All Things Digital

In Sept. 1991, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emailed CEO Bill Gates: “We must slow down Novell. As you said, Bill, it has to be dramatic. We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger.” And in 2001 Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer likened Linux to “cancer.” Later that year, Gates derided open-source licensing models like the one used by Linux as “Pacman-like.”

That’s some heavy rhetoric. Certainly, it’s representative of the distaste with which Microsoft (MSFT) has viewed Linux and Linux vendors like Novell (NOVL) for the past decade.

So to hear back in Nov. 2006 that Microsoft was partnering with Novell to offer sales support for Novell’s SUSE Linux and cooperate with its old rival on Linux-Windows interoperability was astonishing–a bit like discovering that Stalin really sent Trotsky to Mexico for a nice vacation or that Itchy has shacked up with Scratchy.

And the unlikely partnership continues to astonish to this day. On Wednesday, the two companies expanded their interoperability agreement, with Microsoft agreeing to buy and resell up to $100 million in enterprise support subscriptions for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server OS. That’s in addition to the $240 million Microsoft has already agreed to buy.

Odd, isn’t it, to see Microsoft marketing Linux like this? Odder still, to see Novell in an alliance with the company that hoped to “slaughter” it. So why did Novell agree to it? “Novell’s benefit is obvious, if not self-destructive,” Joe Wilcox explains over at Microsoft Watch. “The deal allows Novell to exist in the shadow of Windows Server, sustaining on its table scraps. Microsoft can offer customers that simply must have some Linux servers a sanctioned source for good tools ensuring interoperability with Windows Server.”

Google’s (GOOG) Open Handset Alliance is going to have to do a lot better than a few early prototype demos if it truly hopes to unify mobile Linux around its Android specification. Because rival LiMo Foundation is stepping up its game. And fast.

Earlier this year, LiMo uncrated a first wave of handsets running on its Linux-based software platform for mobile devices–18 devices from seven vendors. And now the foundation is adding some big names to its roster of mobile-phone outfits. This morning, LiMo announced eight new members, among them: Mozilla, developer of the Firefox Web browser and Verizon Wireless (VZ).

The companies’ membership is an important endorsement for LiMo–Verizon’s in particular. The mobile-phone player seems quite invested in LiMo and its vision of mobile Linux, which is far more Democratic than the OHA, which is one of those wonderful we’re-Google-and-Google-always-knows-best democracies. So much so that Verizon has declared LiMo’s to be its preferred mobile OS.

“We are wholeheartedly endorsing LiMo’s approach, and we are investing company resources, but we see the opportunity to have both the OHA and LiMo succeed and/or work together,” Kyle Malady, vice president of networks at Verizon Wireless, said during a conference call with reporters this morning. “LiMo is our platform of choice, but if there comes a point where we see there is benefit for our customers we will use OHA as well.”

(Image Credit: ThinkGeek)

Get this: A new report from the Standish Group claims that FOSS–free and open source software–is decimating the software market. To wit:

Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.”

Quite a claim. A contentious one too, since, according to research outfit IDC, Linux software actually contributed $10 billion to the market and is expected to contribute $31 billion by 2011. The 2011 forecast for spending on the entire Linux ecosystem? More than $49 billion.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, a Web search for “Standish Group”+Microsoft+”sponsored by” didn’t return any documents.

Looks like Samba is the first beneficiary of the European Commission’s antitrust sanctions against Microsoft. To comply with the terms established by the EC’s 2004 antitrust ruling, the software giant has signed an agreement with Samba that will give the company the protocol documentation its developers need to make its open-source software inter-operate with Windows.

“Today the Samba team announced that they’re satisfied with the agreement, and are taking a Work Group Server Protocol Program trade secret and copyright license,” Microsoft Director of Platform and Technology Strategy Sam Ramji wrote in a post to the Microsoft Port 25 blog. “This will give them access to Microsoft specifications for the protocols in WSPP (such as file, print, and user and group administrative services) and allow the Samba team to create, use and distribute implementations. I expect this will significantly improve the process of Samba development, and produce better quality inter-operation between Windows and Linux/Unix environments. … This is an historic moment, and one that I’m proud of.”

As he should be. Even if it did come under duress.

Samba, which has been struggling valiantly for years to support Windows server protocols, was understandably overjoyed to finally ink such a deal. “They’re giving us all the documentation to make everything work,” Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba, told InfoWorld. “We will have no more excuses to suck … if we don’t have something, we won’t be able to say it’s not our fault we don’t know how to do it.”

(Incidentally, you’ll find Microsoft’s Holiday Gift Guide here. And boy, is it ever something: Traditional calendars for Excel! Three dozen Outlook add-ins! Oh, and thanks for the photo, “Encyclopedia Brown.”)

Apparently unable to stomach the idea of thousands of school children in developing countries running the Linux operating system on their new laptops, Microsoft is working on a version of Windows XP for the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO machine.

The company has assigned some 40 developers to the project and plans to begin limited field trials in January. If all goes well, XP for the XO could be available as early as the second half of 2008. “We want Windows to run on the XO and we are investing significant energy and talent,” James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, told The Wall Street Journal. “We really want to make sure we have a quality experience before we make commitment to governments.”

Quite an interesting turnabout. After all, Microsoft has been slagging the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO machine since its conception. Just a year ago, Bill Gates publicly derided it while presenting Redmond’s ultra-mobile Origami machine at the Government Leaders Forum. “The last thing you want for a shared-use computer is for it to be something without a disk, and with a tiny little screen,” he said. “If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user. Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type.”

Odd, isn’t it, that Google will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, but it’s willing to pony up just $10 million to spur interest in development of its new Android platform for mobile devices. Apparently Google’s dominion over space figures higher on the list of company priorities than its dominion over the mobile market.

