..::Linux Club::..

Ubuntu 10.04 on Book G4

2011-10-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I have got an old Apple Mac Laptop, iBook G4. I have decided to install Linux( of cources my first choice was Ubuntu 11.10, but I had some problem on installing with the beta live CD).Later I have downloded the 10.04 Ubuntu to work on my iBook you can follow these steps to boot the Ubuntu 10.04 livecd on your iBook.

Download the image for Ubuntu 10.04 for PowerPC... You can go here
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.04/release/

The desktop Live CD allows you to try Ubuntu without changing your computer at all, and at your option to install it permanently later.

There are three images available, each for a different type of computer:you have to select this from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.04/release/
Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) desktop CD

Then the next step is burn that image to a disk and insert this newly burned disk into your iBooks and reboot your iBook. Holding "c" key during booting (you have press for 10 seconds).

Next step you get the prompt to select image to boot, by default it is "live"( But in some cases do not boot it right away you need to type in this command line. "live-nosplash-powerpc modprobe ide-core video=radeonfb:1024x768-24@60")

From your live CD Desktop you can click on install to install Ubuntu on your iBook G4.All you have to do is click on shortcut on the desktop.

When you compare the speed with OS x Tiger, it is same , remember there is no support for Macromedia Flash in PPC, but you can manage with other tools(gnash..). I hope we get a better porting of ubuntu 11.10 PPC after October 13th.

see the result here

Mikogo An Excellent Zeero Configuration Netmeeting Tool

2011-08-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Mikogo a cross-platform desktop sharing tool and it is free and Zeero Config Tool.We have tested in Ubuntu 10.04 Linux. Mikogo is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. There is also a web client but it lacks most of the Mikogo features so it can only be used for viewing.what we found that Mac and Windows version of Mikogo are better performance than Linux.

Mikogo can be used for web conferencing, online meetings, presentations or remote support and comes with built-in file transfer and chat features. It doesn't come with native audio conferencing but it does support it through regular phone calls.

Mikogo does not charge fees for this audio conferencing service, But it provide a list of free Phone number in few countries , please refer here for details.

What we found that , it has better quality and more secure than Microsoft tools. Mikogo can be used for Technical or Corporate trainings, webinars , Web meetings( see a full list of features here )
Needless to say, security within Mikogo is of a high standard, with several levels of security available to protect the user’s privacy and computer data.All transmitted information during a web conference or remote support session is compressed with proprietary compression algorithms. Mikogo never sends session content in clear text, but encrypts all data using 256-bit AES encryption. ( see a full list of security list here )

Other technical details are here

Google+ Facebook and DuckDuckGo

2011-06-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Google+ Facebook
Google+ is the next one coming to this category, It can collect your complete personal data.When you have concerns about privacy of personal data, better to avoid google+ and stick on with facebook.

Google and DuckDuckGo
Google has been collecting usage statistics of their products. Anything you use that google owns, they see. Not so much as who's entering what data, but what data has been entered. DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information and only uses cookies when needed. Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.

GNOME 3.0 Launch Party - Zurich

2011-04-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

GNOME 3.0 Release

On April 6th 2011, GNOME 3.0 released, the long awaited Linux Desktop to the world. It is one of the most powerful and easy to use desktop of GNOME. It includes most of the revolutionary changes in desktop world like GNOME Shell and Activity Journal. In Zurich Switzerland, the GNOME release party took place on 8th of April. This happened in the premises of ETH,the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

GNOME 3.0 release party featured live demonstrations of GNOME 3.0 in different Linux distributions and talks about the new features. I gave a short talk on Free software in general and few screens of Gnome 3.0. Marcus Muller, the man behind frOSCamp Zurich, gave an excellent live demonstration of GNOME 3.0 using Fedora, there were couple of active participants in this party. Marcus presentation was in German.

Bruno Friedmann, Ambassador of openSUSE in Switzerland,gave an in-depth live demonstration on openSUSE and how to get GNOME 3.0 in it. it included many powerful features and services of openSUSE like SUSE Studio. Bruno in his presentation demonstrated many powerful feature-rich solutions to th real-world situations. I have published few snaps here.

Free Beer Version 2.0 Release

2011-04-05T01:29:00.000-07:00

free beer products

Free Beer -An Eco-friendly,Green Energy, Socially Committed and tasty open source beer - you can even free beer recipe to produce and sell our, for recipe and etiquette under a free license (Creative Commons)

This was my second meeting with free beer product, I saw a lot of satisfied clients / users who liked the previous version of free beer that was in FrOSCamp one year back in Zurich.I was surprised at the number of people who were interested in free beer. The first event happened in Sep 2011. Some snaps from the event that I have posted in my previous blog.

