10.18.13

Red Hat Roundup: Claims That OpenStack is on the Rise, New Partnerships, Releases, and More

Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat, Servers at 12:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The creation of Bob Young keeps giving

Photo by Hamilton Tiger-Cats

Summary: An overview of recent news about Red Hat, the world’s leader in GNU/Linux server sales

DESPITE growing pains and competition from other “open” options [1], OpenStack has a new release [2] and one of its main backers, Red Hat, claims that it has growth potential [3]. Taking advantage of the whole ‘cloud’ hype, Red Hat is growing closer to Salesforce.com [4] and SAP [5]. A RHEL 5.9 – 5.10 risk report is released [6], with the latest RHEL 6.x now in beta [7]. Red Hat uses the total cost of ownership (TCO) line to claim advantage [8] and its shares are doing reasonably well [9-10]. Despite RHEL not being free (gratis) [11], free derivatives continue to exist [12] and be made public. Techrights runs the latest CentOS, which is essentially a rebranded RHEL. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Being on the napkin

   Which would make Eucalyptus the open source little brother that the System/360 never had, that has no analogue in the history books, and that could have changed everything. Trouble is, I’m not sure how to fit that on your napkin.

2. OpenStack Havana Heats Up the Cloud

   The new open-source cloud platform release provides orchestration, monitoring and security features.

3. OpenStack Demand Is High as Havana Debut Nears: Report

   A Red Hat-sponsored report shows growth potential for the open-source OpenStack cloud, though there are some challenges.

   The open-source OpenStack cloud platform has the support of many of the world’s leading IT vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, AT&T, Cisco and Red Hat, but does it have the support of enterprises?

4. Salesforce.com Expands Use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

   Linux is the foundation for the cloud, and increasingly, global customers are choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their cloud foundation. That’s why we’re excited to share that salesforce.com, the world’s #1 CRM platform, and a longtime Red Hat customer, has completed a new, multi-year contract with Red Hat, expanding use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a key part of its infrastructure.

5. Red Hat Loves SAP, It’s Official

   Red Hat has gone public with the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5. With predictable labels like “better scalability and manageability”, there is also some real meat on the bones for those prepared to chew deeper.

6. RHEL 5.9 – 5.10 Risk Report Released

7. Latest Beta Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Now Available

8. How RHEL trims total cost of ownership (TCO)

9. 2 Reasons Red Hat Really Shouldn’t Be This Cheap

   Red Hat beat analyst estimates both on earnings and revenues by growing sales 16% year over year and adjusted earnings by 25%. Analysts and investors ignored all this good news to focus on the billings proxy, a forward-looking measure of upcoming revenues. On that measure — on which Red Hat doesn’t offer any guidance — the 8% higher number fell short of Wall Street’s 12% projections. Red Hat has seen this market reaction before, but the business growth hasn’t slowed down like the panic sellers expected.

10. First Week of November 16th Options Trading For Red Hat (RHT)

    Investors in Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) saw new options begin trading this week, for the November 16th expiration. At Stock Options Channel, our YieldBoost formula has looked up and down the RHT options chain for the new November 16th contracts and identified one put and one call contract of particular interest.

11. Open software is not free: Red Hat

    Software vendors dispels the myth that open source software has no costs involved

12. Video: The CentOS Project

    I use CentOS quite a bit myself and I know a lot of other CentOS users. Here is a video of one of the main developers (Karanbir Singh ) within the CentOS Project explaining how the CentOS Project works and builds what it builds.

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The Amazing Rise of Drupal

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Taking note of trends in Free (as in freedom) CMS software

JOOMLA, which is a popular CMS and content engine right now in 2013 [1], was used by a government client of my employer. WordPress, which I run on about a dozen sites (not just Techrights), is also very popular these days, but it is hardly being used in government sites. It’s just more of a blogging platform — one that I became closely involved in one decade ago (also the inner circles like development). Drupal was back then a close rival of WordPress, but both survived and established themselves in slightly different markets. A new government client of my employer uses Drupal and so does the White House. It has become almost a de facto standard as a CMS, whereas WordPress became somewhat of a de facto standard as a blogging platform. Both are GPL-licensed.

