To: Linus Subject: Episode 3 of Grumbling Public Luminaries

Come on Linus, wake up! There are ogres out there who are ready to eat your lunch and include you in the menu!

But first allow me to digress and examine the latest salvo in the war between proprietary and open source software.

Licensing is in the eye of the beholder!

A slyly attractive, legally beautiful, monumentally crafted GPLv3 has finally precipitated out of the ether of copyright law. The only surprise may be in how mild the final version really is. But mildness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

To a simple mind, there’s something for everyone. Just like you, people of all persuasions have found parts of the document to like and parts not to like. In this manner, GPLv3 is unusually fair to everyone!

Novell praises GPLv3

Novell enthusiastically welcomes V3, yet it continues to be party to an agreement with Microsoft where non-Novell customers are at risk of being sued by Microsoft if they use free and open source software. Promises of differential legal protection plainly violate the spirit of fairness baked into all free and open source software licenses, including V3 and the older V2.

Nonetheless, and to its credit, Novell unequivocally promises to distribute software covered by V3, such as Samba and gcc. Distributing, with warranty, V3 components of Novell products is apparently within the letter of Novell’s agreement with Microsoft, but contradicts its intention. Ultimately, the result may substantially weaken Microsoft’s ability to use third parties like Novell to drive a wedge through the free and open source software community.

Microsoft condemns GPLv3

Microsoft protests that V3 is out-of-touch and is, in any case, incapable of affecting its own actions since it was not, is not, and never will be a party to the stipulations of the license. Yet this unapologetic protester has unilaterally and unceremoniously withdrawn its promised patent indemnification covering Novell Linux customers when software distributed is touched in any manner by V3.

At the same time, acting as if it can operate independently of its partner’s sudden chill, Novell assures its customers that they are categorically protected from being sued by Microsoft in their use of any product or component sold by Novell, whether or not it is covered by V2 or V3. Novell’s distribution of V3 components, in the context of its agreement with Microsoft, is an outcome unintended by Microsoft that may allow V3 to work it’s magic anyway.

Therefore, there is a clear risk to the balance sheet of benefits that Microsoft can derive. No matter how bullishly it may argue to the contrary, Microsoft cannot escape the result that its relationship with Novell may unwittingly indemnify all recipients of GPLv3 software through the poison pill of uniform patent protection demanded by V3 license compliance.

Linus rebukes the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3

Linus, you have been somewhat grumpy about V3. You argue that V3’s anti-DRM provisions are misplaced. People ought to have no restrictions in how they use your software, period. If I may dare to say so, you are well known for your directness. For occasional curmudgeons like yourself (and perhaps Mr. Stallman as well), I’d recommend we think of the GPL as standing for Grumbling Public Luminaries. Perhaps you have so much invested in your own creation that you may not be able to see a path that can provide better health insurance against diseases like the anti-Linux lobby that’s ready to strike at any opportunity and is always looking for a good lunch!

And then there’s a cast of millions of others, praisers as well as grumblers (some people just don’t like the color of your tie)

Many think V3 is just too much legalese. “Who can really understand it?”, they ask. It may be brilliantly clever in its articulation of canonical concepts of jurisprudence, but most adopters of software licenses are not lawyers. The license is crafted with so much polish that it could be cast in a thousand non-English tongues without ever loosing a syllable of meaning. It’s that good. It was penned by an undisputed legal genius, yet it is clear that the formal presentation has been targeted primarily for lawyers.

But this is good news for many leading open source corporations. With heavily invested in-house counsel, they are happy with the license. It reflects the kinds of reciprocity requirements that healthy businesses can use to maintain a level playing field in the software market. Once they can compete fairly, strong open source players prefer to exploit packaging and service differentiation. Having a common, well crafted license, in their opinion, only helps grow market size. Qualified competitors can vie for their slice of business from a far larger and richer pie.

In addition, V3 provides an umbrella of protection against aggressors who are increasingly trying to game a broken software patent system.

GPLv3 is here to stay

In the current license landscape, V3 will co-exist with alternative approaches, some compatible, some not. Variation among licenses expresses different ideals in promoting communities among software innovators and authors, who ultimately are the copyright owners.

Viewed in isolation, some argue that V3 represents an unnecessary proliferation of open source licenses. The truth is, however, matching licensing language to the variety of real world legal goals and requirements demands diversity, not uniformity. One license cannot fit all needs. Freedom and flexibility of choice lie at the foundation of innovation, whether the problem domain is developing software code or developing legal frameworks that protect that code and encourage its use. And it is the preservation of choice that leads to a natural solution for honoring investments in current licensing schemes while at the same time being able to benefit from a diversity of newer approaches.

Expand the turf, don’t fence it in

For those desiring the least fragmentation and the largest possible community adoption of free and open source software, multiple licensing is the answer. Simply put, if you are an open source author, license your software under the widest spectrum of options that still reflect your policy for sharing or sharing-alike. Instead of using minor differences to reject options for the protection and promotion of important technologies, open source copyright holders and managers like yourself should give adopters the widest choice possible not only in software but also in the legal framework surrounding it.

The challenge for open source copyright holders and managers, Linus, is to think on a larger scale of community. You should strive for inclusiveness by putting in the hands of your users the power to choose, within guidelines you select, which licenses cover their redistribution of your work. At the same time, you can ensure that your broad goals for sharing and reciprocity are met as widely as possible. Adopters who want to redistribute your work, and potentially their modifications, under V2 are free to do so. Adopters who want to incorporate your work seamlessly into a V3 project or product are equally free to do so. In effect you are setting a general policy for share-alike but your users are able to select the specific language that they require for their needs.

