology: I can’t see it dumping Zimbra. But if a News Corp. were to acquire the Zimbra assets, what would it possibly do with them? The best we could hope for would be an asset sale that would see Zimbra move to, say, Google, Apple, or Adobe.

It’s one thing to listen to vendors talk about the rise and importance of open source. It’s quite another – and much more interesting – to hear customers talking about it.

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That comes through loud and clear in this podcast in which Jon talks about how to introduce open source into an organization, where it fits, how to integrate it with proprietary software (and proprietary mindsets), and other things. Well worth a listen for anyone who wants to see where open source is going next.

Numonyx will play in both major portions of the flash memory market. Its primary business, roughly 90 percent, consists of NOR flash memory, so named for the logic gates used to create the chip. NOR memory has traditionally been used as the primary storage in mobile phones, but that’s changing as NAND memory becomes faster.

And the real key to the deal, according to Harrison, is the work that Intel and STMicro have already done on a new type of flash memory called phase-change memory. This technology is still very much in the experimental stage, but phase-change memory effectively doubles the capacity of NAND memory and is almost as fast as RAM, the memory used in PCs. Intel and STMicro showed off phase-change memory prototypes earlier this year.

From Intel’s standpoint, the Numonyx deal allows it to shed its NOR flash assets, although the company’s 45.1 percent stake in Numonyx means it will have to record a portion of Numonyx’s profits or losses on its earnings statements. Intel and Micron Technologies have formed a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies to manufacture NAND flash memory, which Intel wants to use in an increasing number of flash-memory hard drives for PCs and mobile Internet devices.

The offspring of Intel and STMicroelectronics, Numonyx, is ready to open its doors amid a volatile market for its flash-memory chips.

First announced last year, Numonyx is arriving a little later than expected. The credit crunch that’s dragged down the stock market in recent months forced Intel and STMicro to alter the financing for the new company, but everything will be set to go as of Monday.

The problem is that at the moment, the flash memory market is in turmoil. Prices are plummeting as flash buyers like Apple pull back their purchases in the face of a slowing economy. Intel is going to miss its earnings targets for the first quarter because the price of flash fell twice as fast as it had planned going into the quarter.

Numonyx is the combination of Intel’s NOR flash memory business and STMicro’s NAND business, which will make it the largest provider of NOR flash memory in the world and the largest flash supplier to the mobile phone market, said Brian Harrison, the former head of Intel’s flash memory group and the new CEO of Numonyx. “We have a very broad product line that’s not typical of a start-up company by any means,” he said.

Numonyx CEO Brian Harrison

(Credit:
Intel)

It’s really the NAND market, however, that’s facing the severe price crunch, Harrison said. Since Numonyx’s primary business involves NOR flash memory, which hasn’t seen the same dramatic plunge in pricing, the company is in a better position to endure the price drops.

NAND is used in memory cards, MP3 players like the
iPod, and more and more in mobile phones–the high-growth areas. As a result, Harrison expects Numonyx’s NAND business to grow much faster over the coming year, although at only 10 percent of the total, there’s a lot of work to be done.

The Obesity of Hope.

Wall-E, the hero of Pixar’s latest huge success, has waddled into an unexpected spat.

(Credit:
Zac-Attack)

This vision of the future is, naturally, a vast stretch.

Surely that’s what Pixar is getting at.

The Wall-E debate seems to have been begun by Ms. Rachel Richardson.

As it stands, isn’t it something of a stereotype confirmation to criticize a movie you haven’t bothered to actually see? Isn’t this the very logic of the lazy she is warning us against?

Ms. Marilyn Wann, another fat-tivist, who has her own site, Fat!so?, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph’s site as having told London’s Sunday Telegraph:

Ms.Richardson continued to express her concerns in a post yesterday.

“WALL-E specifically singles out and targets obese people as the primary cause of mankind’s demise,” she wrote.

This use of words seemed a little careless as NAAFA, for example, believes supposedly PC words such as ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’ are not merely sad attempts at largesse. They are moral judgments, created by thin people to suppress their more sizable brethren, just as certain world leaders of the past attempted to champion only the perfect eugenic specimens.

There he is with his tiny little neck and sweet little binocular eyes. And his rather disproportionately large belly.

About fat.

She does, however, reference those who accuse Pixar of ‘lazy logic’ by equating environmental collapse with overconsumption.

However, the National Association To Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) is largely unamused.

In any case, fat-tivist critics are surely missing the deep-seated, positive message of Wall-E’s remarkable story.

On her blog, ‘The F-Word,’ she accused Pixar of ‘fat-bashing.’

Ms. Richardson, for example, hasn’t seen the movie.

