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For many years the Linux-Kongress has been the most important European
event for Linux developers. It offers a unique opportunity for Linux
developers and enthusiasts from all over the world to meet and talk, to
present their work and keep building the future of Linux and Open Source.
The organizers encourage everybody from the Linux community to submit
papers to this conference. The Call for Papers with all details is now
available on the web site at http://www.linux-kongress.org/2002/cfp.html.”
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I don’t think we’ve met, but you and I are partners. I’m one of the authors of the “Lindows” system.”
First, I’d like to thank you for what Lindows.com has done to support Free Software: helping with the Debian and WINE conferences, contributing to the KDE League, and code contributions to WINE and through MP3.com.
I’m delighted to see you investing in a Linux-based desktop, and wish you all possible success in promoting it. Certainly you are welcome to sell copies of my software, and you don’t have to pay me for the privilege. Modify it, use it for any purpose, all of that’s fine.
But Michael, please remember that we are partners. For all that you’ve done for the Free Software community, we’ve done at least as much for you. And our partnership has rules that we are both honor-bound to follow. In the case of my work on Lindows, those rules are the terms of the GPL. You accepted those terms, and became my partner, when you chose to incorporate my software into your product and distribute it to others.
There is a pragmatic reason that I ask you to fulfill your source-code obligation any time you distribute a copy of my work from one legal entity to another: Sadly, some companies never make it to release 1.0. In that case, the pre-release versions provide the only opportunity for a company to fulfill its source-code obligation. Another reason is that if we’re lax in enforcing our terms with you, other companies will think they can violate those terms with impunity.
In addition to pragmatic reasons, there’s principle. In entering into the GPL relationship, partners agree not to unilaterally modify their partnership, for example, by overlaying the terms of a non-disclosure agreement upon the license. Partners agree not to delay their source-code obligation. You can be sure that I’ll honor those terms when I distribute your code. If you want to behave differently, please negotiate a new contract with me.
The terms of our partnership make it difficult for you to keep your system secret from your competitors before its release, and they obligate you to distribute the source for intermediate versions. Although this may cause you difficulty, it’s necessary in order to operate a partnership that’s fair to all parties. Some of those other parties are your competitors. We don’t want to see them hold back changes from you, and we don’t want to see anyone do needless, redundant work.
You seem surprised that some people in the community aren’t friendly to your company. Too many of us have seen companies attempt, sometimes cynically, to capitalize on our work without ever understanding the source of our success, and without being good partners. One of the reasons your company has come in for criticism is that Lindows.com looks too much like Corel, and even seems to be following Corel’s history. Corel tried to hold back source during its beta test, and tried to overlay an NDA on top of the GPL terms. It later turned out that Corel had KDE changes in development without feeding them back for so long that the public KDE source and the Corel version could not be reconciled. We’d prefer not to see a replay of that.
I was distressed by your treatment of FSF and Bradley Kuhn, reported in NewsForge. Brad is a reasonable person and is advised by a top-notch attorney, Professor Eben Moglen of the Columbia University Law School. As another of your partners, Brad was within his rights to ask to see the source. The comment you made about “eating your young” is inappropriate. In your place, I’d apologize to Brad and make sure that your company is fulfilling its entire obligation on a timely basis.
You also commented about the lack of successful Linux companies. This is not due to the community treatment of Linux businesses, but the fact that Open Source is not a business and should not be treated as one. It’s successful when operated as a cost-center, in businesses that make their money some other way. The most successful ones use the software they develop for some business purpose: For example, Apache developers use the software to implement Web sites for their businesses, IBM and HP make money by selling hardware that runs with Linux, not by selling Linux.
Eric Raymond and others theorized that support would be a good way to fund Open Source, but the support model has under-performed so far, because the early adopters are too self-supporting. Sales of proprietary software to support the Open Source development are also under-performing, as Linux customers, even within the Fortune 500, have become wary of dependence on non-Open Source. Thus, no Linux distribution has been more than marginally profitable so far. My surmise is that over the long term, a non-profit like Debian supported by hardware manufacturers and other businesses will work best. But I’d be delighted to see you prove me wrong.
Michael, please email bruce@perens.com if there’s anything I can help you with.