If your kernel can begin to move toward a more flexible licensing policy, many Linux adopters, who personally prefer simpler reciprocity licenses like V2, can live happily along side those who want stronger protection, like anti-DRM and patent provisions. Multiple and flexible licensing by the copyright owner provides the best antidote to community fragmentation caused by license proliferation. But more importantly, flexibility gives your users the freedom to choose the degree to which software is protected while remaining consistent with your overall goals. Traditional users can continue to work in the V2 licensing environment they are already comfortable with. But, at the same time, a broader spectrum of users can adopt a stronger and arguably better license like V3. You will end up strengthening the whole community’s defenses against the anti-Linux forces. Not just for the software you produce and manage, but for everyone’s contributions as well.

So Linus, don’t be an easy target. Don’t be a menu item for somebody else’s lunch. Instead, expand your own cuisine.

whurley, Chief Architect, Open Source Strategy, BMC Software (Photo by: alexmuse/Flickr)

I recently found myself in innovation alley in San Francisco enjoying the fun at the first ever iPhoneDevCamp. 400 developers, artists, users and technology innovators had assembled together to hack and invent cool ways to use Apple’s new gadget. This DevCamp, flowing with constructive energies, was choreographed as a BarCamp. I had a chance to talk with one of the key organizers of this event, William Hurley. “Whurley”, as he is affectionately known, is an open source die-hard and leader in the “BarCamp” movement, redefining the way technology conferences are held. I asked him all about these “BarCamps” and “Unconferences” that have become so popular and here’s what he told me.

Q: What is a “BarCamp”? What is a “Mashup”?

Whurley: A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from a desire to share and learn in an open environment. The price of admission to a BarCamp is participation. They’re intense, with discussions, demos, and participant interaction. Very successful BarCamps have been held around the world, as excitement around “unconferences” grows.

Mashups are different by nature. During a mashup, developers take multiple APIs and merge them to form new, oftentimes innovative, applications. Though there are wild predictions about the future of mashups, they aren’t that different from what the open source community has been doing for years. Calls for “10 new mashups per day by 2007″ (by ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind) seem a bit extreme. First, it should be obvious that as new capabilities are presented to developers, they will use them. Second, the reality of the situation is that the software industry in general is moving towards greater openness and collaborative innovation. However, even with all of these factors in favor of “mashups”, the fact remains that there will only be a limited number of APIs available and therefore, a limited number of potentially useful combinations that can be derived from them.

Q: What do you see as advantages to the “BarCamp” format vs. a “Conference”?

Whurley: The ease with which BarCamps can be pulled together by the community and the limited resources needed to make them happen are among the BarCamp’s chief advantages. The key advantage is that they are inclusive – anyone can participate in a BarCamp. At a conference I have to have a pass, be assigned to a track, and am fairly limited in how I can participate. As a BarCamp participant, I can do as much of anything as I want: add new sessions, lead roundtables, join panel discussions, etc.

Q: You have an interest in open source which is a movement that is naturally self-organizing and serendipitous. Is there a connection between the open source movement and the bar camp phenomenon?

Whurley: BarCamps and open source share some common lineage, but neither are as open as they should be. The technology industry is transitioning to the next phase in its constant evolution. Openness is a natural conclusion driven by users and customers as they become more knowledgeable. Software was considered a black art in the 80s. Today everyone has access to the tools and techniques needed to build basic Web-based applications. More educated users demand more access to the engine of the applications they depend on. Conference attendees often spend thousands of dollars to discover the most useful part of the event happened not during the sessions, but in the hallways. So BarCamps take those hallway discussions and make them the centerpiece of a free event.

People need to realize that open solutions are usually initiated by under-served users and customers. You can’t take today’s savvy customers for granted; they will innovate around any obstacles that you inadvertently or purposely place in their way. They could commoditize a market if the environment was ripe.

Developers hacking at iPhoneDevCamp 2007 (Photo by: blakeburris/Flickr)

Q: What’s the difference between a BarCamp and just a technology users group meeting, like a LUG?

Whurley: LUGs usually recur monthly. BarCampAustin – which I founded – is held once a year. LUGs follow the same form at every meeting. BarCamps are driven directly by the participants, and are far more dynamic than almost any other form of technical gathering. I’m working to spawn BarCampTexasMonthly, a BarCamp that occurs with LUG frequency.

Q: Do you see a clash of cultures between the open source community vs. the Web API crowds who don’t necessarily care whether the software is open source?

Whurley: No, I’m asked this open source vs. industry developers question frequently. There are few open source developers who aren’t industry developers by day. As more and more open source companies are seeking venture capital and more commercial open source solutions become available there’s a natural blending that is taking effect. In the end, we all need to realize that software is software is software. The differences between open source and proprietary software were few to begin with. Today, those differences are becoming even harder to distinguish as open source becomes more and more integrated with how we practice software development.

I don’t see a ton of confrontation as long as people practice what they preach, i.e. even the most proprietary of vendors can be a good open source citizen if they follow the community’s lead and play by the rules established by the community.

Q: What attracts active developers, creators and contributors to these camps? Is it the lure of cool, bleeding-edge technology? Or is it the social networking? Or is it the RedBull?