Pascal Mages,Roland Studer and Daniel Reichlin - Three men army behind the free beer (free beer web site). On April 1st of 2011 the new version of free beer was released. HUB was the Release location. When I started for the event there were three things in my mind, First How the HUB looks like, Second meet the people behind free beer, third to find people to discuss the CC licensing model.
The presentation was in German, but fortunately I got a translator,Dominik Scheck from CS bank.

Daniel Reichlin the Great Brewer and the Quality Controller , his presentation was very simple and natural and I think it is nice to have a Quality Controller Job in freebeer :), lot of testing and tasting to ensure the quality of Product.

The Free Beer and Dabu Fantastic Band was a nice combination. I am planning to visit brewery on 7th of May.

Open Format and MS Office Alternatives

2011-02-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

We have lot of Alternatives to MS Office available today to get the work done. Here are dozens of FREE alternatives to what Microsoft Office has to offer. We can select a web based or normal productivity suite. If you are always connected you can go for a web based office software suite.

With my experience I suggest to use Zoho (Zoho offers a suite of online web applications which is easy to collaborate. Zoho suite goes beyond that by offering a wiki, a planner, email , CRM etc..

Zoho provides a wide, integrated portfolio of rich online applications for businesses. With more than 20 different applications spanning Collaboration , Business and Productivity applications

The second choice is Google docs, Zoho is far better than google docs) In both you can create word processing documents, spreadsheets ,presentations and lot more. You can share these documents with friends and co-workers quite effectively with the push of a few buttons.


Zoho

Open Office can install in Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, it is better solution for those who are looking for a free open source alternative to the MS Office.

KOffice have distros for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux , there are eight packages in this suite, including project planning and image editing tools.

Lotus Symphony ,Libre Office,Abiword,Atlantis Nova ,SSuite Office and too many are in the list, but till this time MS office have one only competitor product , that is Zoho.

I am sure people have tried all most all these free suites to abandon MS Office, but the reality is, they always come back to MS office suites. The main reason for this trend is compatibility problems. So what we need along with Free Software and Open Source, we need Open Format in Software and in hardware too.

Migrate From Microsoft Windows or Mac OS to Linux

2011-01-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

We support individuals and corporations for moving from Windows/Mac to Linux, when you decide you want the stability, flexibility, and a virus free environment of Linux. Recent few years we can see a steady growth in migration from Windows to Linux and the number of enterprises migrating from Windows to Linux is a dramatically growing during 2005 to 2010.

What most people do not realise is that there are very simple ways to help ease this migration. Microsoft Windows is one of the first computer operating systems for individual and corporations,It is easy to use for a layman user during late 90s,but that doesn't mean it's perfect till this time. In fact, Microsoft Windows operating Systems cause continual trouble or distress by bugs, viruses, crashes and many other serious problems that can make your computer difficult to use. Linux, however, is much more stable, more user friendly than Apple Mac or MS Windows and, more importantly, it is free, no worries about Licence or software piracy and NO VIRUS threats.

1. Select a Linux Distribution

If you decide to migrate from Windows to Linux, you will need to take few steps before doing so. The first things is selecting a Linux distribution. There are hundreds of Linux distributions out there, for just about every type of user and every type of use. There have been plenty of distributions that have attempted to mimic the look and feel of Windows and Apple Mac as closely as possible.We cannot say that which is the best distribution, it is just like which food is the best, it depend on your taste and need.

In my experience,we can select Ubuntu, OpenSUSE,Mandriva or Redhat. If you are new to Linux, Ubuntu will be the easiest distribution to learn, you will be addicted to great nice graphical user interfaces. Mandriva and OpenSUSE are also very popular versions of Linux.

2. Backup your Files and Configurations.

Back up all of the files you wish to keep when you migrate to Linux from Windows / Mac. If you are doing a complete reinstall on your drive and removing Windows completely, then these files will end up formatted and lost. Backing them up will allow you to replace them on the hard drive once Linux is installed.

