Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, a company executive said.

Tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011, said Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice president of OEM services. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface.

This is interesting coming from a company that reshaped the Linux desktop market. The tablet version will be based on Ubuntu 10.10 version. It will be interesting to see what kind of traction does Ubuntu tablet OS get compared to Android.

Now David Eaves, a public policy advocate and one who evangelizes strongly for Open Government Initiative, has put up a blog post offering a case study on the role played by open data in reducing the fraud under the name of charitable organizations. It is a great case study offering a glimpse of how open data coupled with Linus’ law on more eyeballs making bugs shallow, can help an open society. It is a great case study and I strongly recommend you to read the blog post.

In the computer world there is something called Linus’ Law, which states: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs (problems) are shallow.” The same could be said about many public policy or corruption issues. For many data sets, citizens should not have to make a request. Nor should we have to answer questions about why we want the data. It should be downloadable in its entirety. Not trapped behind some unhelpful search engine. When data is made readily available in machine readable formats, more eyes can look at it. This means that someone on the ground, in the community (like, say, Toronto) who knows the sector, is more likely to spot something a public servant in another city might not see because they don’t have the right context or bandwidth. And if that public servant is not allowed to talk about the issue, then they can share this information with their fellow citizens.

In US, after the current Obama administration took steps for opening up the government data, we saw how open data played a role in tracking how the stimulus money was spent. There are way too many examples of the role played by open data in promoting an open and fair society. It is time we demand open data in all facets of life.

Microsoft has recently signed the contributor agreement with one of the big open source projects, Joomla. It means that Microsoft developers can now easily contribute to Joomla project without worrying about IP issues.

It has taken me a while to write this post, as I’m not even sure what I want to put in – beyond my profound excitement. Yes, it’s a big deal to have a major company contributing to the codebase. And yes, the fact that it’s Microsoft contributing to a GPL project is big news. But, in a lot of ways this is just part of a natural progression related to a lot of work that has been going on for a long time with Joomla!.

Already, Microsoft folks and Joomla developers are working together. They have the Joomla package available as a part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer and contributed code to add WinCache support to Joomla. You can learn more about other contributions to Open Source by Microsoft on Josh Holmes’ blog post. Josh is the architect evangelist at Microsoft. Check out Mary-Jo Foley’s post on this news and Techmeme discussion. Darryl K. Taft of eWeek offers more insight into Microsoft’s involvement in Joomla and other Open Source projects.

Georges Auberger, one of the Songbird developers, has written a blog post announcing this.

After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird. Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache.
 We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.
While our Linux users are some of the most passionate, do some killer development, and always provide tremendous input as to whether we’re on the right path or not, we simply can’t continue to support a Linux version as we have in the past.

This is a shocker to many Linux fans but the fact that Songbird is open source gives a glimmer of hope. With enough hands with itches for a Linux version of Songbird, there will always be a fork that could take care of the needs of these Longtail users. We just have to wait and see if any group is forking Songbird to support the Linux users.

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In the early SaaS days, we saw how Activecollab abused the open source spirit. In recent days, the cloud vendor Enomaly Inc. has been facing the wrath for running away from the open source version of their Elastic Compute Platform (Enomaly ECP). Unlike Activecollab and few others who unabashedly abused the spirit of open source, Reuven Cohen, Founder and CTO of Enomaly Inc., has been vocal about their involvement in open source. In fact, I found him to be one of the strong voices in support of open source and open cloud efforts. Recently, one of the Clouderati, Sam Johnston, noticed that Enomaly has stopped supporting the open source version of their platform.

It doesn’t help my sentiment either that every last trace of the Open Source ECP Community Edition was recently scrubbed from the Internet without notice, leaving angry customers high and dry, purportedly pending the “rejigging [of their] OSS strategy”. While my previous attempts to fork the product as Freenomalism failed when we were unable to get the daemon to start, having the code in any condition is better than not having it at all. In my opinion this is little more than blatantly (and successfully I might add) taking advantage of the Open Source community for as long as necessary to get the product into the limelight. Had they not filled this void others would certainly have done so, and the Open Cloud would be better off today as a result.

Today, Sam Johnston startled everyone in the Clouderati with an announcement that he is forking the community version of Enomaly ECP with some additional security fixes. The new project called OpenECP is released under the Affero General Public License v3 or similar. The Open Elastic Computing Platform (OpenECP) is currently under Version 4.0 Alpha and provisionally tested on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0. In short, Sam Johnston has done what CentOS has done to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Take the source code, rip up the trademarks and release it under a different name.

