Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

Microsoft’s recent threat to seek royalties from users and distributors on 235 patents it holds for open-source software has unnerved users in Asia, but supporters in the US are thumbing their noses at the claim.

Woraphon Watunyuta, senior vice-president of IT at Thailand’s Siam City Bank, fears alliances between open-source and proprietary players could pave the way for commercial vendors to “touch” open-source codes and then “resell modified versions as their own product”.

About 15 per cent of the platforms and applications, mainly in email and firewalls, at the bank are based on open-source technologies.

“If this is what’s happening, we have to be concerned as it will impact the core competency of the open-source community as a whole,” Watunyuta told Computerworld Singapore.

Waleed Hanafi, the Singapore-based CIO of the Global Refund Group, said he sees the heated discussion of patents in the software arena as a “troubling trend”.

Hanafi said he is a supporter of the open-source movement “as a counter balance against the increasing monoculture of proprietary software”.

“I do think software patents are out of control. They are often used to prevent competitors from bringing products to market.

“Since software is the embodiment and codification of ideas and processes, it seems odd that a patent should be issued rather than a copyright, as would be applicable for the same ideas and processes described in a book. Anything that restricts innovation and evolution is bad for those of us who use software to run our businesses.”

Read more: Computerworld Singapore

Will 2008 be the year of the open source desktop?

Red Hat Linux is now widely deployed on the servers in my data center. Users have no idea what operating system underlies our xeb applications and databases, nor do they care, as long as those tools are highly available.

But the desktop is uncharted territory. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to find an operating system that balances ease of use, stability, low cost and high functionality. My experiences were the subject of an article in CIO magazine that described how I tried to use my enterprise applications with Windows XP, Mac OS X, Red Hat and Fedora. Recently, I’ve spent months running Novell’s SUSE Linux and Canonical’s Ubuntu, and I’ll report on those efforts soon.

Based on these experiences, I think I can say when the open source desktop will become a more widely deployed end-user operating system: when it becomes a product and not a project. That will require the following:

The open source desktop should recognise my video chip set, my wired/wireless networking hardware and all my storage devices without being custom-configured, which would require me to search the web to learn how others have done the same thing with the same hardware. Searching the web works, but even for a high-level engineer, a typical laptop requires a lot of trial and error.

Read more: Reseller News

Engineers have been bypassing open source software — such as the Linux operating system — due to confusion over its classification.

The CIO of the U.S. Navy says naval technology managers have not been giving due consideration to the use of open source software in business and weapons systems due to confusion over its classification. In building systems for the Navy, engineers can use what’s called GOTS or COTS — government off-the-shelf-software or commercial off-the-shelf software.

Because open source software — such as the Linux operating system — fits neither definition, engineers have been bypassing it, says Navy CIO Robert Carey, in a memo dated June 5.

To resolve the issue, Carey has ordered technology managers at the Department of The Navy (DON) to classify open source software as commercial. “DON commands will treat OSS [open source software] as COTS when it meets the definition of a commercial item,” Carey wrote in the memo, which lays out additional requirements that open source programs must meet to merit Naval consideration.

A copy of the memo is posted on a Web site maintained by the Open Source Software Institute–a non-profit group comprising government, academic and commercial representatives that aim to promote the use of open source software in the public sector.

In the memo, Carey says he hopes the clarification will boost the adoption of open source software within the Navy and notes that he “recognizes the importance of OSS to the warfighter and the need to leverage its benefits throughout the DON.”

Increased use of open source software by the Navy could put it at odds with Microsoft.

Read more: InformationWeek

Two Slashdot posts and a long meeting with Microsoft really got me to thinking about whether Microsoft really likes, or doesn’t like, the new GPL version and how its strategy, with regard to open source in general, has been changing over the past few years.

It got me thinking about four facts: Buyers don’t like change; the new IT priority is interoperability; IT likes simple homogeneity (it often seems they’d like to return to one big mainframe); and IT is not a line organization (and has no line authority). Knowing that, I immediately understood Microsoft’s strategy and why, while it would never use it, it loves the 3.0 version of the GPL.

Interoperability

Going into this decade, Microsoft was still on a path of being largely closed with an overarching strategy that its tools would work best, or only, with other Microsoft tools. Microsoft ran against any concept that reduced its ability to protect the products it had developed and the ecosystem it had so painstakingly put in place.

However, that was not working, so its strategy had to change. IT buyers increasingly were demanding to see Microsoft’s code, and Microsoft seemed to be getting less and less of the UNIX migration opportunities. New employees increasingly advocated the benefits of open source, and as a competitive response, Microsoft hired aggressively from the open source community, creating a new decision core in the company.

Read more: ITBusinesEdge