This morning, Google’s Open Handset Alliance released the Android Software Development Kit in concert with the Android Developer Challenge, a contest that will see Google doling out $10 million in prize money to programmers able to create workable applications for the platform.

“We’ve built some interesting applications for Android but the best applications are not here yet and that’s because they’re going to be written by developers,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a statement. “We’d like to reward these developers and recognize them as much as possible.”

Cash prizes will range from $25,000 to $275,000. Half of the $10 million will be awarded for entries submitted between Jan. 2 and March 3 of next year. The other $5 million will be distributed in a second round that will start after the first Android-based phones arrive at market in the second half of 2008.

Android is built on a Linux 2.6 kernel and supports multitouch interaction, which means we’ll likely be seeing quite a bit of creativity on the platform.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, not Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, is the most influential IT personality of the past quarter-century.

This according to a survey of IT professionals conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association. Asked to list the most influential tech personalities of the last 25 years, 84% of respondents listed Gates, and 73% listed Jobs. Also appearing on the list: Dell CEO Michael Dell (53% of respondents); Linux founder Linus Torvalds (47%); Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (also 47%); Cisco CEO John Chambers (44%); Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (36%); Vint “Father of the Internet” Cerf (35%); Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (also 35%); and eBay CEO Meg Whitman (30%).

In August 2005 Google acquired a two-year-old start-up called Android. Founded by Andy Rubin, the guy behind mobile-device maker Danger, Android was rumored to have been developing a mobile-phone operating system.

Google never said much about the acquisition or its plans for Rubin, but he’s been on the company’s payroll ever since, presumably holed up somewhere on its campus in Mountain View, Calif., working on something–perhaps with the “graphics-software fanatics” from Skia, another mysterious mobile start-up Google acquired in 2005. Together they’d make quite a team–Rubin with his passion for location-aware mobile devices and Skia’s engineers with theirs for the robust, but portable, graphics engines that could be used in them. Theoretically, of course.

Why the history lesson? Well, industry sources tell The Wall Street Journal that Google might publicly detail its long-rumored mobile-phone project as early as Monday. “U.S. carriers likely to be part of the announcement are T-Mobile and Sprint, according to our sources, but there could be others by the time Google says its piece,” the Journal reports. “While Sprint appears to be agreeing to work with Google to put the Web giant’s new Linux-based open operating system into phones, T-Mobile will probably go even further: the company has worked with Google for months on plans to build Google-powered phones with a variety of Google software and applications. As far as handset partners for Google, Taiwan’s HTC is a likely bet, our sources say. Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are also possible, but we’ll wait and see the full roster. Equally interesting will be who isn’t on the list.”

Indeed. Because whoever’s not on that list could be losing out on a chance to become a true player in the mobile-search advertising business, which research outfit the Kelsey Group recently claimed will grow to $1.4 billion in 2012 from $33.2 million this year–in the United States alone.

According to a study conducted by the International Data Corporation and commissioned by Microsoft, the software giant contributes quite a lot to Nigeria’s economy. In fact, for every dollar that Microsoft earns in 2007, companies working with Microsoft in Nigeria will earn $11.

So really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Nigerian government, after agreeing to install Mandriva Linux on 17,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs, has decided to install Microsoft Windows instead. Anyone, except perhaps Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon who, in a blistering open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, accused the company of masterminding the Nigerian government’s switch to Windows.

… We closed the deal, we got the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. In other words, we did our job. I understand the machines are being delivered right now.

“And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “We shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.

“Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done for these guys to change their mind like this? It’s pretty clear to me, and it will be clear to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve, in the place where you live? In my place, they give it various names, I’m sure you know them.

“Hey Steve, how do you feel looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning?”

Likely, quite a bit better than Bancilhon, I imagine.

It’s been a year since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first claimed the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property and six months since the company’s general counsel, Brad Smith, and vice president of intellectual property and licensing, Horacio Gutierrez, told Fortune magazine that Linux and other open-source software projects between them violate 235 Microsoft patents.

Such anti-Linux declarations being biannual, it’s clear we were about due for another one, which Ballmer dutifully provided last week at a company event in the United Kingdom.

… Our battle is not sort of business model to business model. Our battle is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice.
The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is, we spend a lot of money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money on R&D. We’ve spent a lot of money licensing patents, when people come to us and say, ‘Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property,’ we’ll either get a court judgment or we’ll pay a big check. And we are going to–I think it is important that the open-source products also have an obligation to participate in the same way in the intellectual property regime.

“That’s why we’ve done the deal we have with Novell, where not only are we working on technical interoperability between Linux and Windows, but we’ve also made sure that we could provide the appropriate, for the appropriate fee, Novell customers to also get essentially the right to use our patented intellectual property. And I think it’s great the way Novell stepped up to kind of say intellectual property matters. People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us.”

So according to Ballmer, if you’re a Red Hat customer you may have an “undisclosed balance-sheet liability” to deal with in the near future. And if you’re not, you probably want to stay away from free software entirely. Because, as Groklaw’s Pamela Jones suggests, Microsoft apparently plans to eradicate it.

Ballmer “has just clearly outlined how Microsoft intends to extinguish Linux as we know it,” Jones writes. “Microsoft knows full well that in any intellectual-property regime based on software patents, particularly when used as weapons against innovation to protect and reward the old, no one can compete with Microsoft. They have all the money. FOSS is written by individuals who don’t have a pile of gold under the bed to go to court and get a court judgment or pay ‘a big check.’ Ballmer of course knows that. So this is the anticompetitive plan, under the guise of everyone having to play by the same rules.”