Thanks,
Bruce Perens
“Commentary” articles are contributed by Linux.com and NewsForge.com readers. The opinions they contain are strictly those held by their authors, and may not be the same as those held by OSDN management. We welcome “Commentary” contributions from anyone who deals with Linux and Open Source at any level, whether as a corporate officer; as a programmer or sysadmin; or as a home/office desktop user. If you would like to write one, please email editors@newsforge.com with “Commentary” in the subject line.
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The annual National Association of Broadcasters’ show in Las Vegas is one of the
broadcasting industry’s premier showcases for technology. From studio equipment to online channel guides, NAB brings together all aspects of the broadcasting industry. During the convention this past week, Tux was there.
Linux is a visible player in the broadcasting industry’s
efforts to transition from analog technologies to digital. From set-top box software to servers to content creation, Open Source software is providing tools for the new generation of broadcasting technology.
Nowhere is Linux more dominant in this industry than in the digital set-top box (STB). Well over 80% of the STBs at the show were running some variant of Linux. Companies like Kreatel, Tivella, EnReach and Tuxia promoted STB software based on Linux and other Open Source components such as Mozilla. Advanced video-on-demand, broadband gaming and Web browsing were among the crowd-catching demos
exhibited during the course of the show.
When asked why his company chose Linux, Chad Gibbons, senior v.p. and
general manager of Tuxia Americas, said: “It’s about standards. With Linux, HTML 4, Java, and MHP at its core, the TASTE iTV platform from Tuxia enables set-top OEMs, operators and broadband service providers to benefit from the flexibility and
economics of open-standards software while addressing the growing
demands for new applications and interactive content from consumers.”
It was no surprise, either, to see Linux take its place amongst SGI and Sun as a server platform for media services. Kasenna’s video streaming server is available for Linux, as is Orca Interactive’s media content management server. Demos from Tivella and The Paddle Krumland Group relied upon the free source Darwin Streaming Server from Apple to stream MPEG-2 content from Linux servers to Linux STBs.
At Hewlett-Packard’s booth, hundreds of foam Tux penguins were passed out to promote the company’s server and workstation Linux products, and IBM displayed Linux and Gnome on its systems.
The greatest surprise came in the area of content creation and special effects technologies. From high-powered-number crunching clusters used for generating special effects to desktop animation and 3D imaging programs, Linux was mentioned over and over as a behind-the-scenes player.
Alias|Wavefront, a long-standing force in high-end digital content creation, demonstrated its cutting-edge Maya 3D applications (known for the spectacular effects in Star Wars, Episode I) on HP workstations powered by Red Hat Linux.
DreamWorks SKG demonstrated its in-house animation and rendering tools on the same HP workstations, and discussed its 1,000 processor Linux rendering farm. A representative of DreamWorks was quick to state: “We are not Linux zealots. We just needed a platform that was reliable, ran on commodity hardware, and provided good desktop performance.”
He added that DreamWorks had evaluated SGI, Mac OSX (which was not complete at the time) and Windows, but that it became clear that Linux was the solution for the movie studio.
On the “strictly Linux” side, Linux Media Arts and Linux Media Labs co-hosted a booth demonstrating Linux-based digital video editing and production. Linux Media Arts unveiled its forthcoming Cinterra media production systems fully loaded with dual processors (AMD or Intel), two gigs of DDR, up to 200 gigs of hard drive space, and custom digital encoding hardware and software. Linux Media Labs showcased its more modest video CD authoring technologies.
Kreatel: http://www.kreatel.com
Tivella: http://www.tivella.com
EnReach: http://www.enreach.com
Tuxia: http://www.tuxia.com
Paddle Krumland: http://www.paddlekrumland.com
SGI: http://www.sgi.com
Sun: http://www.sun.com
Kasenna: http://www.kasenna.com
Orca Interactive: http://www.orcainteractive.com
Apple: http://www.apple.com
HP: http://www.hp.com
IBM: http://www.ibm.com
DreamWorks: http://www.dreamworks.com
Red Hat: http://www.redhat.com
Linux Media Arts: http://www.linuxmediaarts.com
Linux Media Labs: http://www.linuxmedialabs.com
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Moshe Bar
openMosix began as the last verifiable GPL version of MOSIX. All openMosix extensions are under the full
GPLv2 license, the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2. The openMosix Copyright is held by Moshe
Bar.
openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering.
openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive.
