In its first quarter of fiscal 2009, Red Hat produced $0.08 of GAAP earnings per share on revenue of $156.6 million. That’s a 32% sales increase over last year, while profits held steady. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story here.

The open-source software veteran released major updates to four of its key products and re-signed every expired contract with its 25 largest subscribers — for 50% more than the worth of the old deals. It’s always cool to see the big boys upgrading their pacts, don’t you think? Red Hat continues to invest in its global sales and support infrastructure, funding the growth from organic cash flows.

And if you doubt that the hackeriffic Linux platform is ready for a hard sell into the corporate space, consider that NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) now runs its trading operations on Red Hat-powered machines. “Red Hat is as pervasive as water gear,” said NYSE CIO Steve Rubinow, according to Red Hat’s earnings call comments. “It is part and parcel of everything we do here from a computing standpoint.” You can’t ask for a stronger endorsement than that, especially since it comes from the traditional-minded Big Board boys at the heart of Wall Street.

Red Hat’s efforts to scale up its business model positions the company for years of upcoming growth, at a time when Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) seems to have botched its latest and greatest operating system launch. It also helps non-Windows competitors like Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) in a roundabout way, by growing the Linux/Unix market into spaces where you might not have seen them before.

For now, it’s all about the enterprise space. But remember that Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) ships every Macintosh with a Unix-derivative operating system installed, and common people don’t seem to have any problem adjusting to its quirks and advantages. One day, Red Hat will lead an assault on the consumer space, too, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is a packet of explosive growth just waiting for a spark.

http://www.fool.com

Following Nokia’s buy-out of Symbian, three quarters of the world’s smartphones will soon be running free software. Assuming we take into account Nokia’s figures of 200 million users and (the less likely figure) of 4 million developers, Nokia’s purchase of Symbian – and the subsequent open source release of Symbian under the auspices of the non-profit Symbian Foundation – is probably the largest ever donation of software to the free software community.

Symbian, which will now be distributed free, is likely to make large inroads into Microsoft’s tenuous 11 per cent share of the smartphone market, as the proprietary option becomes less appealing for reasons of cost and efficiency.

This is an astounding success for the free and open source software community, and is a direct result of the success of Linux and other open source software solutions in the mobile phone market. Linux has gone from nowhere to being the second most popular platform for smartphones. Experts have predicted a bright future for Linux, with ABI Research suggesting that it will appear on more than 200 million phones by 2012. It has been suggested that the driver for Nokia’s initiative is the competitive threat provided by the Google-led Android consortium and the The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, which are both sponsored by a number of prominent telecoms and mobile manufacturers.

Nokia denies that this is so. More significant has been the rapid growth of Linux in the mobile sector. Linux brings many advantages for mobile manufacturers that are not necessarily specific to Linux, but derive from free software licensing and the open source development model. The code is modular and visible, which makes it easier to adapt to specialised hardware. Open sourcing Symbian brings the same advantages, new resources, developers, and collaborative input from other manufacturers.

David Rivas, Nokia vice president for devices research and development, notes that: “The natural evolution of the Symbian platform and the mobile industry has been heading in this direction for quite a while. Its encumbent on all of us in the industry to change with the times, so rather than thinking of this as being a direct response to any particular initiative its really a matter of growing with the times and making the overall platform as competitive as it possibly can be.”

The gizmo that rides on top

For some years the drift in the smartphone industry has been towards free software solutions. Unlike the home computing market the OS is transparent and the user interface is fairly limited. Nobody cares which operating system is running behind the interface. Manufacturers of mobile devices operate in a rapidly changing environment with short product life-cycles and shorter time-to-market.

The compelling arguments for manufacturers to deploy Linux on smart phones have been the same as those that apply to HPC and server manufacturers. Pooling knowledge and resources on the technology and feeding back software changes to the community is of mutual advantage to all the players. Sharing the technology improves performance and reduces the overall costs for everybody.

