It is good to see settlement — something I’ve been calling for, while also warning against patent and IP aggression. However, this settlment comes from the one conflict in this ongoing war that was actually shedding some light on the matter, rather than further complicating it.

See the full article at TechNewsWorld.

It is good to see settlement — something I’ve been calling for, while also warning against patent and IP aggression. However, this settlment comes from the one conflict in this ongoing war that was actually shedding some light on the matter, rather than further complicating it.

See the full article at TechNewsWorld.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and open source in cloud computing in 2012. The cloud continues to be the biggest disruptor and opportunity for Linux providers. 2012 got off to an interesting start with Microsoft’s efforts to support for Linux on Azure, which highlights just how pervasive Linux has become in cloud computing. As detail in our special report on The Changing Linux Landscape, we also expect Linux to continue to be the basis for most offerings in IaaS and particularly PaaS, which is burgeoning across open source languages and frameworks as well as verticals and enterprise customers. Its popularity among enterprise and other developers will also bolster Linux and open source software in 2012.

We can certainly expect to see Linux continue its domination in supercomputing and the Top 500 Supercomputer List, where Linux continues to grow its share above 90% while others, such as Microsoft, Apple and BSD, fall off of the list.

I also expect Linux will grow its presence and impact on the wider, more mainstream server market, where Red Hat and SUSE continue to benefit from Unix migration, particularly from Solaris. Our analysis with survey data from 451 Research division TheInfoPro shows server spending for databases and data warehousing favoring Red Hat with Linux over Oracle with either Linux or Solaris. Out of more than 165 server professionals interviewed by TIP, 67% are planning to spend more with Red Hat on database/data-warehousing, and only 6% plan to spend less. The positive figures for Red Hat mirror negative spending intentions for Oracle, with 55% planning to spend less and only 9% planning to spend more. Spending continues to decline strongly for all of the primary Unix providers in the study, which in addition to Oracle includes IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

We may also see further expansion for Red Hat, which may be eyeing key acquisitions, and other Linux and open source vendors as they continue building their channels and wade more into midmarket and SMB customers.

In smartphones and mobile software, I also expect Linux will do quite well in 2012 with continued Android strength, diminished FUD and possibly an open source boost from a newly-open sourced WebOS. We also see Ubuntu arriving on the mobile and converged device scene, including ‘concept’ appearance at CES.

We’re also likely to see Linux in automobiles, health care and other electronics even more in 2012, though you may never hear Linux or open source. Don’t be fooled though, Linux is expanding its already impressive, wide presence and 2012 looks to be another year of significant gains.

*What’s it mean for WebOS?
Moving WebOS to open source was best option for HP. It retains some value in the software depending on its involvement. It is also the best fate for the code, rather then being sold or simmered to its IP and patent value or even used as another weapon in the ongoing mobile software patent wars. Still, the move comes amid huge developer and consumer uncertainty for WebOS. Nevertheless, at least WebOS was already in the market with a compelling products, the Palm the Pre, in the modern smartphone market. WebOS will hopefully have a faster path to open source than Symbian since the former is based on Linux. I still think the greatest opportunity for WebOS may be in serving as an open alternative in the market, particularly after Android has proven to handset makers, wireless carriers, OEMs and others that a Linux-based, open source mobile OS can succeed in the market and provide profit for multiple parties. Furthering this opportunity, WebOS may be even more attractive to these key vendors, channel players and other stakeholders who are tired of the IP and patent stress and expense around Android. Of course, Android was not under patent or IP attack until it was successful in the market and the same may be the case for WebOS, though we think its IP roots and history in touch and smartphone technology are less complex in terms of origin and ownership.

*What’s it mean for competitors?
For Apple, an open source WebOS means more market pressure and open pressure, more competition for developers and a real danger WebOS hooks into the Android ecosystem. WebOS may also be harder to attack from a patent and IP standpoint since it is older and more singular in ownership (Palm and now HP). Other factors include HP’s own formidable patent portfolio and the perception of Apple as a patent aggressor, which would be reinforced if it attacked WebOS the way it has gone after Android.