My initial reaction to this news was that Sam is mad but this is a brilliant move. Frankly speaking, this fork is a result of some personal bickering between Sam Johnston and Reuven Cohen (as evidenced by their public tweets). Personally, I know both of them “equally well” through Twitter and I have absolutely no comment on the tensions between them. I am approaching this issue from the point of view of open source licensing and what this move by Sam means to the customers. From what I scraped out from Twitter and various online forums, Enomaly has decided to not work on the open source edition for some tactical reasons from their business strategy point of view. Even though they have promised to bring the open source edition back in few months, there is absolutely no guarantee. Under such circumstances, this fork ensures that the community edition continues to live on even if Enomaly decides to not revive it. It ensures that the current users of the community edition are not left in a lurch. However, there is no guarantee that the development of the open source software will continue beyond this point. On a related note, I strongly recommend you read the post on 451 Group’s CAOS Theory and my response to it.

To be fair to Enomaly, I would like to point out that the current proprietary version of Enomaly ECP has some additional features like vlan, metering, etc.. Plus, it was directed towards service providers who want to buy it straight from the software vendor. Though fork is fun and easy, ultimately the hardest job was done by the original vendor by spending thousand of hours on the product. But, this episode should serve as a warning to software vendors who want to take the open source route. If they take the path of open source, they should stick to it all the way through. But if they try to use it just as a shortcut for gaining users, they will lose control of their product and may even face a potential danger of losing their business.

Update: Sam says OpenECP has both vlan and metering. It is a fork from the most recent community edition.

Cross Posted at CloudAve

I am happy that this idea got tossed around the web. In fact, I really want more people dissecting this idea because it will help me better understand the viability of this approach and fine tune it further. I do believe that this theory can help users trust SaaS more and has the potential to empower the users instead of dragging the carpet from underneath their feet. Feel free to jumpin and offer your thoughts.

Matthew Aslett, of 451 Group who writes the CAOS Theory blog, disputes this and makes a very important point.

with open source there is life after death – if there is a committed group of developers prepared to put in the effort to keep the project alive. For many open source projects that’s a pretty big “if”.

I completely agree with Matthew. Unless, these open source projects have a strong developer community, it is as good as “Living Dead”. As he points out in his blog post, projects like Mindquarry, Zoto (the ones I have pointed out to make my case), Tr.im, etc. have been lying dormant in their repositories without any development activities. Clearly, under open source philosophy, it means that there are not many people actively using these applications. As Matthew points out, even though these projects are alive due to their open source licensing, they are living dead.

In fact, I would extend these arguments to all of the open source software. We have seen so many open source projects that die on arrival at either Sourceforge or Google code. The biggest reason being the developers who start these projects couldn’t sustain it either due to financial reasons or lack of interest. The number of active developers in a project has some kind of correlation with the number of active users of the application. It is quite natural that the lack of enthusiasm for these apps makes them dead on arrival at these repositories. Extending even further, such “dead on arrival” cases are not just unique to open source software but it is also the case with all software. We have seen many proprietary software companies closing shop even before they get their first customer. So, the bottom line is that any software, irrespective of whether it is open source or proprietary or SaaS, needs a strong user base and vibrant developer community/vendor to flourish.

I completely agree with Matthew’s “the big ‘if’ factor” for the success of any open source software. But, I have put forward my theory from a completely different angle. It is about the issue of business continuity. The impact of a SaaS vendor going out of business is huge for any type of business. It is even more striking for the small businesses. In the case of traditional desktop based applications, after a software vendor goes out of business, the users can continue using the software and plan their migration at their own pace. The SaaS world is different. The data lies on the vendors’ servers (cloud) and, as we have seen in the case of many defunct SaaS providers, they only offer a very short time frame to recover the data. This affects the business continuity. If the app is available in the form of open source, the users can just put it on one their own servers or on the cloud and continue using it till they could safely migrate over to another application.

Yes, open standards for the data can solve some of these issues. However, it is much easier to continue using the same application than moving to a new one because it saves money for the businesses in terms of migration costs, integration and training. Add to it the amount of time lost in the process, we have a very strong case for having an open source endgame. Even if the above said costs are not a big issue, there will be some badly needed niche apps which may not be available from any other vendor. Open source becomes crucial in such cases too.

Even though the open source licensing of SaaS app doesn’t guarantee that the app will flourish after the demise of the original developer/vendor, it lives long enough to ensure business continuity and, with some luck, it can even flourish. I still feel it is still a better option to have open source as an endgame for SaaS. Even if the open source version is of no use to the users, the very fact that it will be available as open source helps the users trust SaaS more than what they do now. It gives them a confidence that their business continuity will not be affected with a move to SaaS.

Crossposted at Cloud Ave

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