Looking at some news from the past month and a half, WordPress causes problems to some [2] and Drupal is gradually stealing its thunder [3-8]. One has to wonder if one day Drupal’s blogging facilities will help it leapfrog WordPress, even among bloggers. Either way, it’s all Free software, so these two projects can probably coexist, reuse, and thrive together, just like GNOME and KDE. The more options we have, the better, even if some disagree [9]. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Joomla on Ubuntu Server 13.10

2. When a WordPress Update Goes Awry

   Perhaps it’s merely a reminder that Murphy’s law is always at work–you know, if something can go wrong, it will. Or maybe it’s to instill in my own mind that the next time I upgrade, be sure to look at a cached page to make sure the public is seeing what I see. Then again, it could be an opportunity for you to learn from my mistakes.

3. Top 5 things Angie Bryon loves about Drupal

   Angie Byron is an advocate for Drupal. Commonly known online as webchick, she is a Drupal core co-maintainer. She has her finger on the pulse of the community, helping to manage over 1,600 contributors from all over the world.

4. Dries Buytaert Is Building the Next ‘Red Hat-Like’ Open Source Success Story

   “We wanted Drupal to be what Red Hat is to Linux, that’s why we started Acquia,” says the Belgium-born founder of open source website CMS software Drupal and now co-founder and CTO of Acquia, Dries Buytaert.

5. Drupal Dries Buytaert’s top three tips for startups

   Drupal, the open source platform he developed 13 years ago, has grown immensely, now underpinning around 1 in 50 websites and a huge community of developers. Sites running on Drupal range from the White House and NBC, to the EU’s Digital Agenda site—and indeed my own site.

6. Achieving Continuous Integration with Drupal

   In the early 1990s, my first job out of college was as a software engineer at a startup company. We were building a commercial product using a well-known open-source network security project. In those days, Agile software development practices (not to mention the World Wide Web, or even widespread public awareness of the Internet) still were in the future. My fellow engineers on that project (who had just graduated with me and to this day are the best programmers I know) and I were taught what we now call the Waterfall method. We thought we were invincible.

7. People, passion and learning to fail – opening up with Dries Buytaert

   On Wednesday I had a special guest – Dries Buytaert, Belgian creator of open-source platform Drupal and general all-round entrepreneur; to get his views on open source, web publishing, web startups and entrepreneurship.

   Drupal, the open-source platform he developed 13 years ago, has grown immensely, now underpinning around 1 in 50 websites and a huge community of developers. Sites running on Drupal range from the White House and NBC, to the EU’s Digital Agenda site – and indeed my own site, the one you’re reading this blog on right now.

8. Drupal 8: A View into Performance

   Views is one of the most installed Drupal modules with over two thirds of Drupal sites reporting that they have it installed. Soon, though, that number will go up: as of Drupal 8, Views is a core module! This effort started as a community effort and was announced as an official Drupal 8 initiative in a post by Dries explaining why this change is so exciting.

9. Oh No, Too Many Distros?

   My poll also found that a majority of visitors to my website think there is just too much choice. I asked a simple question with only two answers. Given the topic of “Too Many Distros” and the choices of only “yes” or “no,” 63% of participants said yes. 37% said no. Visitors to my site are split almost equally into three camps: little experience, moderately experienced, and well experienced or better.

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Corporate or VC Funding Turns Free Software Into Proprietary

Posted in Finance, Free/Libre Software at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Who pulls the strings?

Summary: Commentary on funding that comes with strings attached and what this means to freedom-respecting software

Nginx, which is basically proprietary software except its very core (like OpenX [1] and other companies that misuse the “open” label), received some more funds [2] and to some — like IDG (or IDC) — the only number that ever counts is money [3]. There is a new platform called Open Funding [4] and it’s said “to help speed up the development of free and open source software by financially supporting the developers.” Generally speaking, Free software should be funded by users, not outside companies, which usually seek to get money back — a “return” on their “investment”. Usually, although not always, there are user-hostile strings attached to the latter type of funding (the former has strings tied to users). This might help explain why Nginx stopped being Free software in the first place. The same type of thing happened to various other projects, some of them famous like MySQL.

It is not always a victory when a FOSS project attracts funding. It very much depends on where the funds come from. Nginx does well in terms of market share [5], but not in terms of freedom. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Nginx Raises $10 Million in New Funding for Server Development

   Open-source server vendor Nginx will use the new financing to help fuel both its community and its commercial efforts.