The market is highly competitive, and every new product comes to market with a new range of features. The availability of a memory-efficient modular operating system that is easily adapted to new hardware environments is an invaluable commodity, and the profit margins being what they are, freedom, “as in beer”, is hard to compete with. The industry has recognised the advantages of free software for some time, and has dispensed with out-dated reservations. What matters is that the software is cheap and efficient, and gives you a competitive edge over your rivals.

Software at the OS level, and much higher up the stack, is not what distinguishes the product. The product is distinguished by the gizmos that ride on top. The OS affects time-to-market, the cost of hardware and software development, the limits of battery life and memory, and the flexibility and reliability of the product, and this is where Linux and free software have proved themselves.

Gaining an education

Linux, even on a mobile device, is more scalable than many of the systems with which it is in close competition. This is because of the modular and scalable pattern that has dominated Linux development since the beginning. With a bit of tweaking here and there you can run it on any device, and if doesn’t quite work, you can strip it down, and pick at the code and find out why. Development is therefore much faster, and support can be found from an expanding ecosystem of developers and companies who specialise in producing hardened versions of Linux for mobile devices.

This is what Nokia hopes to replicate. Symbian is the market leader, and was developed specifically for the kind of devices that Nokia and its partners in The Symbian Foundation manufacture and sell. It has many advantages over Linux, which is the precocious upstart in this market, and for this reason, the first reaction of many to the news that Symbian was to be open sourced has been to assume that there might be a slowdown in the uptake of Linux on smartphones.

This is possible but may not happen for a number of reasons. Linux has some powerful allies in the mobile phone market. More importantly, it has an existing infrastructure of developers who have proved themselves willing to devote their resources to Linux.

Symbian has a large commercial infrastructure, and a large body of supporters amongst the manufacturers, many of whom, including Nokia, also produce Linux-based devices. Building a wider community of developers may prove to be a more difficult task, and this is important because, if Symbian is to put a brake on the impetus of Linux in the smartphone market, it has to develop at a faster rate, and show itself not just to be equal to, but better than, Linux. Linux brings with it a rapidly expanding suite of tools and software that were developed specifically to run on Linux, but Symbian has a longer history in this market, and tools that are more familiar to the market.

More contentiously, Nokia may need to be “educated” as to the prevalent attitude of free and open source software developers towards the imposition of “DRM, IPR, SIM locks and subsidised business models” on their software, as this is an important element in the philosophy that drives many open source developers. DRM is a no-go area for many developers, and “IPR” is a concept that is poorly understood in many sectors of industry.

On another level, competition for dominance of the smartphone market between two “open source” operating systems can only be a good thing for Linux, for Symbian and for the free software community.

“The opportunity for garnering innovation increases as you open up the platform,” notes Rivas, “and you can’t discount the effect that royalties have on the competitiveness of the platform, and how people consider whether or not to use a particular platform. Certainly we hope that this move makes Symbian S60 that much more competitive.”

A changing industry

Symbian is being released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), a licence which is approved by the Free Software Foundation, but is not compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is a pity as it may impede some cross-platform developments. However, the the choice of the EPL is seen as a positive choice.

“There are two issues here for us,” says Rivas. “We wanted a license that was respected and understood by the open source community. We didn’t want to devise a new open source licence simply to handle what we were doing. The specific choice of the EPL has everything to do with the form of copyright that is utilised in the EPL. We felt it was important that there was some kind of requirement to share modifications to the underlying source code, as this is about building a community around software that is going to be made available to others. We also felt that it was important that the software should be able to sit alongside other software, so developers need not fear that their application would not automatically become an open source application. The Eclipse licence satisfies both of those goals, and that’s why we chose it.”

Nokia has shown some commitment to open source development in other areas of its business, having recently purchased Trolltech, the company that produces qt, the graphical toolkit which is a fundamental part of the KDE desktop environment on Linux, and also produces specialised software for the mobile phone market. Nokia also funds maemo.org, a developer community based around Debian GNU/Linux, which produces software for Nokia’s N800 series of tablet devices.

