Google Releases Picaso for Linux

While this might seem like a pretty minor announcement, what makes this announcement newsworthy is the approach that Google took to port it to Linux. The Picasa Linux port was made with Wine and generated over 100 patches to Wine itself. So in other words Wine got extended in order to quickly move Picasa to Linux. This seems to be a back ended way to help Linux run Windows applications withou immediately raising the ire (or attention) of Microsoft. With a 100 patches to WINE, it takes a longish step in enabling Linux users to run Windows applications without the hassle of running the OS our Redmond.

South Korea Antitrust Body rejects Microsoft's objection

Microsoft continues to push those rock up the hill only to have them fall back down. In this case it was an objection that Microsoft allow it's media player to be un bundled or competing players to be embedded in the system. At the same time the South Korean Fair Trade Commission fined MS $34 million dollars.

Microsoft appealed and then lost. An appeal is continuing to the South Korean Supreme Court. As I have said before, fines of this sort are completely meaningless to Microsoft. They can look at them as merely the cost of business and a trivial one at that. This 34 million dollar fine was the largest one every levied by the FTC in South Korea, yet it will have ZERO effect on Microsoft's behaviour.

Extensive legal push back on correcting MS's illegal behaviour has meant that enforcement of even the sweet heart deal they got with the Bush Justice department isn't being enforced. Given MS's tremendous bankroll, it will be DECADES before these issues are resolved.

How the media portrays free software - the not so subtle bias.

How free software thinkers are portrayed in the media has been a long standing grip. Part of the problem is that the grandfather of free software, Richard Stallman, is not photogenic. Then again not many geeks are really photogenic - I have met Stallman, Linus, Bruce Perens, Alan Cox so I know of what I speak. I am talking about the continual bias that creeps into the popular media about open source. For example, here's the opening quote from the above CNN article,

Portland, Oregon is the unlikely capital of a global software revolution. The revolution is called Open Source. And its leader? Linus Torvalds, the reclusive founder of Linux.

Please note the date on the article. It's May 19, 2006. Free software has been around in computer terms since the very dawn of time. Linus really isn't reclusive. Yet the use of that term creates the real connotation of a Howard Hughes like figure reclusively writing code but really out of touch with the business world. This characterization is completely silly to anyone that actually know Linus. He's a solid family man with kids. He's also a top flight engineer who does a pretty good job with the linux kernal.

For the longest time the propriatary software vendors called free software thinkers communists. When Richard Stallman started out in the 80s it was very common to call the man a communist and his ideas communistic. Yet Stallman's ideas are rooted in the very essence of freedom and in existing copyright law. Current detractors of the free software movement have taken to calling the movement "commonists" in reference both communists and the shared creative commons of ideas.

Language is important. It frames the terms of the debate. For example the term digital rights management (DRM) for short doesn't really describe the rights the consumer has with his or her purchased media. Instead it really describes the rights of the copyright holder to restrict a consumers usage of the media. The FSF has recognized this has launched several efforts to push back on the language used to describe digital restricts management. They have recently launched Defective By Design a site devoted to the pointing out a simple fact - DRM is indeed defective by design.

Redhat, JBoss and Sun

I wanted to take a little time to digest the recent acquistion of JBoss by Redhat. I find it somewhat amusing that JBoss was acquired by a company that just last year Marc Fleury was calling just a packager of linux. It's amusing as it represent the view of Redhgat which is accurate in about the year 1994 when Fleury was graduate student in comp sci. That ceased to be the case in about 1998, when Redhat made the point of actively hiring kernel developers. They also acqured Cygnus in 1999 which was one of the first true open source professional services company which had numerous contracts with major chipmakers such as Intel and IBM. Marc Fluery has often declared Redhat - a complete piece of crap company. From the always snarky Register UK,

"Today RH *IS* a proprietary vendor," Fleury wrote. "Their whole business is around proprietary wrappers to Open Source Linux to drive the subscription business.

"RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux."

Tell us how you really feel, Marc.

"But what really gets me, is this: Our own talks with RH broke down, RH is NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PAYING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS. We are, that is why we created JBoss inc. RH wanted to keep the services revenues all to themselves. That is the dirty little secret, so for them to come out and claim they are the open source when we know the reality is distasteful."

So why sell to Redhat? Well I think the answer is pretty clear. Marc Fleury is an ass. So much of an ass that the people who provided the one round of VC probably made it apparent that some form of liquidity event was expected from the investment. Since Marc with his propensity to randomly spout off nonsense (such as Redhat not paying open source developers) is unlikely to make it through the complete pain in the ass round show that is an IPO. Fluery is a great entrepreneur and taking his company from 2 people to roughly 100 is an amazing accomplishment. The problem is those skills sets don't often translate into the quarter to quarter discipline you see in a company like Redhat. Of course Marc will take his roughly 70 million (based on my rough guess) and in a year won't be working for Redhat. Despites Fleury's repeated and erroneous claims about Redhat he was more than willing to take their money when it became apparent that Larry Ellison didn't want to pay 8 times revenue for JBoss. (Silly Larry it's mostly stock anyway, what where you thinking).

Of course with this move, the real pressure is on Sun Microsystems to GPL their Java. It's apparent that customers like the JBoss solution and JBoss as a company can certainly execute. With the backing of a company like Redhat, entrance into the Fortune 500 becomes much easier. If Sun doesn't truly open source Java, well I am pretty sure Redhat is gonna eat their lunch and in 5 years the only Java application server will be JBoss.