2. OpenX Sells Open Source Ad Serving Product

   Sale of OpenX Source Ensures Continuity of OpenX Community

3. Greed is good: 9 open source secrets to making money

   Low-cost marketing, hard bargains, keeping competitors in check — profiteering abounds in the open source community

4. Open Funding for free software

   A crowd funding platform for free software projects has reached beta state and already transmits the helping requests of various FOSS development teams. The name is Open Funding and the mission is to help speed up the development of free and open source software by financially supporting the developers.

5. Nginx: this Russian software is taking over the internet

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The BSD Camp Adds Compelling New Features Like Better ZFS

Posted in BSD at 11:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: New releases of FreeBSD and the relevance to GNU/Linux

Free software is not a one-man race. There are numerous camps with slightly varying opinions on what freedom means. FreeBSD, one of the giants in the BSD world, is gradually approaching release 10 [1,2], having just updated 9.2 [3,4]. GhostBSD, which is derived from FreeBSD, is also worth noting [5]. Those systems not always compete with the GNU/Linux camp because there is a lot of sharing of code and packages between those two camps. Starting an argument over the level of freedom or meaning of freedom would be a waste of time and effort. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. First Alpha for FreeBSD 10 Released

   Glen Barber from the FreeBSD team announced the availability of the first alpha download of FreeBSD 10 on their mailing list. FreeBSD 10 appears to be a significant upgrade from 9, with a long list of improvements and new features. However, as is standard with FreeBSD, the most interesting features are under the hood.

2. FreeBSD 10.0 Now In Beta With Faster ZFS LZJB

   FreeBSD 10.0 has been in alpha for just one month but announced today is the first beta of the forthcoming FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE.

3. FreeBSD 9.2 Is Behind Schedule, RC4 Released

   The release of FreeBSD 9.2 was supposed to happen by the end of August, but instead we’re now up to the fourth release candidate.

4. FreeBSD 9.2 Brings ZFS TRIM, ZFS LZ4, Updated DTrace

   After being challenged by days and while FreeBSD 10.0 is up to Alpha 4, the FreeBSD Foundation and its developers released FreeBSD 9.2 today as stable.

5. Open source snapshot: GhostBSD

   GhostBSD is a FreeBSD derived, Gnome-based desktop operating system.

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Sharing Leads to Nobel Prizes

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The benefits of sharing are realised by more and more people, who label it the “open” way

MR. Zemlin, a marketing and branding guy (not a technical man), takes pride in the achievements of Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs, claiming that mass collaboration contributed to their Nobel prize [1]. In a way he is right and it is encouraging to see the Linux Foundation giving some credit to the GNU project [2]. Without immense amounts of sharing and collaboration, science would not have moved forward. Science is succeeding when the mentality of proprietary software vendors gets abolished.

A similar approach is now being proposed on order to fix the US Constitution [3], which is definitely outdated (dating back to the days when slavery was fine) and crowdfunding/crowdsourcing finds momentum [4,5]. The Washington Times says [6] that “[m]ore and more creative content is being distributed under open source licensing such as GNU General Public License and Wikimedia Commons.”

Maybe this whole ‘crazy’ idea of sharing, as promoted 30 years ago by Richard Stallman, isn’t quite so crazy after all. Without GNU and the GPL, would Linux have survived to this date? █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Congratulations to Nobel Prize Winners, and a Nod to Mass Collaboration

   We’re honored and humbled that Linux was able to play a part in facilitating the discovery of Higgs boson (“Finding the Higgs was done almost entirely with Linux. Indeed, many of the scientists we’ve spoken to say it couldn’t have been done without it.”). Created nearly 30 years after Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle and 20 years before its existence would be confirmed, Linux provided one of the needed technologies with which this work could be done. Additionally, the principles of mass collaboration that informed the way thousands of scientists over five decades were able to achieve a critical discovery is embraced daily by the Linux community.

   The Linux Foundation is preparing to host LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe in Edinburgh in just a couple weeks. How appropriate that Linux played a small role in the Higgs Boson discovery that was rooted in that very city.

