Microsoft ‘sets record straight’ on open source, Mar 22, 2004

Microsoft wheeled out two top regional executives in Auckland last week to help right some “misperceptions” about the company’s attitude to open source software.

Peter Moore, the company’s Asia-Pacific and greater China public sector general manager, and Chris Sharp, platform strategy director, joined Microsoft New Zealand’s chief spokesman on open source issues, Brett Roberts, at a media briefing. Auckland was the latest stop on a Pacific-wide tour by the two Singapore-based executives.

Roberts prefaced a presentation by Moore by saying he was convinced there was plenty of confusion in the market about Microsoft’s view of open source.

Taiwan’s notebook makers, including Asustek Computer and Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), have started marketing low-cost Linux-based notebooks in the US market, according to sources at the Taiwanese makers.

Taiwanese makers will also promote their value notebooks in China, where the Chinese government is encouraging the adoption of Linux-based PCs, said the sources.

There still is room for Taiwanese makers to promote sales of Linux-based notebooks in the US market due to Linux’s competitive pricing and low-cost operating system (OS) and application software, the sources said. The office-use application software supporting Linux is just around 10% of Microsoft’s Office, they noted.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and several other states next month will launch a software repository designed to let government agencies make more efficient use of open-source software. The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative, a newly formed group of seven states and four municipalities that will contribute and download open-source code and proprietary software designed by and for government agencies.

The repository itself will consist of a MySQL database, Z Object Publishing Environment application server, Apache Web server, OpenLDAP authentication service for storing membership data, and the Debian Linux operating system running on an Intel-based rack-mounted server. The University of Rhode Island will house the system.

The report, which came out earlier this month, warns that as Linux marches into the enterprise, organisations must understand all of the open source operating system’s benefits, risks and costs.

It says as Linux climbs the enterprise ladder it inevitably becomes more commercial and is moving away from being cost- and risk-free. Support fees will increase, middleware will be as expensive as that of Unix, dependency is a risk, databases and clusters will get no favoured discounts and the total cost of acquisition may be a misleading indicator for large enterprise deployments.

The Mozilla Foundation recently released a beta version of the next edition of its open-source browser and e-mail suite, Mozilla 1.7.

Mozilla 1.7 beta, which comes in versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, boasts noticeable performance improvements, according to the Foundation.

Compared with the current stable release--Mozilla 1.6--the preview edition of 1.7 is approximately seven percent faster at startup, eight percent faster at opening windows, and nine percent faster in loading pages.

The Beaverton-based Open Source Development Labs has continued its push into the Asia-Pacific region by added Beijing Software Testing Center, China's largest software testing organization, as a member.

OSDL, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux, said Beijing Software Testing Center plans to focus on Linux testing and development of internationalization features for Linux.

The week's most useful address is arguably ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-9.0 - this is how you can download it to a CD and start SUSE LINUX from there without changing the partioning of your hard disk before using it.

Novell's hope is that allowing people to see the new functionalities and the look-and-feel of SUSE LINUX before installing it will help drive adoption.

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