Note: I finished this blog entry late last summer and for some inexplicable reason I never entered it in my blog. Could I have been having that much fun? Honestly, I can't remember, but here is (was) my "End of Summer Open Source News Roundup...several months late.
Summer in New England this year was a pretty abbreviated affair. Low temperatures and frequent rains in June and July gave way to a more seasonal August and early September. But despite the absence of typical summer weather, open source news was on the up-tick.
The blockbuster news was the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The deal generated a number of "red flags" for the Linux and open source community. Oracle was already supporting a Red Hat clone in the form of Oracle "unbreakable" Linux, while trying to undercut Red Hat on support. Now Oracle has its hands on Sun's hardware (a mixed blessing) and Solaris (a fine Unix implementation) and the open source MySQL database, which Sun paid $1B for not too long ago. So now Oracle has a complete Unix hardware, Unix OS and Oracle application stack they can bring to customers. Sounds like the IBM mainframe days of the 1970s and 1980s all over again. The European Union could be the stumbling block to this "marriage made in heaven" but odds are the deal will finally be approved. Note: The EU finally did approve the deal...hope no one was holding their breath.
Of particular concern to the open source community is what happens to MySQL, which is part of the ubiquitous LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl or PHP or Python). Notable MySQL luminaries have voiced their suspicions about what lies ahead. However, MySQL forks are already a reality so there isn't much Oracle can do about that, but consider what Oracle did after they bought Virtual Iron, a Xen-based server virtualization vendor. Oracle announced that Virtual Iron would be consumed in-house and no longer provided to customers and Virtual Iron's channel partners were told to get lost. By having already forked, MySQL has escaped Virtual Iron's fate, but who knows what mischief Oracle might engage in down the road.
Red Hat recently released RHEL 5.4 with improved management of KVM virtual machines as the core of their virtualization efforts. Red Hat paid $107M about a year ago to acquire the commercial KVM sponsor Qumranet. Red Hat subsequently moved support for Xen-based virtualization to the sidelines. Unlike Xen, KVM virtualization is a kernel module in Linux distros. But in a server virtualization market dominated by the proprietary VMware, you have to wonder where KVM will find enough room for itself in a market also shared by Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix's XenServer. KVM would seem to something of a long shot until you consider that Red Hat is the market leading, data center grade Linux distro in the U.S. Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has about half of Red Hat's market percentage and is generally considered to be the other data center grade Linux distro. Note: Novell recently announced its interest in KVM, which makes sense because Novell has worked hard at making SLES the VM "guest of choice" on any virtualization host OS or Type I (bare metal) hypervisor.
In something of a surprise move, Microsoft announced that it would provide 20K lines of Linux driver code to the open source community under the GPLv2. Skeptics portrayed Microsoft's release of their Linux driver code as a Trojan horse to help them destroy Linux. The more obvious rationale is that the Linux driver code released by Microsoft makes it easier for Microsoft to support Linux virtual machines on Microsoft's Hyper-V. In any event, it will be up to Microsoft as the chief maintainer of this code to belly up to the bar and keep supporting it. Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the chief Linux driver support maintainers who works at Novell, has already called out Microsoft to do just that or see the code pulled from Linux. You have to wonder if any of this would have happened in the absence of the Microsoft - Novell agreement of November 2006 in which both companies agreed to work on improved Windows - Linux integration in order to better support their mutual customers. Their agreement runs through 2011.
Microsoft recently created and funded CodePlex, which is an open source software hosting site. The official Microsoft disclaimer on the side reads..."Microsoft does not control, review, revise, endorse or distribute the third party projects on this site. Microsoft is hosting the CodePlex site solely as a Web storage site as a service to the developer community." As to be expected, the fanatics see danger to the open source movement whenever Microsoft starts tossing money around that touches on open source software. A more moderate portion of the open source community sees Microsoft's CodePlex site as another validation of the importance of the open source software development model. After years of denigrating open source, Microsoft has grudgingly accepted it as a legitimate development model. However, suspicions of Microsoft's intentions vis-a-vis open source are ingrained in the community. And based on Microsoft's history of untrustworthiness, there will always be concerns about its motives.
On a final note, the 2009 fall harvest of open source Linux distros will include Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSUSE 11.2, which should all arrive before the end of the year. So help yourself to some of the freshest Linux distro releases this holiday season. And I for one will give my thanks and appreciation to all of the people around the world who make open source Linux happen. Note: It is almost time for the release of Ubuntu 10.4, which I believe will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release.
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