Open Source – The Times They Are A Changing

Three very interesting little open source stories passed my desk recently that I found shone facets on open source issues.

Last week, the Industrial Commercial Bank of China has signed a deal with Unix-clone Turbolinux to run open-source software in all of the bank’s operations. “Linux deployment is growing in China, with software makers targeting segments such as banking, insurance and wireless applications. Intel last year began a program to boost sales in China of desktop computers based on Linux.” Perhaps Microsoft shouldn’t look to China for much market growth.

Meanwhile, domestic open source companies have also been pursuing revenue through maintanance fees. According to Martin LaMonica of Cnet “In the absence of software license fees, open-source companies are adopting a services-intensive business model, accelerating an industrywide shift toward ongoing, rather than up-front, revenue.” Why would anyone want to pay up-front for software, when you can try it out and pay as you go?

Finally, open source companies, the pariahs of venture capitalists, are finally beginning to get some respect. When William Jolitz and I released to the public after 3 years of work in 1992, there was no serious business model for open source companies – especially an operating system. Companies bundled Unix on their brand of hardware, like Sun or Symmetric Computer Systems. Microsoft had the X86 desktop “locked up”. No one could compete with Microsoft by “giving away software”!

But the times, they are a changing. According to Gary Rivlin of the New York Times, “The first time Marc Fleury tried to raise money for his technology start-up company, in mid-2000, a venture capitalist told him that he didn’t have merely a bad business plan but a terrible one. Not only was Fleury planning to compete against the likes of IBM, but his product was open-source software, which he would give away. Four years later, he tried again. His business was still based on the free distribution of code, yet now there was a dogfight among venture capitalists competing to finance his company, called JBoss.In February 2004, JBoss received a combined $10 million from two prominent venture capital firms: Accel Partners in Palo Alto, Calif., and Matrix Partners in Waltham, Mass.”

Who’s Doing the Icon’ing?

So, Steve Jobs got annoyed at a publisher’s attempt to sponge off of his rep and decided to kick out all of Wiley’s books from the Apple stores. Matt Marshall pulls some really funny quotes from the NYTimes from the beleaguered author, a kind of “pity me, I’m an orphan because I killed my parents” defense:

“This guy is out of control,” Mr. Young told the Times, referring to Jobs. “I’m just a little guy. I’m just one of many guys Steve has destroyed over the years,” he added, though it wasn’t clear from the NYT article exactly what he meant. Young added: “He has an amazing ability to con people.”

So does the author, apparently, who according to “the late Jeff Raskin, a former Apple employee”, didn’t mind a bit of imaginative invention himself. As an author myself, I can’t really feel any sympathy for a publisher and author who can’t even pull off a good scam. Steve is better – that’s a surprise?

My take to Matt today:
“Figures you’d get the pathetic cry for sympathy from a hack writer who rehashed a lousy 20 year old book.

But the real problem is Wiley. They’re the ones who got something on the cheap and said “Hey, let’s just respin this – who’s gonna do anything about it?” Well, guess they found out. 🙂

Maybe Wiley should pay a *real* writer to do a bio. Isn’t Silicon Valley worth the insight and talent of a Tom Wolfe or a Ken Kesey – or a Tracy Kidder, who’s “Soul of a New Machine” captured the sheer thrill of competition in the computer industry?

I think after changing the world, innovators in Silicon Valley deserve a real writer for a change. Put the hacks on the throw-away Britney Spears bios, and give us the literary positioning we deserve.”

Watch Out for that …. Queue! Oh Wait, I Feel Buffer.

Ran into Vidya Babu (Director SW Engineerng, Cisco) at a girls Internet event sponsored by the ATW and Cisco called Great Minds Program Series: The Human Internet Game. What was it about? According to the invite the “…participants play the roles of routers, switches and packets in a network. Working together, these “components” (AKA the girls) have to route as many “human packets” as they can through the network in a limited amount time.” In other words, I got to watch my daughter Rebecca Jolitz and her friend Jesse run from hop to hop, while other girls stood around acting as very unsophisticated routers.