Whurley: While the RedBull is probably a factor, I think the sense of community is the biggest draw. Who doesn’t want to work openly with their industry peers to explore new ideas in a creative setting?

Chris Allen speaking at iPhoneDevCamp 2007 (Photo by: eschipul/Flickr)

Q: You just concluded a very successful DevCamp for the iPhone in San Francisco. What were the highlights of the 3-day camp and what would you like to have done better?

Whurley: Well, much if not all of the credit goes to Raven Zachary, who did a fantastic job of pulling everyone together. The camp launched without a hitch and in the end, there wasn’t much that needed improvement. We ran into the typical issues – t-shirt sizes, badge quantities, etc. – but there weren’t any complaints and everyone involved enjoyed themselves.

Q: What do you see as other technologies or other topics around which enthusiasts can organize a BarCamp or Mashup in their city?

Whurley: Google and other Web APIs are obvious candidates for Mashups. I see a trend of DevCamps focused on emerging technologies and platforms, especially mobile devices, unless proprietors can catch up with the speed at which consumers now demand applications for these new technologies.

Q: What would your three most important tips be to other BarCamp organizers across the world?

Whurley: Don’t try to do everything by yourself, seek help early and often. Don’t try to over structure the event. Be fluid before and during the event and focus your energy on facilitating rather than organizing or controlling.

Q: Which places do you want to be doing the next BarCamp at?

Whurley: I’m not the person to ask. That’s a question for the community, and an answer they will make happen. Though several experienced BarCampers have traveled around the world for events, BarCamps are more about local community. I publicly offer my help to anyone who wants to take charge and start a BarCamp in their area, regardless of geography.

Q: In your other life as an open source strategist at BMC, what do you see as major challenges to open source adoption in your company.

Whurley: There are none. BMC consumes and supports open source technologies. We use open source internally in many of our systems, and our management products support many open source technologies including Apache, JBoss, and others.

Q: As chairman of the Open Management Consortium, what do you see as opportunities for greater adoption and integration of open source systems management software.

Whurley: Systems management is moving up the application stack in the form of business process management, out across the development tools and applications, and down into the infrastructure. Customers who no longer want to have to rip and replace solutions within their infrastructure will increasingly demand interoperability, and BMC is taking a lead in this area via the open source integrations on our developer network site.

Q: Who do you see as the top 3 leaders (organizations or individuals) making a difference in the open source world. Why?

Whurley: I like what Greg Stein is doing at Apache, as well as his “License Pressure” theory. I think he’s dead on when it comes to several key issues looming in the future of the open source community. Plus he’s just a nice guy.

Ethan Galstad (Nagios) is the best example of open source and community leadership out there. Ethan has a great relationship with his community, and the community is his focus and the foundation of Nagios’s success. He’s also a fine example of open source citizenship, as evidenced by his handling of a recent situation in which outsiders built VC-funded corporations around his project, excluded him and his community, abused his trademark, and made false claims. Ethan’s done a fantastic job of staying focused on his community and their needs during this time, and not falling into the trap dramatic situations like this always create.

Ross David Turk also comes to mind. He’s reinventing SourceForge.net and providing open source projects with a way to offer their customers support via a new ecosystem called SourceForge Marketplace. The Marketplace will help projects to stay independent – they can offer direct user support without having to build a support infrastructure themselves.

Q: What’s the next big trend you think we should all watch for in software and hardware?

Whurley: The return to user-driven innovation. Too often companies build features without consulting customers. Put your users first in all things software and hardware. Openness and open source are great ways to create new dialogues that will result in better hardware, software, and services.

Open source and Unconferences complement each other. Innovation starts with the user and ends with the user, completing a full circle. That’s what make BarCamps tick. That’s what makes open source tick. That’s also what makes whurley tick

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu

Ubuntu has bling. It has caught the attention of many FOSS developers and users both in India and Asia. And its popularity is growing at breakneck speed. Is it technology, is it community or is it just Mark Shuttleworth’s charisma that brings Ubuntu its name and fame. In this interview, our goal was to capture what, regarding Ubuntu, is on the minds of the FOSS leaders in India and South-East Asia. So I went and asked these leaders from the community and industry what they would like to ask Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. Here are the Ubuntu chief’s responses to a selection of the best of our questions.

Q: Given that Red Hat is a pure play FOSS company, and Ubuntu is striving to be the same, would it not make sense for the Fedora and Ubuntu projects to have more cooperation and collaboration?

Mark: Yes indeed! And there have been a couple of success stories in that line – where developers from both communities have figured out how to make things work in a standardised fashion that suits both projects. However, I think we could go further. We realised early on in our project history that our tools needed to support that kind of collaboration, so we adopted Launchpad.net. It allows us to interact with other communities on bugs, for example, so we can have one conversation with upstream, Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat if needed, rather than multiple conversations. It also handles our online translation of Ubuntu and many upstream projects too.

Q: How do you compare India with China, Brazil and the other developing countries you have visited. What is unique about each of these BRIC countries? Where do you see their contributions fitting into the global open source community?

Mark: They are all quite different of course! However, I get the same feeling when visiting them – smart, young people who have a good sense of what’s going on globally and want to play at the cutting edge. This is a great time to be growing up in those countries, because you really can “get ahead” if you work hard and stay focused on the things you are passionate about. We have global media, but local opportunities, and people from BRIC countries are best positioned to capitalise on their own local opportunities.