For Android, it may finally get a dose of its own open medicine, feeling the pressure of another Linux-based, open source mobile OS that is familiar to many developers, compatible with newer smartphone technologies and appealing to handset makers and other key OEMs. However, WebOS is also a validation of Android, which paved the path for mobile Linux and open source to finally break through beyond geeks to reach a mass consumer audience.

As for other proprietary players such as Microsoft and RIM, another open source rival is bad news. It presents another open source option and potentially serious competition on developers, applications, devices, carriers and consumers. An open source WebOS may also make Android, in effect, more open with faster, easier access to code for both Android and WebOS compete. This could make it even harder for these older, proprietary players to get developer or consumer mind share that is already slipping.

*What’s it mean for open source? Really, there is no downside for open source except that it will be viewed as a form of software cemetery if WebOS is not developed or delivered to market. HP’s WebOS move does give open source greater prominence in mobile software. Again, it is a validation of Android, which is Linux-based and open source, and shows that we haven’t seen the last of mobile Linux and open source software in Android.

*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

iTunes or direct download (27:35, 4.7MB)

# Rackspace announced its intention to form an independent OpenStack Foundation.

# HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud.

# Pentaho appointed Quentin Gallivan as its new CEO.

# Hortonworks continued the discussion about contributions to Apache Hadoop.

# Bob Bickel explained why CloudBees is not, itself, open source.

# Google announced the limited preview release of Google Cloud SQL.

# Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges joined the Linux Foundation.

# Dave Neary discussed the different types of community in relation to the Tizen project.

# Akamai joined the OpenStack community.

# Daniel Abadi provided his perspective on Oracle’s NoSQL Database.

# One more thing…
Apple’s relationship with open source may be somewhat tenuous – Paul Rooney provides some background – but given the impact Steve Jobs has made on the industry as a whole it seems wrong not to mark his passing in some way. We’ll leave the words to the company he created.

I also remember when I saw a Macintosh for the first time. I had followed Apple for some time, but I had never had the opportunity to actually see a Macintosh. I think it was in 1987 or 1988, when I was a student at the University of Georgia. I believe it was a Mac SE, and it had one megabyte of RAM and a twenty-megabyte hard drive. Up to that point, I had only played around with MS-DOS, and that was on a computer at work. I was amazed at the graphical interface. The mouse was definitely cool. I had to have one, but at that time, they were a couple thousand dollars (at least), and I was a “poor college student”. I spent a lot of time at the computer lab, and I waited.

In 1989, I landed my first job out of college, and one of the first things on my “to-buy” list was a Mac. I just didn’t WANT a Mac – I NEEDED a Mac. So, with a loan from the bank (yes, we took out a loan), my brother and I bought two Mac SE’s, and an HP Deskwriter dot-matrix printer that cost $1,195 (we had to share the printer). I remember opening the box and putting the computer on my desk – and I was thrilled and amazed. With my 2400-baud modem, I could connect to the Unix computers at work. Life was grand. The first major improvement that I made was to upgrade the RAM to four megabytes. I think the upgrade was a whopping $400. And then, about a year later, the hard drive died (one of the only problems that I have ever had with a Mac). So, I upgraded to a forty-megabyte drive for $500. I remember thinking that I will wouldn’t need any more additional hard drive space for a really long time. Besides, I had several hundred 3.5 inch floppies. I later upgraded to a faster processor and bought an internal video card that let me use a huge monitor at the same time (I think it was a 19″ monitor – but it was a grayscale monitor). But having two monitors was cool – very cool – even though a color monitor still eluded me.

And then, about every year or two, I would upgrade to a newer model. I had an SE/30, LC, IIsi, Quadra 840 AV (which I used to edit my first videos), a Power Mac G3, G4 and then several iMac’s. I remember staying up all night playing SIM City on the LC and playing on Prodigy. I had other computers in the house – a Windows machine and a couple of Unix boxes. But I was all-Mac. I remember my first web cam, which I set up to record people driving my the house. The motion-detection software would record a few grayscale photos when cars would drive by. I found out when the trash was picked up and when the mail was delivered. Technology was amazing.