Although Symbian currently has more than 60 per cent of the smart phone market, and Linux only has a 12 per cent share, the decision to release Symbian to the open source community is an acknowledgement that realities in the software development industry are changing, and that Linux is beginning to challenge the assumptions of the mobile device manufacturers.

“We’re watching the industry change,” says Rivas. “Business models are changing along with it, and this feels very much like the right approach to deal with the change, and capture as much innovation as possible. Open source business models and software development are changing the software development industry right in front of us, and it’s important to be in a position to ensure that if someone wants to participate in innovating on a platform they can easily do it.”

Open sourcing Symbian and giving it away free may have been the only option if Nokia was to ensure the continued development of its primary operating system.

http://www.itpro.co.uk

Clark has cut his teeth on VMware and other virtualization platforms as a solutions architect at Alliance Technologies, where he works with small and medium—sized businesses and some enterprise businesses to develop strategies to best implement virtualization, be it storage, server or application virtualization. Clark posted notes on a presentation he did at a recent meeting on Red Hat Network File System (NFS) configuration being used with VMotion, High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

NFS vs. Fibre Channel and iSCSI
The NFS configuration how-to Clark followed was posted by Mike Laverick on RTFM Education and was chosen for the demo not only because of it’s easy configuration, but also because implementing Red Hat NFS is a good low-cost alternative to shelling out big cash for more expensive devices for virtual machines (VM) storage. “Most people think that you need a Fibre Channel SAN [storage area network] or an iSCSI SAN; you’ll spend at least 20 or 30 grand on that device. But all you really need is a reasonably new server with some pretty fast discs, and you can basically have a SAN for the cost of your hardware.”

Clark also says that despite what some benchmarking stats say, performance won’t suffer on the cheaper NFS. “If you do your homework, you’ll find that in many benchmarks when you compare the performance of NFS versus iSCSI, they’re almost nearly identical. You can spin your benchmarking tasks so that one will come out on top every time, but for the majority of uses out there, and especially for test and dev, NFS is just as good as iSCSI.”

The storage system lines blur when you scale out to enterprise-level requirements because the needs go beyond the hardware and software backing your VM storage. Clark says that it’s really about having enough discs. “It doesn’t matter if you have NFS, Fibre Channel or iSCSI if you don’t have enough discs to meet the I/O demand that the number of virtual machines can put on a SAN. Most of the time, it becomes almost a religious decision — whatever you’re most comfortable with.”

HA snafu highlights proper network configuration
After walking through the NFS configuration, Clark went on to demo VMotion, HA and DRS, but ran into some problems with the HA portion. At his home in Pella, Iowa, Clark has a small test lab of two 1U servers running two ESX VMs, which he brought to Des Moines for his presentation.

With little time to reconfigure the servers (Clark was asked only a few days prior to the meeting to give the presentation), Clark decided against bringing his PC that he had used as his NFS server in favor of a Red Hat VM running on his laptop, which served as the basis for his presentation. Although both the ESX servers were able to see the Red Hat VM through a little Linksys switch, the demonstration came to a standstill during the HA portion.

The problem? Because the conference room that the VUG meets in is an island network, there is no default gateway address available as there was at Clark’s lab in Pella. An available, ping-able gateway address is required for HA to work. This is because when HA is set up, each ESX server establishes and communicates through a heartbeat and that’s how it determines whether each server is awake or not. If that heartbeat ceases, then HA makes a decision to restart the VMs that are running on a different ESX server. Sometimes the network becomes unavailable, but the other ESX server continues to run.

The isolation address was the pain point in Clark’s HA demo. The default gateway that used to exist in Pella didn’t exist and HA failed. As Clark explains, “It’s just an additional IP address that an ESX server can gain to say, ‘OK, I lost my buddy, but I need to make sure that the network is still up.’ So as long as it can reach that other IP address, then it can assume that the other host is actually truly dead and that it needs to restart its failed VMs.”

