Should open source hate Apple?, Aug 31, 2009

It’s true that Apple is just as proprietary a company as Microsoft. Some might say more so.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.

Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software. About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.

If you need a break from Windows land, then linux-for-education.org provides a wealth of learning tools, both for the open source community and educators in general.

Microsoft is releasing three Microsoft-developed Linux drivers to the Linux community for possible inclusion in the Linux source tree.

Microsoft’s announcement that it will invoke its community promise regarding C# and the Common Language Infrastructure may be causing a split between the Free Software Foundation and Ubuntu.

IBM has combined its “church” and “state” Linux functions under Bob Sutor, whose title now reads vice president of open source and Linux.

You don’t buy an operating system. You buy a gadget that runs a program. The gadget and its software are one unit. This is Invisible Linux.

Can Intel compete with its long-time partner Microsoft in the operating system game?

Despite a bevy of questions—looming competition from Oracle, takeover rumors and a weak economy—Red Hat appears to be humming along, according to Jeffries analyst Katherine Egbert. But in the long run, Red Hat will have to be subsumed into a large company—most likely IBM.

This is a key moment for open source. In some ways it is going from strength to strength. But it remains vulnerable to counter-attack from the copyright industries.

Once an open source product is released into the market, users don’t really care what license it uses.

So much for a big blue Sun. Instead, the company is being gobbled up Oracle for about $7.4 billion. Does this mean that Oracle will become “the biggest contributor to open source,” or a gaping hole in the FOSS ecosystem?

Microsoft knew this day was coming. This was the reason it desperately wanted — no, needed — to take down Netscape in 1996. Netscape wasn’t just trying to build a program for reading text and photos across a network of connected computers. Netscape was trying to build a new platform - the ultimate platform - to run software and share information instantly and on a global scale. And no one understood that better than Bill Gates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported over the last couple of days that a Boston College computer science student has been targeted by BC police largely on the basis of using Linux. Boston College police seized several items, citing his use of Linux as probable cause supporting their actions.

There is no doubt why Microsoft won this round of the Netbook wars. There are, at Fry’s, a number of Netbooks on offer. None ran Linux. All ran Windows. The salesman was a Linux enthusiast, however, and was able to explain just why you can’t get Ubuntu there.

With the stock market shedding half of its value between July 2007 and January 2009, the market price of a lot of public technology companies has essentially been put on a “50% off sale.” This creates an atmosphere that is ripe for consolidation. As soon as the companies with the cash have confidence that the economy is at an inflection point, they will start spending money to position themselves for the turnaround.

The President’s announcement of a coordinated system of Electronic Medical Records for both soldiers and veterans could be a big win for open source. The military and VA records will transfer under NHIN-CONNECT.

The main point of the GPL license is it is impossible to use it to create proprietary software. It’s deliberately designed that way by a man who views proprietary software as immoral. The GPL is designed to ensure all derivative works remain Free Software.

The Linux laptop business represents a Chinese industry trying to serve a Western market and getting lost in the translation.