I followed all of the Apple news. Even before I bought my first Mac, I remember when Steve was booted from Apple. I winced as I remember watching Scully and Amelio take Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. When I traveled to the San Francisco area in the mid-1990′s on a business trip, I took some time to drive to Cupertino to the Apple Campus. While I would have loved to have been an Apple employee back then, moving to California was pretty much out of the question. But, I wanted to at least state that I had applied for a job there – which I did. I wasn’t hired, but at least I tried, at least I did that. And I remember when Steve Jobs returned. Mac lovers now had hope. The love affair was rekindled – and it had the opportunity to be much, much stronger than before. Steve would fix it. He had to fix it. And he did.

When I started a company a few years ago, the office was filled with Intel iMac’s and a Mac Pro Server (running MySQL of course!). My wife has a MacBook Pro, my kids have Mac Mini’s, and I just recently purchased a MacBook Pro. We even have an iMac in the kitchen. My Mom has an iMac and my Dad has my Mom’s old G4 (when she upgrades, he gets the hand-me-downs). My sister recently “upgraded” from Windows to an iMac. I gave my niece a MacBook when she started graphics arts school. (My brother is the only current hold-out, but he is on the way to converting back to the Mac). I think you get my point – I really love Macintosh computers and I enjoy “converting people” to the cause.

Needless to say, my life has been touched in some way throughout the past 20-plus years by the Macintosh. I have done everything from creating proposals, creating and listening to music, to editing my youngest son’s birth video (yes, it is rated G) – all on a Macintosh. It is even where I store my tens of thousands of digital photos. I have designed web sites, created software products and ran a business on Macintosh computers. My wife produced a video for my 40th birthday party on her Mac. And, I can’t forget my first iPod, my first iPod Touch, and my iPhones – versions 3 and 4 (I am holding out for the iPad 3). Heck, I even still use the old AppleWorks application every once in a while.

Even though the Mac isn’t and has never been the most dominant “PC” in the marketplace – if you ask anyone that uses a Mac if they would ever use anything else, the vast majority of them would answer with a strong and resounding “no” (or even HELL NO). Even when Apple stock was trading at less than five bucks per share, and it seemed like it was going out of business, I remember telling friends that Apple would pull through (heck – it HAD to pull through). I couldn’t imagine having to use a Windows machine.

And so, I owe a lot of my memories over the past twenty years to Apple Computer, and of course, to Steve Jobs. Steve wouldn’t just manufacture a computer, he would design a work of art (albeit a more expensive work of art). And the operating system was, well, extremely easy to use. Having an Apple computer is tantamount to having a love affair – a comment that I usually don’t hear from users of that other operating system. Steve’s vision for what a computer should do for the user and how the user interacts with the computer was pure genius. And being an ex-Unix admin, once the Mac OS switched to a Unix-based OS, I was even more smitten.

When I had heard the Steve Jobs had passed, I was sad. Well, maybe a bit more than sad. I was never really a big fan of Steve Jobs as a person, mainly because I really didn’t know a lot about him personally – I just loved his products, his vision. When he would announce a new product, you could tell that he was really, really proud of what he had achieved. He wasn’t just up on stage hawking widgets, he was introducing something truly historic. Something that would cause other companies to scurry and to try and play catch-up (they rarely succeeded). I can only hope that the team that he has placed at Apple will continue his legacy of producing innovation at the same level of genius that he has cultivated over the years. If not, then I will also be sad for my two kids, as they won’t get to experience the joy of using a Macintosh as I have. Steve Jobs, you will be missed. Greatly.

A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are AWOL from Lion. Instead, the geek-loved but less widely used Postgres database is installed.

It seems pretty obvious to the casual observer why Apple would make this move. With Oracle suing Google over Java, and Oracle's open source philosophy in doubt, I know I wouldn't want to stake my bottom line on an Oracle package bundled with my premiere operating system. Apple could have used one of the non-Oracle forks of MySQL, but it appears they decided to skirt the issue entirely by going with Postgres, which has a clear history of non-litigiousness.

Meanwhile, Oracle had better be asking themselves if they can afford to play the games they've been playing without alienating their market base.

South Korea fines Apple 3 million won, which works out to ...