Once you have installed openMosix, the nodes in the cluster start
talking to one another and the cluster adapts itself to the workload.
There is no need to program applications specifically for openMosix. Since all openMosix extensions are inside
the kernel, every application automatically and transparently benefits from the
distributed computing concept of openMosix.
The cluster behaves much as does a SMP, but this solution scales to well
over a thousand nodes which can themselves be SMPs.
OpenSource is more than just free access to
software source code. The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source
code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people
adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used
to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
the Open Source
Initiative
Moshe Bar is an Operating Systems researcher, writer of Byte Magazine
column Serving With Linux, author of numerous Linux books, and frequent
contributor to the Linux tree. Moshe
lectures for universities, corporations, and international organizations. He holds a Bachelor degree in mathematics,
a M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science.
Moshe runs moshebar.com with a mailing list of over 20,000 members, is
Chief Technical Officer of Qlusters, Inc.,
and is the Project Manager for openMosix.
Moshe was born in Israel, grew up in a kibbutz, and now lives in Tel
Aviv.
The development team of volunteers is truly international. The early team members reside in Chile,
Spain, Italy, Norway, Germany, Israel, France and the United
States. Plus, other mailing list
queries have come from Canada, Pakistan, Oman, Estonia, Finland, India, South
Africa, Switzerland, Tonga, and Shanghai China. Projects using openMosix already include astrophysics, medical
research, and university laboratories.
The openMosix project is hosted on SourceForge.net which provides
collaborative development web tools for the project. Downloads, documentation, and additional information are
available from www.openmosix.org.
MOSIX is a very highly regarded, high performance, low cost,
flexible, and scaleable Cluster Computing System for Linux. MOSIX was a GPL OpenSource project until
late 2001. MOSIX, operational since
1983, integrates independent computers into a cluster, providing the user with
what appears to be a single-machine Linux environment. Both the MOSIX Copyright and the MOSIX
Trademark are owned by Professor Amnon Barak.
Amnon Barak is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the
Distributed Computing Laboratory in the Institute of Computer Science at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem on sabbatical leave for one year.
openMosix is Copyright © 2002 by Moshe Bar.
Linux is Copyright © 2002 by Linus Torvalds.
Mosix is Copyright © 2002 by Amnon Barak.
openMosix is licensed under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) Version 2, June 1991 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
All logos and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2002 by Moshe Bar”
Life with Lineo has been a roller coaster ride lately. The embedded Linux company fortune’s have been up, with the release of the Lineo-powered Embedix PlusSharp Zaurus PDA, and Lineo has been down
with recent layoffs and a cash crunch. Today, with a complete recapitalization, Lineo
could be back on an even ride.
But that new funding, the amount of which was not officially disclosed, comes with a price. After the reorganization, The Canopy Group will have a controlling interest in the company. Matt Harris, CEO and president, will still be in charge of the company from day to day, but he’ll also be meeting with Lineo’s board of directors twice a month.
In return for the funding, Canopy, according to Harris, has “committed funds to carry us through to profitability. This is long-term funding delivered on a going-forward basis.”
Harris claims that profitability, despite rumors to the contrary, isn’t far away. He says, “In the middle of March we had talks with our backers about our overall expense rate. To meet the goal of hitting profitability numbers and to be cash-flow positive by mid-year, we had to
lay people off. It’s a miserable thing to have to do, but it was necessary, or we’d not be able to get additional funding to hit those expense targets.”
Harris adds, “We’re working to take care of former employees.”
Indeed, some of those former employees may be on their way back into Lineo. While Harris expects that Lineo will still end up losing at net of five or fewer people because of the recapitalization, the company is looking to rehire and hire for a few key positions in marketing and senior engineering.
Although cutting costs, Harris observes that Lineo “has a healthy backlog of work” with $5 million dollars of work on current contracts underway. With that alone, he believes Lineo will meet its goal of being profitable by mid-year.
Given this, and a financial track record of what Harris says was a 100% growth over the last two fiscal years, how did Lineo ever end up in so much financial hot water?
Stacey Quandt, Giga Information Group’s Open Source analyst, thinks that the answer is simple: “They acquired too many companies, too quickly.”