Q: Ubuntu is a great product, especially on the desktop, where it has many fans. But Canonical has yet to show signs of making money. Do you see Ubuntu remaining an enthusiasts’ product forever?

Mark: Ubuntu could certainly stay a purely philanthropic venture. It’s very important to me personally that there be a high quality free software platform that’s usable and free for the world. But I also like a challenge, and I see it as a very interesting challenge to find commercial opportunities around Ubuntu.

Of course we will not compromise the values of the project:
a. Ubuntu will always remain free software
b. Ubuntu will always be available free of charge, with security updates free too

I think the key is that so many more people are interested in Linux today, that the market for services like support is much bigger today that is was previously.

Q: Is there any special interest within the Ubuntu engineering team about virtualization? It would be great to see an initiative which makes setting up virtual servers or on-demand storage/compute services like Amazon EC2 and S3 easier in Ubuntu.

Mark: Yes, the kernel team has done a lot of work to make Xen, KVM and VMWare perform really well in Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty), and that work will only improve over the next releases as we prepare for a Long Term Support (LTS) release, probably in April 2008.

Q: You have said in your blog that “Microsoft is not the real threat” because they will come to see the benefit of fighting along side the Linux community against a broken patent system. How are you helping to change today’s unfair patent system to make it safer for Linux developers to continue innovating and to create new business opportunities?

Mark: I’m supporting the people who lobby in the European Parliament to keep software patents out of Europe. Its very important, I think, to have a large Western region take a stance against patents, because it sends a message to the BRIC countries that there is no consensus on patents and they should not necessarily unthinkingly pursue the US agenda.

Q: What do you think could be the tipping point that would enable FOSS to take over the healthcare, education and retail markets? Maybe we could see a MedUbuntu or SMBUbuntu along side Edubuntu?

Mark: First I think we need widespread adoption of FOSS in universities, so that future generations of CIO’s are comfortable with both free and proprietary offerings, and make smart decisions about the right tools for any particular job.

Second, I think we want local business to start to invest in FOSS-based solutions for those markets. We can’t create those centrally at Ubuntu, all we can do is point to them when they are created in a particular market.

Q: Do you see Ubuntu being a consumer and mass market distribution? If so, why not nip Microsoft in the bud and announce a low cost, fully functional, supported distribution for India that can pair up with the various low cost PC efforts underway?

Mark: Yes, I do see Ubuntu as a consumer and mass-market distribution, and we are in fact working with Intel on the ClassmatePC as well as with other low-cost PC providers.

Q: When will the Dell-Ubuntu offerings be available to Indian customers? At that time, will Canonical provide support locally in country?

Mark: Dell will make that decision – so call them and ask for it! In the USA they offered Ubuntu because their customers voted heavily for it. So if you can find a way to collectively petition Dell, and do so convincingly (i.e. they need to believe you will actually buy machines!) then you will have Ubuntu pre-installed on Dell in India.

If that happens, Canonical will probably partner with a local company to provide local-language support, with escalation in English to our global support operation.

Q: I am an entrepreneur who needs technical support for my organization and my customers. But I cannot bolster customer confidence in Ubuntu without an India-based sales and support team that I can call. Do you have any plans for a local presence by Canonical in India to provide that support?

Mark: We should talk – because there are plenty of companies in India doing good work with Ubuntu, and one of them may be in a position to provide the support you need.

Q: You have emphasized the potential of developing markets and mindshare in India and China as well as Brazil. What are your plans to invest in growing the FOSS community in India?

Mark: I’ve always found that community is a spontaneous thing – not something that can be created artificially. Ubuntu is a project that has certain values and aspirations, and if those resonate in India as they have resonated in Brazil, the US, Europe and China, then I have no doubt a strong community will form around it.

Q: India is fertile ground for recruiting Ubunteros. Do you have any India-specific initiatives like scholarships to help engineering colleges across India to grow developer mindshare?

Mark: None! We do of course support folks who are actively contributing in Ubuntu to attend our developer summits, no matter where they come from.

Q: Ubuntu is holding its first conference in the US this July as a meeting place for its users, contributors and partners. When are you going to hold an Ubuntu Live in India?

Mark: Only when there is sufficient demand from business users.

I would like to thank Mark for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk with us. I also thank the following FOSS leaders for their thoughtful questions – Harish Pillay, Niyam Bhushan, Sandeep Menon, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Vamsee Kanakala, Venkatesh Hariharan

A debate often heard among FOSS evangelists across the world, is that using software is about “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”. The libre vs. gratis argument rings no less true for some of the richest corporations in the world. I was recently at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco and I was struck by the sheer number of Fortune 500 corporations talking about their adoption of open source and explaining why they’ve signed onto the movement. Heavy duty roll-outs of open source software in the financial industry reveal that adoption of open source is all about the user having control over what they do with the technology and how and when they do it.

E*Trade Performs Flawlessly

A keynote by Lee Thompson, Chief Technologist for E*Trade, highlighted the deep penetration of open source software in critical services of the financial giants. From 2002, Linux has helped E*Trade increase its performance by dramatically giving it an edge over competitors like Ameritrade and Schwab. This was graphically illustrated when, on February 27, 2007, the DOW dropped 400 points. E*Trade’s open source technology infrastructure scaled better than their competitors’ and handled flawlessly the emergency spike in online trading.