The thing is, he puts that belly to such good use. He takes the waste that overconsumers have left behind and makes pretty little buildings out of it.

Anyway, in her next post worrying about Wall-E’s poisonous effects, Ms. Richardson wrote:

“The real truth is that people just don’t care that others are being discriminated against, as long as it’s not directed their way. They don’t – or won’t – see how such stereotypes harm both fat and thin people, and contribute to an environment where a recent study of teen girls reveals they’d rather be blinded or lose a limb instead of becoming fat.”

At its conference in LA, which ends today, the organization enjoyed entertainment from the Fatimas, declared its members’ determination to make the word ‘fat’ their own and much private debate apparently whirled around the deleterious influence of Wall-E.

I’d be a little more interested if she and other fat-tivists wrote about how they felt having actually seen the movie. Would they feel better about it? Or even worse? Would they order the large popcorn? (Yes, I am ashamed of that last question. I am weak. I am in the stranglehold of stereotypes. I watch too much Sarah Silverman. Please save me.)

She voiced her concerns about Wall-E’s anti-fat depictions even before the movie came out.

If you have not yet seen the movie, I won’t spoil the story.

Here’s the truly amazing thing, though.

“Pixar should be out of business for portraying this level of prejudicial bigotry-mongering. These are 19th-century hatreds repackaged in modern animation. It’s amazing.”

Last time out, the restaurant I wanted was “out of stock,” but this morning I was able to nab a $25 coupon for just two bucks. In these heinous economic times, that’s too good to pass up.

There are a few conditions, of course, usually in the form of a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it’s not as if you have to order a case of wine or anything. And you can print the coupon right on your own printer: It’s immediately ready for use.

(Credit:
Restaurant.com)

Remember the Restaurant.com deal from a couple weeks ago? Well, it’s back! From now until Halloween (aka October 31), you can get a $25 gift certificate for a restaurant in your area for just $2. Just enter coupon code TREATS when you get to the shopping cart.

As one reader pointed out previously, do make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes. Bon appetit!

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

With all the talk about interoperability rumbling around, I thought a quick sanity check would be in order. Vendors are fond of talking about interoperability, but myopia-challenged as we are, we tend to forget that most software is not developed by vendors. It’s developed by so-called “customers.”

Bravo to Microsoft for making much of its interoperability with Novell! Unfortunately, this hardly resolves even a rounding error’s worth of the industry’s need to interoperate with enterprise-developed software.

But I’ve been surprised by the diversity of companies who do precisely this. I’ve been less surprised to see IT people from all sizes of companies actively getting involved with their support issues because they can with open source. They may call with a support issue but it’s no longer the passive “I broke, you fix” (or, really, “You broke, you fix when it’s convenient for you”) relationship that proprietary software demands. Instead, they’re investigating their issues before calling so that the support process is easier.

Open source lends itself to true interoperability much better than proprietary software does, if for no other reason than the reality that most software does not involve a vendor. It involves a customer solving its own itch. Open source fits nicely into this, the way software is actually developed and used in the real world.

I was meeting with an Alfresco customer recently in London. The customer is a top-10 financial services company with a small army of developers. In this, it is atypical of many enterprises, but I’ve heard similar stories from an increasing number of enterprises that view IT as a strategic differentiator.

For the moment, “You make believe that you are still in charge,” as Thom Yorke sings in “The Clock.” But eventually the charade will end. Customers are in control. Or should be. That’s how grown-up industries act.

No, not everyone wants to modify source code. Nor do they need to do so. This is a benefit that some exercise directly, while others benefit as surrogates.

The customer was having some issues getting single sign-on to work with Alfresco. My sales engineer logically asked, “What directory are you authenticating against? Active Directory? eDirectory?” The answer was, “None of the above. We developed our own authentication system.”

Enter open source. Because this Alfresco customer has absolute rights to view and modify our source code, it is actively working with us to integrate its authentication system with the Alfresco content collaboration/management system. It’s a great partnership. Where it is using community-developed open-source software (Apache, Linux, etc.), it is simply making the changes on its own with the assistance of members of that community.

Unfortunately for proprietary vendors, open source is setting the agenda here, as can be evidenced by Microsoft slowly ceding control (Shared Source Initiative, anyone?) of its code back to the customers who really should own it. They pay for it, after all.

Typed to the tune of Thom Yorke’s “Atoms for Peace.” Blame him.

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For that, open source is a critical requirement. Open source, unencumbered by silly patents, closed APIs, and such. Open source because, quite frankly, the enterprise is often not going to want to be bothered by or with a vendor during the integration process. A real-life case study may help to convince those incapable of seeing past their proprietary noses.