Rick Lehrbaum, executive editor of LinuxDevices.com agrees: “Their strategy of swallowing up a lot of little companies and integrating them was very risky. They got to be a big size, but there wasn’t the kind of value-add that you needed to get for their
investments.”
Harris, while agreeing “Lineo got too big, too fast,” doesn’t think that acquiring companies was a problem. He says SnapGear, which makes customized virtual private network devices, has “helped Lineo to generate both software and service revenue.” Indeed, these smaller
Lineo affiliated companies have “provided the dollars to run the company.”
Instead, Harris believes “the bigger problem was that we sized the company, thanks to both acquisition and hiring, based on our predictions of early adoption of embedded Linux by OEMs. We sized for a revenue base that was twice as big as what we got. This resulted in a much greater loss than we expected or wanted.” And, of course, “it was made worse by the economy downturn.”
Looking ahead, Harris thinks that Lineo’s business plan, revamped in November 2001, should see the company through, in addition to besides the cuts and fiscal reorganization. He explains: “Part of our plan is to provide not just embedded Linux, but embedded Linux solutions — software stacks that go from the boot loader to the application for a particular market.” For example, Lineo wrote the Zaurus’ entire stack. Besides PDAs, he also sees opportunity for this kind of work in the next generation of
mobile phones and pagers, with new contracts to be announced soon in all three areas.
Harris also believes that Lineo can find work and deliver a complete operating system, development tools and applications to the residential Internet gateway market and, in 2003, the Digital TV markets. In short, Lineo is going “from being a tools and operating system company to a complete embedded solution company.”
Not that the operating system and tools are being neglected. The Embedix software development kit 2.2, for example, was released last week.
Does all these changes mean that Lineo will make it? Lehrbaum thinks so. “They have a better-than-even chance of pulling through and getting back on track. Like many companies, they had too much capital initially without a real sense of how to use it.
Now, I think they’re whittled down to a reasonable size. The terrible economy has been
hard on even companies doing everything well.”
With Canopy looking over Harris’ shoulder, and profitability expected shortly, we’ll soon know see whether Lineo can get off its business roller-coaster safely.
But a comeback is exactly what the open-source project hopes to pull off in the next few weeks, when the Netscape Communications-backed effort releases the first official version of its Web browser. After four years in development, the pending event has renewed excitement in a project that once was hailed as a possible Microsoft killer–only to tumble into obscurity after lengthy delays.”
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Now that it has tested a Linux system in-house, Lehman plans to replace about half of the lost servers with ones that use this technology.”
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Vendor displays at LinuxFest 2002 will include Bargain Bookland,
BLUG, Jade Microsystems, Lycoris, Northwest Computer Supplies, Peak
Services, Planetary Data Systems, Puget Sound Technology, and 3D
Computers.
Demonstrations will include multimedia, StarOffice, VMware, wireless
networking, remote X, network gaming and more. The presentations
will cover system security, the KDE and Ximian Gnome desktops, Java
programming, and introduction to BSD.
Several of the demonstrations, hands-on tutorials and presentations
introduce Linux, BSD, and open source software to new users.
“Most people still think Linux is just for servers or computer
geeks,” said Mark Ashworth of Planetary Data Systems, who builds
and hosts custom web applications for companies. “I think the
general public would be surprised to see how friendly a Linux
desktop environment can be. I even switched my 82-year-old father
from Windows to Linux.”
Also available at the event will be free software, raffles and
items for sale.
“We have a lot of geek fun,” stated Bill Wright, BLUG
treasurer and librarian. “It’s like a big geek science fair.”
Keynote speakers will be Illiad, author of the User Friendly comic
strip, and Joseph Cheek, CTO of Lycoris. Illiad will be talking
about the source of his characters and events in the comic strip.
Cheek will be presenting and fielding questions about Lycoris’
Desktop/LX, a version of Linux targeted for regular end-users.
For complete LinuxFest 2002 details, visit
the BLUG website.
The Bellingham Technical College is a short distance from Interstate 5,
approximately 90 miles north of Seattle and one hour south of Vancouver,
B.C.
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This is the follow-up to the previously-posted first part.
URL: http://www.monolinux.com/modules/news/article.php? storyid=96.”
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