Information Manager Journal

Opening Move returns: LinuxWorld Installfest for Schools

After nearly a year's hiatus, my IT Conversations podcast Opening Move returns today. I talk with Andrew Fife, organizer of LinuxWorld Installfest for Schools, which starts next Tuesday in San Francisco.

In the spirit of open source

In the spirit of open source, I'm going to give back to a community and industry that helped me labor to write my (now abandoned) book. Starting today, I'll spend a few minutes a day posting some notes from my book, really just quotes and links, with an occasional comment here and there. I hope you enjoy them.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler takes aim at Apple

Former Wired Magazine cover-guy Asa Dotzler accuses Apple of not fully open-sourcing its WebKit Web browser and gets piled on in his blog's comments, including this comment by Mozilla's own Brendan Eich:

"Mozilla advocates risk looking holier than thou, or just whiny, when there's real work to do."

At some point, with all the money sloshing around, do leaders of Mozilla-type organizations start exhibiting more of the behavior or deportment of commercial software companies? MySQL may not be the only "community" drifting in that direction.

(None of which means Apple shouldn't be as open as possible.)

Pay no attention to that open source behind the curtain

Link of the day: Microsoft Hypocrites: Pro MS sites that run open source.

LiMo Foundation on IT Conversations

My latest Opening Move podcast at IT Conversations is a chat with Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation. LiMo stands for Linux Mobile, and anyone who's been watching moves by Google lately realizes just how important mobile Linux is becoming. 2008 will be a watershed year for mobile phones, but it remains to be seen just how open such phones will be, at least in the U.S., due to the power of those carriers controlling licensed spectrum. If they don't loosen their grip, 2008 could be yet another year that mobile innovation moves elsewhere in the world. LiMo Foundation will be at the center of that.

Open source mobility "wars": customers lose

If open source has simply become ammunition for IT platform wars, as even Dana Blankenhorn believes -- it's no wonder that his survey doesn't even consider the possibility that customers could end up being the winners. Customers have to demand more interoperability now or vendors and service providers will continue to build a myriad of new data silos that even open source will be hard-pressed to untangle.

Open Handset Alliance won't dictate much

Listening to the conference call now in progress about the Open Handset Alliance, it's clear to me that this is an open source play and not an open standards one, in the sense that the forthcoming work of the Alliance won't be under enough control that certain minimum requirements be satisfied by any one handset using that code. For instance, the code (licensed under Apache v2) could be used to build a completely locked-down handset. Also no one is dictating inclusion of certain functions -- for instance, offline access to Web-based applications as might be built using Google Gears or an equivalent.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making these decisions, but they will have long-term effects on the kinds of mobile devices this venture will yield. I'm not saying we won't see completely open mobile phones with offline access to all Web apps, but customers will still have to demand them, engineers will still have to build them, and sales channels will still have to deliver them. That much hasn't changed with today's announcement.

It does remind me how much standards, even open ones, often dictate what a technology must do. There's much more work to be done on open standards for mobile devices.

Marc Fleury: Open source is Russia

How delightful to discover Marc Fleury's new, post-JBoss blog, and this post from March 2007:

"Take it from an ego-maniacal frenchman: Open Source is Russia. You think you can invade it. Sure, you can walk in easily enough, the borders are wide open. You can occupy land there, but you can't force your way into the minds of the people. You can even reach Moscow, but all you'll find is a deserted city. Eventually the terrain will swallow you up. You either become assimilated or you get frustrated by the irrelevance and go home."

For years, I've been reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, a few pages per month. (Who has time?) I totally dig Marc's metaphor here, and find it ironic perfection that open source is not communism, but can be easily compared to the resilience of the country where communism first flourished.

Editors and communities

I've been thinking a lot about editors and communities. Ideally, modern journalism works best when editors and communities collaborate on discovering and reporting the news. We've all heard about the phenomenon of community-based journalism. Still, there are plenty of editors in this world, and not all of them are journalists. In my latest Opening Move, Dave Gynn talked to me about the challenges of editing Optaros' Enterprise Open Source Directory, and why Optaros didn't opt for a community-oriented wiki instead. The fact that people derive value from something where accountability trumps anonymity, and that it manages to overcome the flaws that editors can bring to truth and news, is worth pondering.

This podcast also illuminates the fact that whether or not the Open Source Initiative likes it or not, the term open source is being used to describe a much wider range of software than the OSI definition would dictate.

IMJ Podcast #9: Christy Wyatt, Motorola

With so much attention these days on the iPhone, and even on Microsoft's smartphone plans, it's worth remembering that the total number of phones shipped in a given year dwarfs Apple and Microsoft-based systems combined. Linux is playing an increasing role in these other handsets. Already, Motorola has shipped 9 million Linux handsets worldwide since 2003, and is luring more developers to its platform. In IMJ Podcast #9 (recorded 8/8/07, running time 9:26), I speak with Motorola vice president of ecosystem and market development Christy Wyatt (pictured). Wyatt also talks about Java's changing role in a world with more and more Linux-based phones.