H&R Block Delivers New Services Faster

Another major organization, H&R Block talked about how its adoption of open source has been all about performance and flexibility. Marc West, CIO of H&R Block explained how open source enabled his company to meet short time-to-market deadlines. Open source has given him the power to leverage rapid innovation and stay ahead of the curve.

“Among the largest and most advanced corporations, freedom and control are the top drivers for the adoption of open source.”

Bank of America has Choice

Tim Golden, SVP at Bank of America (BOA) emphasized that banking on open source has given them the power of choice – to select a variety of technologies to build and roll-out applications that best suit their needs for performance, service availability, and reliability. Corporations like BOA have invested heavily in expertise and infrastructure within their organizational framework to realize the benefits from open source software and processes.

Freedom to Control, Freedom to Share

A couple of weeks later, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at Google, the same themes of freedom and control were reiterated. Many large users, including Motorola, Dell and Google, explained that they could never have done what they did if they had had to wait for an external vendor to provide them with the capabilities they required. So for these large-scale, cutting edge technology users, the most important reason to adopt open source was the control they achieved over the basic technology they use. With open source, they have an unlimited ability to take and shape already powerful technologies in ways that specifically benefit them. And for many of the things they don’t need to customize, they can still leverage the resources and talents of a global panorama of collaborators.

In order to take open source to the next level and get even more power out of it, many of these top open source users are saying it is time to focus on open standards such as data formats, accessibility, sound and the all-important GUI. Standards provide the frameworks and guidance for continuing collaboration and can bring the fruits of super-fast innovation to a greater number of users. Among the largest and most advanced corporations and organizations, freedom and control are still the top drivers for the adoption of open source. But the big players are also saying now it’s time for open standards to pave the super-highway for sustaining the revolution.

It’s all about freedom: freedom to control, freedom to share, and freedom to build the open standards needed to protect the future of freedom.

Max Spevack, Chairman, Fedora Project

We had the opportunity to sit down face-to-face with Max Spevack, chairman of the Fedora project, at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego to talk about all things Fedora — the merger of Fedora Core and Extras, Fedora 7, and the road ahead. Here are Max’s responses to our questions.

Q: What is the vision for Fedora today?

Max: One of the things that we’ve been doing very actively for the last year and a half, certainly since I’ve been the Fedora leader and even earlier during Greg DeKoenigsberg’s leadership, has been to transition the governance and decision making process in Fedora to be more community focused. We have tried to build a technical leadership in Fedora that can be owned and run by the community. If those community members happen to be from Red Hat, that’s great and if they are non Red Hat contributors, that’s fine too. So the Fedora Extras project started as a way to do this. The leadership group of that effort, for the vast majority, were non Red Hat folks. It took about two years or so but Fedora Extras was very successful. We saw that the packages being built by community volunteers in a lot of ways were better than the packages that were built purely within Red Hat. The guidelines for building those packages were better, the end results were better. And so the guidelines and decisions that the Fedora Extras community made were slowly adopted into Fedora Core. Now we’ve thrown away the idea of Core completely and merged everything into one repository that basically follows all the rules that Fedora Extras had set out. So now the build system that all the packages of Fedora get built on is all completely external, all completely open source. Everything relies on the community and there are a lot of interesting things that means.

Q: What is the vision for Fedora tomorrow?

Max: The two biggest goals for Fedora 7 were the live CD/live DVD stuff which was something Fedora needed in order to be able to compete at the same level as other distributions. So we’ve got that.

In Fedora 8 and 9, over the next year let’s say, we want to make the technology even better. For example, envision you take your whole computer around on your USB key and you stick it into any laptop and your desktop just appears. If you lose it, your data is encrypted, so it’s not as much of a catastrophe as it could be — at least your bank account is not all over the world.

A big goal for Fedora 7 was the merge of Core and Extras and the result was anyone being able to generate their own custom version of Fedora as easily as possible. What we’ve got there are some tools. The basic ones that were built include “Pungi“, which is the distribution compose tool. It takes a pile of RPMs and turns them into an installation tree. And there’s also “livecd-creator“, whose name makes it pretty obvious what it does. Livecd-creator takes a bunch of packages and turns them into a live CD. Then there’s another tool that takes that live CD and copies it onto a USB key called the “livecd-iso-to-disk” script. These three tools are command line tools and for someone to use them takes a little bit of actual engineering skill. We want to lower that barrier as much as possible. So another project that’s underway is called “Revisor“. Revisor is cool for a few reasons. It was completely developed by non Red Hat members who understood the vision that the rest of the Fedora project had and kinda went with it. It takes those three tools I just mentioned and puts a really nice UI on top of it so that it’s basically like a wizard work flow where you go through a graphical interface and select the packages you want. You can select if you want a live CD or an installable CD and there’s other options they’re working on. You just select what you want and it will do it for you.

So all of a sudden the ability to customize Fedora doesn’t hinge on you being a release engineer or a programmer at all. Not everyone will want to do that but I think that there are a lot of people who will. And there are some really interesting possibilities. One is businesses, say ISPs or small businesses that run Fedora right now who have their own application software that they would add to the distro. Now they could add it in at build time as opposed to after install, and distribute it however they like, which is kind of cool. Another interesting possibility, especially in the non-US use case, is “I don’t want all this stuff in English. I want it in whatever my local language is. And maybe I’m a country that doesn’t have super amounts of bandwidth and so I want something that is localized and a pretty small download size.” Now people can build that themselves. And so I think that’s a pretty useful case. And then the third interesting possibility is that it fosters a sense of innovation and competition within the community where you can have different people working on putting together the best package set for desktop, or the best package set for whatever server they want to use. Or people can compete to see how small of an install size they can make something that still can connect to the internet, with YUM to go get more.