So I asked Vidya “What do you do with the girls if a packet is dropped”? I kind of left her speechless. Nope, no congestion control, retransmission, window, or other stuff. This would have made the game a lot more fun and real to the girls. I guess we’re just at link, right?

Or maybe I should save the inside humor for Byte next time.

Fun Friday – Watch the Movie, Get the DVD, Plug in for the Download – Not

Director Steven Soderbergh is a brave man. A really brave man. At least, given that movie studios and theater owners want to go after him with billy clubs, he’s pretty brave. He’s agreed to work with 2929 Entertainment to produce six movies in HDTV which also will be released on DVD and cable.

According to Reuters, “The same-day distribution challenges long-held practices for Hollywood studios that first place films in theaters, hoping for solid box office revenues, then sell them months later on DVD or videocassette and offer them to TV broadcasters. Studios and theater owners are concerned that altering the practice would cannibalize box office sales.”

Wow, it’s not often you see the sharks worry about the fish. Now, if he also did downloads, what do you think they’d say then.

Muse, Sing the Tale of the Reconstructed Scrolls

In the midst of lots of work, a lovely article by David Keys and Nicholas Pyke of the Independent about bits and pieces of papyrus found in an ancient Egyptian garbage dump, reconstructed using a variety of satellite scanning and search technologies.

“The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus (“city of the sharp-nosed fish”) in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.” And it took a tremendous amount of work to scan and reconstruct.

So the ancients threw away Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod like we throw away bodice rippers and serial killer novels. Or maybe the Hellenes would have preferred what we read now – and were stuck with “And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.”

When First Mover Doesn’t Help You

An engineer I know was infuriated to find that a software architecture proposal a friend had done several years ago and presented to Microsoft as an enhancement to work done at InterProphet appeared in another company’s patent claims – even though he’d presented a similar idea to Microsoft long before. “Well, I guess I can at least go to my grave claiming we did it first” he laments. And as I was there – I can vouch for them. They did it first. This happens occasionally, and we have to ask ourselves “Does being first really matter”?

First mover isn’t always best mover if you’re dependent on a behemoth like Microsoft. It’s when the market is ready – even IBM and Cisco face this problem. The first mover in Cisco’s area was Proteon. They had 100% of the router market. Haven’t heard of them? Not surprising.

Branding Constellations

Is it any surprise that in an age of “branding” some folks would think it’s a perfect time to rename all the Constellations? No, I didn’t think you’d be surprised. Of course, the complaints are usually something of the order of that the sky is full of “pagan” symbols, or that no one cares about some woman chained to the rocks (Andromeda) unless she’s Xena. But somehow those good old names live on.

In fact, co-opting the stars into new constellations for an agenda is an old trick (from Hinckley, “Star Names, Their Lore and Meaning (1899,1963) pp16-17):
“It has been the fashion with astronomers to decry this multiplicity of sky figures, and with good reason; for, as Miss Clerke writes in her monograph on ‘The Hershels and Modern Astronomy’: Celestial maps had become “a system of derangement and confusion,” of confusion “worse confounded.” New asterisms, carved out of old, existed precariously, recognized by some, ignored by others; waste places in the sky had been annexed by encrouching astronomers as standing-ground for their glorified telescopes, quadrants, sextants, clocks; a chemical apparatus had been set up by the shore of the river Eridanus, itself a meandering and uncomfortable figure; while serpents and dragons trailed their perplexing convolutions through hour after hour of right ascension; with more to the same effect. This condition of things led the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1841, to depute to Sir John Herschel and Mr. Francis Baily the task of attempting a reform. But although improvement was made by the discarding of several figures and the subdivision of others, their changes were too sweeping and were not successful, so that as the constellations stood then, in the main do they stand today, and so will they probably remain, at least with the people. “

So don’t be surprised if someone tries to rename Andromeda “Xena” to sell a video game. But if the Royal Astronomers couldn’t get away with it, I wouldn’t lie awake at night worrying about Nintendo. Now, I suppose we should discuss Pluto and planetary designations, right?