Apple has bee been hit with a penalty from the South Korean government that's a result of the iPhone location-tracking story that broke earlier this year. Now, Apple may have more money than the U.S. Treasury sitting in petty cash right now, but it will be difficult for them to recover from such a significant hit to their bottom line: a whopping 3 million won, which works out to a staggering ... um ... $2,830. Never mind.

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Java 7 and the risks of X.0 software

Java 7 was recently released to the world with great fanfare and todo. This week, we got a reminder why using an X.0 version of software is a risky endeavor. It turns out that the optimized compiler is really a pessimized compiler, and that programs compiled with it stand a chance of crashing. Even better, there's a chance they'll just go off and do the wrong thing.

Java 7 seems to be breaking new ground in non-deterministic programming, which will be very helpful for physics researchers working with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What could be more appropriate for simulating the random behavior of particles than a randomly behaving compiler?

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• More Developer Week in Review coverage

Given that we continue to see software patent-based attacks on Android, as well as swirling FUD around coverage of the attacks and never ending suits and settlements and courtroom developments, it is clear it will be a long time before any of this legal business is ever close to settled, unless ended by settlements first, which is likely.

However, I’m more interested in the technology in the meantime. I also think it’s interesting to see, if not a ‘more open’ alternative emerging, at least another, ’somewhat open’ option in the tablet market, this being HP’s WebOS. It’s interesting that WebOS evolved from Palm, which HP acquired in March 2010 for $1.4 billion. Though Apple’s iPad is still the clear leader in tablets, it is interesting to see continuing signs that what happened in smartphones (where iPhone led and Android quickly caught up and then passed iOS) may be happening in tablets. There is also still the possibility that tablets may play out like netbooks, with wild popularity followed by a fade in favor of more traditional PCs for traditional PC needs. It is interesting to note that Google’s Eric Schmidt recently commented on the continued utility of PCs, which will remain key to professionals, consumers, and also developers, largely because of the tactical keyboard. What is most likely is continued convergence, and it will be interesting to see what ties emerge between WebOS and PCs as computer hardware giant HP rolls out the OS in tablets and smartphones.

We also see other signs that new, open entrants may be mixing things up in the mobile and converged device market, such as word of a possible Android and iOS competitor from Mozilla. There is yet another project that is already a factor in netbooks, other mobile devices and the burgeoning IT market of automobile information and entertainment systems, MeeGo, which is also open source. Even Research in Motion’s Playbook is based on the QNX operating system, for which source code was made available by its previous owner to make it more like the open source Linux OS, which was attracting developers and interesting customers.

We believed there was a fairly prominent place for open source software, open source operating systems and general openness in mobile software when we wrote our report, Mobility Matters three years ago, but we would have never guessed that the openness of this software would be so significant in two respects: defense from patent and other intellectual property attacks; the market power of open source, which draws in not only developers, but manufacturers and other third-parties. We’ve seen the speed and strength at which a project and community such as Android can grow. Will we now begin to see other alternatives that are even more open emerge as top choices among developers, hardware companies, wireless players and consumers? Never before have those alternatives really existed in the mobile software world, so it’s good at least to see the possibility is there.

# CloudBees secured $10.5m in Series B venture funding.

# Microsoft renewed its vows with Attachmate’s SUSE business unit, committing to invest $100m in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates over the next four years.

# Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, twhioch offers zero downtime update technology for Linux.

# Ingres announced that Steve Shine has been named Chief Executive Officer and President.

# Dell unveiled the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution.

# DotNetNuke announced the immediate availability of DotNetNuke 6

# SkySQL announced a partnership with Yoshinori Matsunobu, to provide technical support, professional services, and training for MySQL Master High Availability Manager and Tools (MySQL MHA).

# Oracle provided early access to new features being lined up for MySQL 5.6.

# Abiquo tripled its cloud management business in the first half of 2011.

# Black Duck grew sales 37% in Q2.

# Mark Shuttleworth discussed the responsibilities of [copyright] ownership.

# Linux 3.0 has been released.

# The Document Foundation provided an illustration of its developer community.

# GigaOm considered what it means if Hortonworks doesn’t do distribution.

# Postgres has replaced MySQL as the default database for Apple OS X.

# Gluster announced the beta release of GlusterFS 3.3.