3. Check your hardware

When you install a new operating system, and find a particular piece of hardware is not supported your computing life has become infinitely more difficult,but nowadays hardware incompatibility and driver support is not a problem with Linux Distributions, but this was a biggest issues that many people have had in the past eigh to ten years back, there are instances where a specific piece of hardware were not supported. You have to give particular attention to Networking cards, video cards, sound cards, I prefer to note down the details of this card name and their versions.

4.Export your Email contacts and Bookmarks.

Export your important contacts and personal information from Outlook or other mail clients in your Windows machine, backup all or important email messages, web browser preferences, email and browser configuration, and so on. Don't forget to backup your bookmarks from Internet explorer or other browsers.

5.Install the Linux distribution

Download and install the Linux distribution you've selected, then install other applications for use with your new Linux OS.

There is a nice website called OSAlt has a large database, comparing Windows applications to open source equivalents which can usually be run on Linux. You can find alternatives or better alternatives for Visio, Photoshop ,Dreamweaver, AutoCAD, WinZip, Movie Maker, MS Project, Norton Ghost, Access, Publisher, Sound editor etc...

Reference.

1.A complete migration guide,can be found at Tom's Hardware

2.Screen shots of my favourate linux Distribution, which i have installed in my machines can be found Linux Club Album.

Ubuntu Linux 10.10

OpenSUSE 11.3

OpenSUSE 11.2

An old story and few snaps

2010-11-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Xenix OS, an operating system for 16-bit computers, based on the BSD 4.1. It was on 1976, when there was no Linus or Linux. It is really funny to, when we compare the current price of Windows 7 Pro or Apple Mac Leopard 5.6 with the price of a Microsoft OS In 1976, In 1976 the cost of Operating system from Microsoft was $1000 to $7500 for educational institutions and from $5000 to $40,000 for full commercial open source (per CPU). On 1981, the IBM 5150 Personal Computer gained popularity.

Then, on 1984, the Apple Macintosh Released - Apple Computer- In 1980, ten years before (there was no known Linus or Linux), Microsoft announced XENIX OS Microsoft port of Unix for various 16-bit microprocessors,

and the story continues , only an year later, in 1981 Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS and "IBM Personal Computer DOS 1.0" was ready for the introduction of the IBM PC in October 1981, during this period development of XENIX and DOS was in parallel and XENIX greatly influenced DOS design.For six years (from 1984 till 1990) Microsoft was one of the leading Unix vendors, the provider of the first cheap large volume commercial Unix and, simultaneously, owner of a major branch of Unix -- Xenix

When we analyze MS was trying to bring all known and powerful features of XENIX in to DOS and they have announced all XENIX features for upcoming versions of DOS. That shows that Microsoft certainly tried to bring UNIX features to DOS, but the forks, multitasking, and multi-user support never materialized. Till 1980s Microsoft was used XENIX for Internet gateways, running Sendmail and they functioned as internal gateways between MSMail and Exchange while the company converted everyone over to having personal mailboxes on an Exchange server. In 1996 completely removed XENIX internal network ( Microsoft's Local Area Network (MILAN) was on XENIX during that time).

The important fact that MS was essentially a software company with Vision can controls and extends the PC hardware standard without the Microsoft Vision in PC hardware standard there can be no any substantial base for Linux at all because price of hardware is discounted due to the volume of Microsoft software sells. In this sense Linux is a side effect of Microsoft dominance.

Some Interesting Terms

2010-11-08T03:06:00.000-08:00

Recently I have seen some Interesting Terms on the web and tried one of them in my Compaq PC (AMD processor), It worked as expected, Cheers

a) I pc 10.5.6
b) Ideneb 10.5.6
c) Itkos 10.5.5
d) Leo 4all v3 10.5.2
e) kalway 10.5.2

Linux Club Online Shop

2010-10-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Radio Shop Online is the virtual store front of Linux Club LLC. Radio Shop Online anchored by ALAN VU2AUZ, has more than 5 years of experience in the communications equipment business - wholesale and retail, domestic and international. Radio Shop Online provides a full suite of communication productions, including:

	• Amateur / Ham Radio Equipment
	• Commercial / 2-Way / Land Mobile Radio Equipment
	• Marine Radio Equipment
	• Avionics Radio Equipment
	• Receiver / Scanner Equipment

Radio Shop Online is an authorized dealer for many of the top manufacturers in the market, including: Kenwood, Icom, Yaesu/Vertex, Motorola, Uniden, Garmin, Cushcraft, Larsen, Comet, Diamond and many more.