Q: Virtualization is emerging in a big way. What are Fedora’s strategies for supporting Xen, KVM, QEMU, etc.?

Max: Xen is obviously a big part of what’s in Fedora, but QEMU and KVM are also in there. I think Fedora has a responsibility to offer everything. Just because Red Hat puts a lot of resources and money behind Xen doesn’t mean that Fedora should ignore the other available options. There are people who are going to want them, so we make them all available.

Our Fedora infrastructure team uses Xen in pretty much everything. It’s the ultimate in eating our own dog food. We are using Fedora to build Fedora and we were using Xen in production long before Red Hat was saying well we’ll sell you Xen in RHEL. That’s something that’s ready for production.

But I like the idea of making everything easy enough to use that you don’t have to be an expert to use it. I think of myself as a good use case for a lot of the Fedora stuff. I have an engineering background but I’m not a super duper programmer. I couldn’t write the stuff myself. But I know what it’s supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work. If I can use it, it’s probably OK to give away. But if it’s too complicated for me, it’s certainly going to be too complicated for a lot of other people. I’m not going to insist that my mother be able to use it, but I want to be able to use it.

Q: OLPC’s desktop sets a different paradigm. Services centric desktop vs. something like Sugar. Do you see Fedora taking OLPC’s ideas on the desktop such as Sugar.

Max: OLPC is built on top of Fedora so Fedora in a lot of ways serves as an upstream for OLPC. But we know we want to work in a lot of the ideas that have been talked about from the Online Desktop, the future of the Mugshot project. I don’t think Fedora is ever going to look like Sugar does, but I think it’s going to look like what the vision of the Online Desktop is.

Q: Given the different initiatives that Red Hat has right now for the desktop, do you think that there would be different versions of Fedora for all those different desktops? Or will there just be components that people could use or play around with?

Max: That’s a good question. What’s cool about the changes we made for Fedora 7 has been infrastructure change, changing the way we actually build Fedora from the ground up. And so Red Hat can do an even better job of competing with itself because Fedora serves as the upstream for RHEL and also serves as the upstream for other Red Hat products. So Fedora is set up in a way that Fedora can kind of keep doing what it does, pushing at the forefront, and the rest of Red Hat can take Fedora and build a classic RHEL that everyone knows. Or produce some other Red Hat Shadowman branded products that look like a totally different desktop. And Fedora can serve both of those downstream components just as well. The ability to do that is one of the requirements of Fedora because it’s part of Red Hat and so we have to serve the community on the one hand as well as Red Hat on the other.

Q: Why is Fedora in a holding pattern at only number 4 at DistroWatch. Why isn’t Fedora number 1?

Max: You know, I don’t like the competition to see who has loudest fanboys. I have wanted to make Fedora cool, to make it work and make it good. This aligns with Red Hat’s larger marketing belief that we’re just going to make this software and eventually people will notice it’s the best out there on merit. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about where we rank on DistroWatch or whatever. We collect and publish the statistics of how many IP addresses come back to yum looking for updates. We have a page that talks about those results and how reliable they are and where potential fudge factors are. I don’t see any other big distribution trying to be that transparent. I see a lot of people say “Well I’ve got 8 million users”. And I don’t hear anyone asking the follow up question of “Where did that number come from? How do you justify that?” At Red Hat, we’re proactively trying to say here’s our numbers and then, before you ask, here’s where we got those numbers from. That’s on a link called statistics on the very front page of the Fedora Wiki.

Max, we appreciate your taking the time to provide us with a great overview on Fedora’s progress and the road ahead.

Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins also contributed to this review.

“Public forums. Open processes. Rapid innovation. Meritocracy and transparency. All in pursuit of the best operating system and platform that free software can provide” — these goals are the air beneath Fedora’s wings, lifting the distribution to new heights.

Competition is Good

Over the past couple of years, competition for the Linux desktop has heated up. Major distributions are vying for the best desktop user experience. If Ubuntu’s popularity is any indication, a smooth out-of-the-box experience matters a lot.

With the release of Fedora 7, it is refreshing to see the Fedora project back in the game ready to take on all comers. Fedora’s latest incarnation has better package management, open source release tools, and a sophisticated virtualization environment. In bringing Fedora 7 into the competitive arena of the open source desktop, Red Hat and the Fedora community have raised the bar for others to follow.

The merger of Fedora Core and Fedora Extras is a significant milestone that is already dramatically boosting the vitality of the project. Re-focusing the project structure to ramp up community participation across all parts of Fedora will help inject new ideas, latest technologies and more developers into the distribution. Benefits of this merger are already being seen in the software development cycle which is now simplified and easily accessible to all — Red Hat as well as community contributors.

Anaconda package installation

Start the Engines

Installation

For this review, we installed Fedora 7 using the DVD ISO for both default as well as custom settings. Our test system was a Sony VAIO notebook (VGN-A600) with an Intel Mobile Pentium 2GHz processor and 2Gb system memory. But Fedora 7 runs on a wide range of hardware and is available for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC (ppc) platforms. In addition, Fedora 7 introduces GNOME and KDE specific Live-CDs and Live-DVDs for x86 and x86-64 platforms.