Proper planning and redundancy is key to successful deployments
Clark says that he almost never has problems because he is careful to use VMware-supported hardware and plans out each deployment carefully. But not all IT departments are so careful. “I ran into a customer the other day that didn’t want to invest in redundant networking; they had a four-host cluster and all their networking was going through one physical switch. They had HA set up, and when that switch went down, ever single VM that was on one of their ESX servers powered down.”

Clark says that this can happen as a result of not properly planning your configuration. “One of the configuration options for HA [concerns] what to do if an ESX host becomes isolated. Because it lost its network, there wasn’t a second physical switch for redundancy. Each host, even though it was still running, became isolated according to the HA configuration. It was probably a default setting at the time when they set up the HA cluster, and it powered down all the VMs.” Clark says that with proper preparation, the ESX hosts may not have appeared isolated to HA and this organization may have been able to save the headache of restarting all its VMs and troubleshooting what caused the power-down.

itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com

“We want to educate open source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks, and subsidized business models,” Jaaski told attendees of the Handsets World conference in Berlin. In other words, the open source community needs to learn how to keep things closed.

Nokia has been involved with open source for several years. Notably, it used Linux and several open source code libraries as the foundation of Maemo, the operating system for its line of Internet tablet devices. To be fair, Nokia has also contributed to a number of open source projects in return. But if Jaaski thinks that gives Nokia a right to dictate terms — sorry, to “educate developers” — I think he’s in for a rude awakening.

Not everything needs to be open, and there’s certainly still room for proprietary software in the world. But when it comes to development platforms, the competition is increasingly stiff. As John De Goes, president of tools vendor N-Brain, told Javalobby just last week, “The only commercial development tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools.”

The most obvious example of a developer platform that leapfrogs the competition is Microsoft Visual Studio. Developers who code for non-Windows operating systems may scoff, but no one who has actually used Visual Studio can deny that it’s a top-notch IDE. Moreover, Microsoft is the ultimate authority on the Win32 and .Net APIs, and even the languages, including Visual Basic and C#, are largely Microsoft inventions. How can open source tools compete with that level of vertical integration?

Apple has taken a similar road. Mac OS X developers write to Apple’s proprietary Cocoa and Carbon APIs in Objective C, a language that’s fairly obscure on other platforms. As such, there’s little incentive for anyone to release a competitor to Apple’s Xcode IDE — especially now that it’s become the sole development environment for the iPhone.

What these two examples have in common, however, is that Apple and Microsoft are providing developers with end-to-end platforms. They start by creating environments capable of hosting high-value applications. Then they invite developers to those environments by offering high-quality tools. That one-two punch — create, then invite — is what keeps developers enthusiastic about coding for Windows and Mac OS X, despite the fact that both are closed, proprietary platforms.

By comparison, what is Nokia offering? It based its Maemo OS on Linux, a platform that already existed and was fully open to developers — no invitation needed. And now it wants the open source community’s help to bolt on such features as DRM and SIM locking? What’s the incentive?

Let’s be clear: There is not one single application for a mobile phone that benefits from SIM locking. That particular feature is of interest only to the carriers — and by extension, to Nokia, which wants carriers to support its handsets. Similarly, not only is DRM of little interest to the majority of consumers, it is also widely regarded by developers as technically infeasible, a hopeless time sink, and a waste of money. No wonder Nokia wants it built for free.

Tellingly, Jaaski expressed some disappointment with Nokia’s Maemo experiment. “The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no one was pushing it other than [us],” he said at the Handsets World conference. In other words, Nokia’s tools hadn’t leapfrogged the open source tools; instead, the open source community leapfrogged Nokia.

Nokia assumes that the solution is to “educate” the open source community, but not everyone agrees. On the contrary; Google is banking that the mobile market will follow the pattern we’ve seen on desktop PCs since the rise of the Internet, where connectivity and free access to information is becoming more important than ownership of software. To that end, it is busy readying Android, a feature-rich, fully open source OS platform for mobile devices.

Nokia could be following Google’s example. Instead, it has allowed itself to be bogged down by notions inherited from a computing model that’s rapidly becoming outdated. As Jaaski himself admitted, “As an industry, we plan to use open source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules.”

