Jaani.net

May 7, 2006

Linux marches on Microsoft in NSW

IBM and Novell's inking of contracts to formally become members of the NSW government's Linux and open source panel should finally start delivering some real competition in state procurement.

Posted by Jaani at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 6, 2005

The GPL Impedes Linux More Than It Helps?

Anonymous Coward writes "Linux ought to be even more successful than it is. On ZDNet, Paul Murphy ponders the reasons why. For one thing: The GPL impedes Linux more than it helps. Licensing issues, coupled with patent and copyright FUD, have caused developers and VCs to think twice before committing to Linux. Murphy also suspects that desktop Linux is stuck on stupid." From the post: "Basically, legal issues, or the threat of legal issues, caused some key applications developers to back off Linux while the general negativism of Linux marketing caused many of the individuals whose innovations should have been driving Linux adoption to hang fire until MacOS X and Solaris for x86 under the CDDL came along."

Posted by Jaani at 9:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Thirteen nations push for open standards

The New York Times has a piece about a report presented to the World Bank in which officials from 13 countries urge other nations to embrace open IT standards because they can provide "a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation." The initiative was spearheaded by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Among the 13 nations currently involved are Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Jordan and Thailand, and others. According to the story, the report states that governments should mandate technology choice, not software development models, and it points out that open technology...

Posted by Jaani at 8:48 PM | Comments (0)

September 2, 2005

Massachusetts Proposes Open Format

Massachusetts has proposed requiring that all state documents and presentations be output in Open Document format, a move that could lead state employees to largely abandon Microsoft Office.

Posted by Jaani at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2005

Insurance Policy to Cover IP Infringement in Open Source

Lloyd's of London is close to offering independent insurance protection worldwide against potential IP litigation involving Linux and open source software. The financial services giant has agreed to take on the risk associated with open source, and is finalising arrangements to work through Open Source Risk Management ('OSRM') who will become Lloyd's sole US representative.

Posted by Jaani at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2005

New Open Source Licence in the Works

Lawrence Rosen, author of the Open Software License ('OSL'), has announced on the OSI's licence-discuss list a draft of version 3 of the OSL (pdf). Rosen explains that many of the changes are in response to report by the European Commission on open source software licensing.

While the OSL is used by fewer than 1 per cent of the projects at Source Forge, it [has attracted] the attention of corporations considering releasing code under an open source licence ... A new and improved OSL will only continue to attract the attention of software licensors.

Posted by Jaani at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

Scotland Yard Ditches Open Source Software in Favour of Microsoft Office

‘The Central Scotland Police is removing Sun Microsystems Inc’s StarOffice productivity software from about 400 PCs and switching to Microsoft Corp’s Office System, citing lower maintenance costs and the need to interoperate more smoothly with other departments running Windows.

‘It’s not really based on any ideological argument about open-source software, it’s based on pure business needs,’ David Stirling, head of IT for Central Scotland Police, said of the decision to switch.

In the past, when the agency deployed a new police application on StarOffice and Linux, the application had to be customized to work with the open-source software, Stirling said. It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said.

It is the latest anecdote in a wider tussle for business between Microsoft and open-source software in Europe. Several organizations, particularly public bodies, have been adopting or experimenting with Linux and other open-source products, but the move by the Scottish police shows the migrations are not all one-way.’

Source: James Niccolai, IDG News Service.

Posted by Jaani at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2004

Get The 'Facts' On Linux

In a clear admission that Linux poses a significant threat to Microsoft's corporate supremacy, a new anti-Linux campaign (which, confusingly, is titled "Get the Facts on Windows and Linux�) will do its best to extol the virtues of Microsoft software at the expense of the many free alternatives.

The three major issues on which the campaign focuses are HR costs, operation costs, and speed of development:

The claims bear that usual pungency of over-zealous marketing and colourful dummy graphs. Most impressive is the addition of actual percentage figures:

Though I'm unsure from where exactly those statistics derive, they may very well be true in some cases (though not for the reason Microsoft would imply). Put simply, Windows is often cheaper than an alternative system purely because it's already implemented. Staff are comfortable with the user interface, (competent) network administrators have ironed out the bugs and come to grips with relevant idiosyncrasies, and the network infrastructure is already there.

However, if the costs of establishing a system architecture tabula rasa were examined, then not even the costs of retraining and transition could cancel out the enormous savings in licensing fees that switching to open source software would yield.

At any rate, the very characteristic of open source software that poses the greatest threat to Microsoft (namely, its distributed and contributory nature) cripples its ability to make any kind of effective response. Lacking the resources and centralised command structure of their corporate brethren, groups like the fud and Linux zealot propaganda miss the point somewhat. Choosing an operating system isn't always about cost; productivity is also an important factor, and to this end, both Windows and *nix have a part to play.

Posted by Jaani at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2003

Mapping the Internet

Opte.org has recently completed an interesting project to map the TCP address layer of the internet. Some 4 294 967 296 (2³² for the non-savants) addresses exist, and the project has used some clever reduction techniques (and approximations) to reduce the relevant nodes by 8 orders of magnitude, allowing them to render the image in a mere 2 hours (as compared with several months using previous techniques)! The latest image is dated 23 November, and is available in all its pseudo-artistic glory here (warning: 2.8MB PNG file).

One interesting application of this technology, as noted by the project founder, is to model the effect of disasters (both natural and political) in terms of information flow. As nodes (addresses) become inactive, the shape of the addressable namespace changes to reflect the current distribution of information. So, for example, modelling changes in the shape of Middle Eastern IP addresses before and after the United States war in Iraq may allow a more accurate assessment of sociopolitical changes.

Unfortunately, this premise is flawed, because it ignores the fact that many sites are hosted external to the country in which they are maintained (this site is hosted in Virginia, United States, for example). Indeed, Iraq's most famous blogger is, according to an IP search, hosted in North Carolina, United States. Nonetheless, the maps are rather cool.

Posted by Jaani at 2:14 PM | Comments (0)