Radio Shop Online uses state of the art secure e-commerce shopping technology consistent with the highest standards online to ensure that your information is safely and securely transmitted. All personal information collected is used only for fulfilling orders and telling you about our exclusive offers. We guarantee your information to be safe with us and is never shared with any third parties.

To ensure your transactions are secure when placing orders online, Radio Shop Online uses Verisign on every order processed. We take extra care to protect your information by using advanced encryption and firewall technology throughout the ordering process. We also use state-of-the-art Verisign SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to protect personal information from unauthorized use.

FrOSCamp Zurich

2010-09-19T04:42:00.001-07:00

FrOSCamp Zurich, an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees from all over Europe on Open Source and Open Standards. It is an international network of user generated non-traditional social conferences: open, participatory workshop-events, often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. Oh and super fun!!

FrOSCamp was First of its kind in the ETH University premises, The camp was being organized by Sandro of ORGA Team ,I think this program is an excellent start in the right direction by ORGA team to facilitate open source Promotion.We will also had a fancy party with creative commons licensed beer [Free Beer] and music in the evening of the first day of the event.

An Open Source Beer, which means that the recipe is under a creative commons license. It is open to everyone and everyone can make the brew beer or make yourself.You may even sell it and get rich with free beer,It Is produced by the Wadi Bräu as organic beer.It is a bright, naturally cloudy beer in special bio-quality buds. Brewed and bottled beer free from the Wadi-Brau-Huus AG in Wädenswil on the beautiful lake of Zurich.

OpenSUSE 11.3: The Linux for layman users

2010-07-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

One week back I have installed a fresh copy of OpenSUSE 11.3 on my personal laptop (Copmaq Presario CQ61),This is very stable and optimized for performance without using much CPU resource, and what I feel this is a lightweight distribution.

I have used KDE 4.5 which is the better than any other propitiatory Operating System in performance and User Interface.I can say that this is for layman users or normal users of computers. With my experience in using various Linux distributions,OpenSUSE resists to all update events and don't crash. This is the part that what I suggest this for a final user, for his daily activities.
OpenSUSE 11.3 uses KDE 4.5 along with Compiz Fusion for Desktop Cube kind of animations, which create an illusionary effects in UI for a normal user.

Compiz Fusion seeks to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowing environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to provide impressive effects, amazing speed and unrivaled usefulness, Compiz Fusion is an open-source software project, meaning anyone can use it and contribute to it freely.

All in all, I've found that openSUSE is, once more, a great Linux distribution.

KDE 4.5 Screen Shots

2010-06-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

KDE 4.5 Screen Shots are here, I have successfully updated the KDE 4.5 Beta on my openSuse 11.2 Machine, See the screen shots of KDE 4.5 Screen Shots , after these updates I have solved another problem with Amarok Audio Player, Initially it had no sound.openSuse with KDE 4.5 is not so light or fast in machines having less than 1GB RAM. In my experience it is not a lightweight desktop distribution, when we compare with other linux distros, openSUSE 11.2 has a good Network Manager. Overall openSuse 11.2 with KDE 4.5 is an excellent release, I am using Compaq Prasario CQ61. I have put more screen shots of openSUSE 112. with KDE 4.5 here. In my experience openSUSE 11.2 runs faster, smoother, utilize power more wisely, has a more polished desktop, and simpler installation. I got a decent, colorful choice of programs, lots of useful utilities, plus centralized management by YaST, which is smarter and easier to use than ever before. The one sore point is package management - it's slow. It works great and makes some quite intelligent choices, but waiting a whole minute for it to complete caching the repository info is too much. If only this could be solved - somehow, openSUSE 11.2 would be perfect. When they release the Final we hope it will be solved.

Installing and Running Linux on Sony PS2 Devices and Intel / Mac Computers

2010-05-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Linux can be installed in any INTEL based Mac Machine, here I have used a Mac Mini. It was successful (*please search for @installing Linux on Mac"), the same way and we can install on the Sony Play Station 3 video game console (try Mandrive,Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Yellow Dog, Gentoo. Linux kernel supports PlayStation 3, so no worries about patches or hacks are required to install and run a full-featured distro.