Most of us call that cheating.

http://weblog.infoworld.com

Launched here on the first day of the company’s annual user conference, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.

“This is the first Linux-based, fully open-source hypervisor. We see this announcement as one way to extend virtualization into the entire enterprise,” said Paul Cormier, president of products and technology at Red Hat. “This is the next-generation operating system. We should be talking about virtualization and operating systems in the same package.”

The Embedded Linux Hypervisor is founded on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) project, which has been integrated into the Linux kernel since 2006. Red Hat has claimed KVM supports live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real-time and also has high availability features.

Red Hat’s main virtualization push so far has been centered on the open-source technology Xen, which is now a Citrix product. The company’s main enterprise Linux product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), has integrated virtualization based on Xen.

When pushed on whether the announcement of the KVM-based embedded hypervisor means that the company sees a limited future for its relationship with Xen, Red Hat executives maintained that the company is keen to maintain both technologies, to give customers different choices over how to manage their virtualization tasks.

The company also claimed that it has not decided on how the Embedded Linux Hypervisor will be distributed to customers–whether it will be integrated into future releases of RHEL, for example. Red Hat added that, for now, the beta version can be downloaded from the oVirt Web site.

Xen’s origins lie in University of Cambridge research that was eventually spun out to create the XenSource organization, which develops and maintains the open-source virtualization technology in conjunction with Red Hat, Novell, and other community software organizations.

Red Hat’s latest virtualization announcement will be seen as another move against virtualization specialist VMware, the market leader for the technology. Some analysts believe VMware’s approach, based around proprietary software not coupled to an operating system, is vulnerable in the long term.

“Much as it has in the operating system and relational database systems (arena), open source is poised to have a disruptive impact on the virtualization space, lowering costs for customers and offering alternatives to proprietary lock-in,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk.

However, despite Red Hat’s continued drive to integrate virtualization into its Linux distributions and characterize virtualization as just another feature of the operating system, it is not clear whether end users are attuned to that approach.

Recent research around attitudes to server operating systems, conducted by ZDNet UK, revealed that many end users are still wary of implementing virtualization and, when they do so, still view it as separate technology from the operating system.

With survey respondents asked to rank operating-system features in order of importance, virtualization came last, in eleventh place, with scalability, high reliability and identity management taking the top three positions.

However, despite not viewing virtualization as a key feature for server operating systems, respondents cited virtualization and consolidation as key server-management tasks in the next five years.

http://news.cnet.com

According to Tipping Point’s Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3′s release.

“Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint’s DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team,” said a representative.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.

Mozilla is reported to be working on a fix.

The Zero Day Initiative has been criticized in the past for paying researchers who find vulnerabilities.

http://news.cnet.com

Read more at: Phoronix.com

With everyone focused on the greatness of XP, Microsoft was demoralized. Can you blame them? Now that it’s out of the picture, what other choice do they have but to fix it? Even users don’t have the option to stick to XP, so they are naturally (and forcefully) going to have to purchase Vista. Again, that should prompt Microsoft into bandaging up Vista until Windows 7 rolls out. We know the software maker isn’t going to rehash it, but they might as well bandage it up temporarily until their new OS release.

Obviously with XP out of the picture, developers will be more inclined to look at Vista as well. After all, that’s the only platform they’ll have to work with. Combine all of this, and Vista sales should rocket.

Of course, Microsoft has even more responsibility now. There are going to be a lot of users on Vista, and the more users there are, the more problems there will be. The platform will be tested into oblivion, and users are going to find faults in areas that Microsoft thought were perfect. The company needs to realign itself and fully concentrate on fixing these issues. Relevant patches should roll out quickly and on time. The company must understand this and move forward accordingly.