   Congratulations to Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs and the 10,000 others who contributed to this achievement. We are grateful.

2. What 30 Years of GNU Means to You

   Thirty years ago today Richard Stallman announced his plans to build GNU in a post to the net.unix-wizards mailing list. What followed was the birth of the free software movement, the founding of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU public license (GPL) — now used by the Linux operating system. His words continue to inspire software developers to this day:

3. The US Constitution version 2.0

   After ‘version 1.0′ of the US Constitution was released to the public on Sept 17, 1787 there was remaining discontent among several states regarding the powers assigned to the new Federal government and a lack of protections for fundamental individual freedoms and civil rights.

4. Bountysource CEO talks open source crowdfunding and bounties for developers

   Nearly a decade ago, two friends set out to create a full project management platform for open source software called Bountysource. The year was 2004 and the friends were Warren Konkel and David Rappo, and their vision included creating code repositories, file hosting, issue tracking, and bounty support.

5. Opening Up To 3D Mapping: Collaborative, Crowdsourced Approach to Map Data Gaining Speed

   Finding your way in the urban jungle of a sprawling city is probably one of the most challenging tasks a motorist has to tackle. The days of folded paper maps may long be over, but electronic maps and automated navigation systems have yet to satisfy the modern navigator’s wishlist.

6. Copyright law influences teachers “educational fair use” of materials

   Educators who wish to avoid the hazards of ferreting out legitimate fair usage aren’t entirely limited to materials published before 1923. More and more creative content is being distributed under open source licensing such as GNU General Public License and Wikimedia Commons.

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Open Hardware (Freedom- and Modifications-friendly Hardware) a Growing Force, But Intel Needs to be Kept Away

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Hardware at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Efforts that label themselves “Open Source Hardware” are gaining popularity, but Arduino and other efforts need to keep the notorious vandaliser, Intel, well out of their boundaries

So-called “Open Source Hardware” or “Open Hardware” is derived from the ideals of Free software, as laid bear by Richard Stallman 30 years ago. The notion that we should share designs and permit people to modify designs is not entirely novel because stuff like Lego encourages us and our children to do so. Talking about business models [1] is another, perpendicular/orthogonal issue and whether it can relate to software or not [2] might not matter so much, either. It’s like when people argue with Stallman about whether Free software is good for business or not, as if having a business model is somehow essential to justifying freedom or somehow defends denying people their freedom.

Arduino, one of the leading forces in the area, is now speaking to the press [3] and greedy, malicious Intel tries to interject itself into it, just like it did with OLPC, basically destroying the project. Arduino would be wise to learn from OLPC and send Intel far away. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models

   After some time now, the Open Hardware Ecosystem and Business sector gained some significant traction. An excellent presentation by Mathilde Berchon was recently release at the open hardware summit, trying to summarize the increasingly interesting diversity and numbers of the OSHW business. W

2. Open source hardware holds the same promise as software

   I see SparkFun Electronics mentioned often in my social media stream, so I jumped at the chance to interview Chris Clark, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

3. Arduino creator explains why open source matters in hardware, too

   Ars conducts a Q&A with Massimo Banzi as Arduino’s rise continues.

4. Intel’s Quarky Arduino Adventure

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New Strategy for Fighting Software Patents

Posted in Courtroom, Law, Patents at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Taking into account systemic corruption in law and politics (Chris Dodd shown below)

Summary: When law is controlled and composed (by proxy) by corporations and their lobbyists, a new strategy for reform is needed

WHEN the highest court (SCOTUS) relies on a broken Internet (where material just vanishes [1]) and judges are political and/or tied to corporations, it is no surprise and there is no reason to wonder why there’s reluctance to end bribery/corruption (euphemisms include “campaign-finance”). The ‘legal’ system is so broken that even innocent people who were unjustly punished oughtn’t bother suing [3] and guilty cults that defraud thousands and run their own prison system walk away free, despite being recognised as organised fraud in other, more civilised nations [4]. It seems like in the eyes of this ‘legal’ system, dissent against crime or the pursuit of justice are now the real enemy. This is the sign of a a legal system entering a state of calamitous collapse. To blindly assume its moral higher ground would be unwise.