Default Install

Using default settings suggested by the installer, a total of 805 packages were installed in about 30 minutes. An existing legacy operating system was detected and listed in the GRUB bootloader menu. Fedora was able to automatically configure the system’s sound card (HDA Intel), display resolution (1920×1200), and onboard wireless interface (Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG).

Fedora 7’s latest version of the Anaconda system installer gets high marks for its stability and improved visual appeal. For example, it sports the new “Flying High” artwork theme. And a new zoom widget in the timezone selector map makes it easy for users to drill down to their own locality (although when zoomed-in, the scroll buttons do not work). But missing is the ‘remaining time’ indicator under the progress bar that was a reassuring, if not always accurate, feature of Fedora Core 6 installations.

After completing package installation, the system reboots and comes to the firstboot “Setup Agent”. This tool walks you through configuration screens for the firewall, SELinux, date and time, sound and creating new users. A new screen invites you to send your hardware profile to Fedora HQ to improve quality assurance (QA) and troubleshooting.

Smolt hardware profile agent

Custom Install

When we selected a full installation of all three package sets (Office Productivity, Software Development, Web Server), the installation failed due to a missing dependency for ’system-config-lvm-1.1.1-1.0.fc7.noarch.rpm’. A closer look at the RPM files on the DVD revealed that this package was indeed missing.

We’d like to make a suggestion to Fedora about recovering gracefully from a failed installation: please provide the user with an option to retrieve missing packages from software repositories via a network connection, if available. It seems that the initial dependency check could flag such problems early on in the installation process. This would help prevent a frustrating user experience.

Taking Off

What’s new on the desktop

All major desktop components have been updated to their latest stable versions in Fedora 7, notably Firefox 2 (v2.0.0.3) is now the default. Other major components include GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6, OpenOffice 2.2, Evolution 2.10.1, Pidgin 2.0, GIMP 2.2, Ekiga 2.0.9, RhythmBox 0.10, and Totem 2.18.1.

One of the most visible changes on Fedora’s desktop is the new “Flying High” artwork theme. It resonates Fedora’s message of “infinity, freedom, voice”. We were expecting to see the cool “Echo” icon theme but, alas, it was not ready to be shipped. It would have added even more bling. This will ultimately replace the current “Blue Curve” theme.

A quick look around the default GNOME desktop reveals new features – big and small.

Some of the highlights:

• Fonts: The new “Liberation” fonts make it easy for documents from MS Office to maintain a similar “look and feel” in Linux productivity applications such as OpenOffice.
• New Menu Items: The popular IM (instant messenger) client “Gaim” has been renamed to “Pidgin”. It can be found through the “Applications->Internet” menu. The “Places” menu now includes shortcuts to default folders for your documents, music, pictures, videos and downloads. The “System->Preferences” menu items have been grouped into broad categories for greater clarity.
• Power Management: On our test system, we found two features quite useful. “GNOME Power Manager” provides neat graphs of system power usage over time. It is accessed via the “Applications->System Tools->Power Statistics“. Also, you can control the brightness of your screen by using the “Brightness applet”. This applet is available through the “Add to panel” dialog when you right-click on the GNOME panel.
• Logins: “Fast User Switching” is now integrated with Fedora 7. This applet displays the name of the user currently logged-in at the top right hand corner. Right-clicking on it allows you to switch between sessions of multiple users who are logged in simultaneously.
• Printing: Adding a printer is painless using the revamped graphical tool (system-config-printer) that not only auto detects CUPS printers but also pre-configures most important settings.
• Network Administration: Network Manager, a graphical tool to manage wired and wireless network connections is installed by default now. To use it, you must enable the “NetworkManager” and “NetworkManagerDispatcher” services using the “System->Administration->Services” control panel. This tool also supports modem connections as well as some VPNs like OpenVPN and VPNC.

Managing the system

Folder shortcuts in Places menu

One of Fedora’s traditional strengths has been its system management tools. These tools have benefited from Red Hat’s RHEL work and add tremendously to Fedora’s system administration capabilities. Performance improvements of the system tools contribute noticeably to the responsiveness of this release. A lot of effort has gone into optimizing Fedora’s performance. A great example is yum and its GUI tools, “Pirut” and “Pup”, which are now significantly faster. To further test the tools, we tried installing the email client Thunderbird using “Pirut”, Fedora’s package installer. Although the installation worked fine, “Pirut” assumes the user is knowledgeable about the overall package installation process. A wizard approach where the user is guided through the package selection and installation process would be a welcome improvement.

“Pup”, Fedora’s package updater, has seen many improvements since it was introduced back in Fedora Core 5. During our review, “Pup” notified us (via “puplet”) that there were 37 updates available. So we ran “Pup”. All updates were successful. However, it would be nice if users could select a mirror site geographically closer to them, from a list of official mirrors.

Fedora 7 also features the latest upstream additions to the mainline Linux kernel. For the user that means broader support for wireless networking with a new mac80211 stack and better power management using kernel dynamic ticks.

Advanced users wanting to make use of the latest virtualization support in the Linux kernel can now efficiently manage their virtual machines (VMs) with both graphical “virt-manager” and command line “virsh” tools. These tools can administer virtual machines based on Xen, KVM and QEMU. Both “virt-manager” and “virsh” rely on “libvirt”, a C API toolkit.

SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) implements Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) levels of security in Fedora. Deploying SELinux has become more practical with the addition of friendlier management tools. Fedora 7 adds a new graphical administration tool “system-config-selinux” to help set up and customize policies for your system. Another tool, “setroubleshoot”, notifies users about access denials and helps track down problems with better error reporting capabilities.

SELinux troubleshoot tool menu item

In the Pilot’s Seat

Spin Tools and Live CDs

Spins are variations of Fedora with custom software sets. The ability to remix user applications with a Fedora base onto a new bootable CD, DVD or even a USB key makes it attractive as an easy and convenient deployment platform. It can also facilitate deployment in bandwidth-constrained regions like India, SE Asia, Latin America and Africa. To make this complex process of creating spins simpler, Fedora has released its open source build toolchain consisting of “Pungi“, “Livecd-tools”, and “Revisor“. “Pungi” takes packages from repositories to produce a Fedora release tree and or ISO. Other tools can be built using “Pungi” through its Python API. “Livecd-tools” as the name suggests are tools to build ‘installable’ live CDs. “Revisor” is a GUI tool, that uses “Livecd-tools” and “Pungi” to create installation media as well as live media.

The Next Airfield

Features that did not make Fedora 7 are now targeted to land in Fedora 8, slated for October 2007.

Key areas expected to receive attention are sound-mixing, multimedia codec integration, and an ‘online-aware’ desktop to improve one’s overall user experience. More virtualization features are also planned for Fedora 8. Some packages addressing these key areas are:

• PulseAudio, a sophisticated sound server that allows multiple applications to share sound hardware and serves as a proxy for ALSA, EsounD and JACK based applications.
• CodecBuddy, a GUI tool to help users find support for restricted multimedia formats such as mpeg and mp3.
• BigBoard, a replacement for GNOME panel will make future Fedora desktops aware of your online presence, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, web mail, photos, etc. using MugShot’s infrastructure.

The Final Landing

As their “Flying High” theme promises, Fedora 7 is indeed a great plane to fly. It is a first class distro that demonstrates solid progress in improving the user experience, easing the move to virtualization and enabling the user to create their own flying machine through custom build tools. So grab your flight gear and take Fedora 7 for a spin. See you onboard!

Where does useful technology come from? It is commonly assumed that requirements resulting from demands in the market drive the development of new technologies. However, fundamental changes in markets appear to operate the other way around. That is, technologies drive markets. New economic growth depends on technology that depends on commitment to fundamental research. Sometimes applied technology is developed from fundamental research unexpectedly, like e-mail deriving from research in packet-switched computer communications. But only to the outsider does it seem to happen miraculously. For in fact every advance in technology stands on the shoulders of prior scientific and technological giants.

“Where does open source software come from? Doesn’t it typically start off as scratching just a local itch?”

Open source software also depends on an innovative and healthy technology base. On prior art, as it were. Even growth in services markets, as seen in the services industry surrounding open source software, depends on advancements in the underlying technologies. For example, without the progress and maturation of Linux and other open source technologies including the Internet, billion-dollar service industries like Google would be impossible.

But how is open source software related to fundamental research? Where does open source software come from? Doesn’t it typically start off as scratching just a local itch? Indeed it is often observed that one of the poster children of OSS, Linux, was just Linus Torvalds’ effort to solve his own need for a capable computer workstation environment. But, as in the case of many significant open source projects, this may be just another form of urban myth. Linux as an idea has a far longer heritage. Indeed, Linux emerged from an intellectual context that included commercial Unix as well as government sponsored standards, most notably POSIX. Unix itself was inspired by an earlier operating system research project called Multics which was part of MIT Project MAC. And this was initially sponsored by DoD’s main research incubator, ARPA. Without ARPA’s involvement, it is unlikely that there would ever have been the multi-billion dollar Unix or Linux market of today. A similar path, starting from government funded basic computer communications research, can be traced for the Internet and the World Wide Web.

So government policy toward and investment in basic research is vital to developing the infrastructure upon which useful and commercial technologies can be built.

An important follow up question becomes, what is the government’s role after the infrastructure is in place? In many ways the history of the commercialization of projects like Unix and the Internet involves government stepping away from continued support for the specific projects it started. Yet often the organizations through which the projects were started are still being fully supported even if specific projects like Multics or the Arpanet have died or moved on. You would not be surprised to learn that today Project Mac is none other than the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is still being heavily supported by ARPA (now called DARPA) as well as by many other government and industry sponsors. It is here that Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor directs the W3C and works on research and collaboration leading to the next generation of the Web.

Similarly, while Linux development is focused through the work and stewardship of Linux Torvalds, the government plays a role in the development of its current capabilities. For example, DoD’s National Security Agency built a high grade security prototype called SELinux. The latest versions of SELinux have been integrated into the official 2.6 kernel. SELinux powered Linux has earned security certifications on par with the best competing proprietary operating systems.

In summary, successful government technology initiatives try to set up the conditions, particularly through support of basic research, for a virtuous cycle of cooperation and collaboration between government, industry and academia. The primary objective at this stage is to launch collaborative projects that promote technology leadership. The next phase involves continuing government support, often for applied R&D that sustains the virtuous cycle of collaboration to maintain competitive edge and technology leadership. Sustaining support leads to a refinement of technology capabilities and the promise of continued economic prosperity.