Certainly, we are going to miss XP. We didn’t quite appreciate it as much as we should’ve, and now that it’s gone, it’ll be sorely missed as one of the best operating systems in computing and certainly Microsoft’s history.

http://www.cooltechzone.com

Certainly when using any software this matters, but let’s take a closer look at how this advice relates to open source. Evaluate the following statement for accuracy. True or False? “[Open Source] severely limits the possibility of proprietary “lock-in”–where users become hostage to the software vendors whose products they buy.” If you answered “true,” you’re not alone. This was published recently in the MIT Business Review and is a commonly held belief by computing professionals everywhere. In fact, it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of open source technology. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding can prove costly and dangerous.

First let me be clear by stating that I am a sincere advocate for open source software. It is a superior development model which accelerates innovation, makes for superior peer reviewed code, increases competition and more. For some users having access to the source code of software allows them all the freedom they need. However, for many users the open source development process and its open code format do not guarantee the long term ability to easily or freely choose a technology solution. It’s only half the equation: If the cost of moving from one open source solution to another is prohibitive, you’re just as locked in to open source as a closed source solution. Only open source combined with open standards delivers freedom of choice. I would amend the E.U. commissioners statement to read, “choosing BOTH open source and open standards solutions is a very smart business decision indeed.”

Open standards are vitally important to ensure interoperability and reduce your risk as a technology user. A report titled “Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems” developed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard law school suggests that corporations and government policies should “mandate technology choice, not software development models.”

The report defines open standards, which it distinguishes from open source, based on six elements including the nature of its control, evolution, and availability. While propriety software can exist within an open standards environment, the combination of open source and open standards delivers the best choice for freedom from vendor lock-in. In fact, I would argue that the OSS development model combined with a strong, clear, and timely standard produces an autocatalytic environment of broad choice and participation – both working together to make the other stronger. The report states it like this:

“Open standards and open source share common ground. Both result from a community oriented, collaborative process in which anyone can contribute and access the end product — either standard specifications or source code. There is a complementary relationship with the implementation of an open standard in open source, which promulgates adoption of that standard.”

The report recommends “mandating interoperability in procurement language, preferring open standards when applicable and adhering to the principles of openness whenever possible.” It also provides an example of how the government of Japan has developed software procurement guidelines that dictate that open standards and open document formats shall be given priority in government contracts.

Fortunately, there are many open standards implemented in leading open source products (Apache and HTTP for instance). For Linux users there is a widely supported open standard that forms the foundation of most Linux distributions. The Linux Standard Base offers corporate IT a no-cost solution that delivers freedom of choice. So why exactly should you care about Linux standards?

Improved Interoperability. By following the LSB, distribution vendors and ISVs improve portability between applications and compliant operating systems. It also enables end users to choose the distribution that best meets their needs.

Reduced Risk. The more your organization deploys and supports open standards, the less dependent you are on any one vendor. The Linux Standard Base – or any open standard with similar support – is a simple and effective risk management strategy.

Improved Functionality and Choice. Open standards will make it easier for ISVs to port their software to the Linux operating system. This will increase the number and type of applications available for the platform.

So How Do You Take Advantage of Linux Open Standards?

For IT users of Linux, it’s very easy to support open standards for Linux or any other technology. You should simply mandate open standards-compliance into your procurement contracts with your software vendors and ISVs. Many organizations have already done this with the Linux Standard Base. By stipulating this compliance in your contracts, you’ll ensure a degree of portability unparalleled by Windows and other systems ; either closed or open (think OpenSolaris).

You can also join standards organizations such as the Linux Foundation, the Open Group or OASIS and give your feedback directly to consortia members. This will enhance existing standards and make sure your concerns are addressed in the future. Furthermore, for any custom development your organization does, you should follow leading standards and best-practices to reduce your support and training costs and guarantee you can deploy your application on the platform of your choice.

Developing standards hand in hand in the wild and woolly world of open source is no easy task. The LSB project continues to develop and has not even come close to its full potential. However, I hope it’s clear how important open standards are to the success of your Linux strategy. Without them, as Commissioner Kroes points out, you – and your organization – may be in for a costly awakening.

http://www.linux-foundation.org

http://www.engadget.com