It has been about 2 months since we last covered patents on a regular basis. This is not a coincidence. Having campaigned against software patents since my days as a student, I hardly see any progress. In Europe, debate focuses on unification with US patent law (the typical cross-Atlantic treaty loophole), in New Zealand the fight against software patents never ends (even when the arguments are all settled), and in the US the debate is totally dead; all they talk about right now are “patent trolls”.

Fighting against a system which is inherently broken and does not permit progress — just fake Change® — is a tiresome exercise. It feels like a waste of energy. Larry Lessig tried to reform copyright law for years. He hardly succeeded. Corrupt politicians like Chris Dodd — those who literally bribe Congress — always get their way. Lessig understood this after years of campaigning regarding copyright law. Instead, after years of wasted effort, he turned his attention to fighting corruption in US Congress. it’s no simple task, either. Perhaps we too, at least in the coming years, will need to dedicate some time to fighting the patent issue from a political angle, not just a technical and logical angle. From the technical point of view, the argument was resolved a long time ago. Developers reached a consensus. But the patent lawyers and their lawyer/politician friends stand in the way and they will never give way to change unless they are named and shamed. SCOTUS and CAFC are part of the problem because their decisions continue to legitimise software patents. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Link Rot and the US Supreme Court

   “Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you’ve linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren’t necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship.”

2. Obama’s Lawyer Should Have Used Originalism to Sway Originalist Justices

   If he had met a conservative Court on its own ground, the solicitor general could have notched a victory for liberalism—and helped safeguard campaign-finance protections.

3. Unlawfully Detained by the U.S. Government? Don’t Bother Suing.

   Last Monday, on the same day as the opening of the new Supreme Court term, the federal appeals court in San Francisco threw out a damages suit by a former Guantánamo detainee who alleged that his detention and his treatment while detained had been unlawful. The decision by a unanimous three-judge panel in Hamad v. Gates did not hold that the plaintiff’s rights hadn’t been violated; rather, it held that it lacked the power to even address that question because of a 2006 statute that appears to take away the jurisdiction of the federal courts in such cases. Although there are reasons to quibble with the Ninth Circuit’s analysis, the result underscores a far broader point about which there can be no dispute: In case after case, on issues ranging from Guantánamo to surveillance to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, the federal courts have been categorically hostile to damages claims arising out of post-September 11 counterterrorism policies. And as in Hamad, this hostility has been reflected in the courts’ reliance upon a host of procedural doctrines to reject the plaintiffs’ claims without actually adjudicating—one way or the other—the underlying legality of the government’s conduct.

4. Scientology’s fraud conviction upheld in France

   France’s top appeals court has upheld a fraud conviction and fines totalling hundreds of thousands of euros against the Church of Scientology, for taking advantage of vulnerable followers.

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Neal Heimbach Reveals Another Reason to Boycott Amazon

Posted in Action at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Greenwashing a malicious brand

Summary: Amazon, the company (not the forests), not only harms human dignity of customers but also of employees

FOR a number of years now Techrights has strongly urged everyone to boycott Amazon, which does many despicable things that are too many to name offhand.

Now that reports reveal Amazon’s abuse of its own employees [1,2] we should simply take these employees’ lawsuits as a sign that Amazon is inherently unethical at many levels. It cares about its employees no more than those garment factories in Bangladesh [3], where death of these employees are common (everything to drive the price down!).

The reason we hear a lot more about the abuse of Amazon workers and hardly anything about workers in Bangladesh is probably the racial factor. We’re inclined to be more sympathetic towards people of our race (in Western nations) and suspicious of others, as new studies help remind us [4]. When thinking about how Amazon treats people, think about the many dead workers in Bangladesh. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Worker sues Amazon over lengthy security searches without pay

2. Amazon sued over 20-minute, unpaid, daily security searches of workers

   A Pennsylvania man who works for Internet retail giant Amazon says the company is taking advantage of workers by putting them through daily security checks that last anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes — and eat into unpaid hours, before work, after work and during lunch breaks.

   He’s kicked off a class-action suit against the company, filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and alleging violations of the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, NBC reported.

3. Bangladesh garment factory fire kills at least 10 people

4. Estate agents discriminate against black people, finds BBC investigation

   Posing as a landlord, reporter uncovers London agents willing to meet request flat should not be let to African-Caribbean renters

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