Checksums and Rethinking Old Optimization Habits

More war stories on checksum failures over the years. Craig Partridge recalls “some part of BBN” experienced an NFS checksum issue and that it “took a while for the corruption of the filesystem to become visible…errors are infrequent enough that NIC (or switch, or whatever, …) testing doesn’t typically catch them. So bit rot is slow and subtle — and when you find it, much has been trashed (especially if one ignores early warning signs, such as large compilations occasionally failing with unrepeatable loading / compilation errors)”. Craig is absolutely right – this was exactly the case with the Sunbox project I described as well as the datacenter mirror example (see Checksums – Don’t Leave the Server Without Them). Too much damage too late. As implicit dependence on reliability increases, the value of checksums becomes very clear.

In the early deep space probes they learned the hard way the importance of always providing enough redundancy and error correction, because a single bit error might be the one that leads to the destruction of the communications ability of the spacecraft. One spacecraft had a corruption error like this that destroyed it for precisely this reason. They optimized out reliability to get a slightly greater data rate, and lost the spacecraft (this has happened more than once).

We’re reaching a point where we have to seriously think about whether an “optimization” is really valuable, since as Craig notes, you may not notice a problem until too late. In this age of ubiquitous computing, with plentiful processor, memory, and network bandwidth, we should be focussed on increased reliability and integrity, but old habits of a more parsimonious age die hard.

Another very recent example of ignoring the value of checksums is reflected in the recent ‘fasttrack’ problems of incorrect billing of tolls. But that’s another story…

When Kids Do Video Better than the Pros

Last Saturday, while my husband William Jolitz was attending a really dull all-day seminar on Law and Technology at Stanford, I had a much more enjoyable privilege – escorting my movie-making daughter to her first film debut at the Windy Hill Kids Film Festival at the Menlo School in Atherton.

The screening auditorium was filled with kids (and some proud parents). Rebecca’s film Mystery Festival (see “Rebecca Jolitz Debuts Movie in Kids Film Fest”) was screened in the 5th grade drama catagory, although it’s more a kids mystery than drama. What fun it was!

Lots of really great work in the high school range – some very pro and creative. The MTV-U speaker was fun too. Kids, movies, and the future. Shelby, the young organizer of this fest, is a really positive and outgoing teen (she’s 13). Ben and Rebecca shot interviews with filmmakers, audience, and organizers, MTV style during the fest, and are putting together a quick flick on “being there” for fun (it’s spring break – they need to do something)…

I hope this happens every year. Because I saw a lot of really great work. Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly on talent anymore.

Fun Friday – Datacenter Checksum Stories

In an e2e discussion on the loss of data integrity on Oracle TNS gateways that still exists today, one wag said “When Network General was adding more SQL decodes to the Sniffer(r), in the ’90s, we had a presentation on the Oracle transport (TNS) underlying SQL Net traffic. TNS rode on Netware SPP, or TCP, etc. The fellow went into packet fields in detail and explained how Oracle also made gateway software available for Sun boxes to go from an Oracle system to an IBM SNA db system. The gateway received SQL on TNS on TCP on IP on Ethernet (for instance) and spit out SQL on TNS or whatever IBM wanted. As he expounded on TNS pkt fields, a few hands went up — “What’s the checksum field for if it’s always 0?”…”It’s unimplemented for now”. “Well if it’s unused and your gateway has bad memory, how do you know the data going into the db on the other side will be good?” Answer: “I don’t know”. (Thanks to Alex Cannara).

Of course, if the Oracle tech guy had gone to the Microsoft Research school of obsfucation, he would have said “The probability of this event occuring such that the reliability of the underlying link layer is impaired by an improbably low memory bit error at ten to the minus 12 excluding thermal radiative factors and charge displacement is so low as to be impossible, hence the question is irrelevent”. Now, that’s the way to talk the talk. I guess that’s why Oracle is always Number 2 to Microsoft. 🙂