Use Xross Media Bar (XMB) menu of your Playstation,
XMB menu, select System , Format Drive to PS3 HDD.then do a classic a partition for the hard drive by selecting to Custom Partition and allocate atleast 10GB to the PS3 System. your Play station will restart after this.After restart login and insert your favouraite Linux CD/DVD installer. After this step go again from the XMB menu, go to "System" and then "Install Other OS". The PS3 will search for others.bid from the installer. Once found, install it. After the installation, you can now set the PS3 to boot Linux by default by navigating to System (Default System to Other OS) thats all..your PS3 is a PC

The Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement

2010-05-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement are completely different. Stallman represents the former. Torvalds and Raymond represent the latter. For your freedom, download this video to your disk and watch it with a freedom-respecting program. ......

The Simple Economics of Open Source

2009-06-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

Why in the world would anyone take the time to write complicated software programs for free?

It's a good question, one that has piqued the curiosity of a number of economists, who wonder what benefits, if any, lie behind the burgeoning "open source" movement in technology.

After all, outwardly the situation smells of economic anarchy. Where are the market forces, when thousands of talented programmers—and even many commercial firms—spend inordinate amounts of time writing and sharing computer source code: an activity that apparently gives the individuals and companies involved no pay-off, no reward?

Could it be driven, as some media reports have admiringly suggested, purely by intellectual fervor on the part of programmers, perhaps coupled with a noble desire to share and dispense knowledge to benefit mankind?

Not so fast, say HBS Professor Josh Lerner and his colleague Jean Tirole, an economist at the University of Toulouse and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In their new working paper, "The Simple Economics of Open Source," Lerner and Tirole make the case that an idealistic notion of programmer altruism only goes so far. After all, the pair argues, generosity and knowledge-bearing have not really been guiding factors in other industries: so why would they dominate the computer field?

Instead, they suggest, laboring on open source brings developers and companies specific, tangible and very favorable economic benefits: benefits that are sensible, potentially quite lucrative and, in a word, simple. Altruism is just a nice by-product.

A marriage between Web and Mobile

2009-01-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

A marriage between Web and Mobile can lead to produce a new business era. it can be a combination of web services, socket services and mobiles, Opera mini can play a good role in web based applications in mobile phone. Apple iPhone and Blackberry can make a huge market in Financial trading worlds.

Using Fast Enumeration

2008-08-30T01:04:00.000-07:00

Using Fast Enumeration

The following code example illustrates using fast enumeration with NSArray and NSDictionary objects.

NSArray *array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:

@"One", @"Two", @"Three", @"Four", nil];

for (NSString *element in array) {

NSLog(@"element: %@", element);

}

NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:

@"quattuor", @"four", @"quinque", @"five", @"sex", @"six", nil];

NSString *key;

for (key in dictionary) {

NSLog(@"English: %@, Latin: %@", key, [dictionary valueForKey:key]);

}

You can also use NSEnumerator objects with fast enumeration, as illustrated in the following example:

NSArray *array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:

@"One", @"Two", @"Three", @"Four", nil];

NSEnumerator *enumerator = [array reverseObjectEnumerator];

for (NSString *element in enumerator) {

if ([element isEqualToString:@"Three"]) {

break;

}

NSString *next = [enumerator nextObject];

// next = "Four"

For collections or enumerators that have a well-defined order—such as NSArray or NSEnumerator instance derived from an array—the enumeration proceeds in that order, so simply counting iterations will give you the proper index into the collection if you need it.

NSArray *array = /* assume this exists */;

NSInteger index = 0;

BOOL ok = NO;

for (id element in array) {

if (/* some test for element */) {

ok = YES;

break;

}

index++;

}

if (ok) {

NSLog(@"Test passed by element at index %d", index");

}

iPhone SDK installtion on PowerPC G4 Mac Mini (Non Intel Mac)

2008-07-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

These are contents from different blogs,sites and forums combined together for a successful installation of iPhone SDK on PowerPC G4 which I've used to install iPhone SDK.

I managed to install the SDK completely (in the right place) without using Pacifist, fully working on a Mac Mini PowerPC G4 32 Bit. My root partition is still spammed with 5 gb of redundant crap for following this "Tip", but thats why i decided to let others know there's another better way of getting it to work:

Pre Installation Steps( Create Installation Package for PowerPC G4)

1. Make the iPhone SDK.dmg read/write-able with Disk Utility using convert -> to read/write.
2. Mount the R/W dmg.
3. You need to delete some unneccessary file so that you can modify the installer config file, because the image is completely full. I choose the PDF in the root of the dmg.
4. Modify iPhone SDK/iPhone SDK.mpkg/Contents/iPhoneSDK.dist :(Right Click on "iPhone SDK.mpkg" from the Mounted disk ans Selelct "Show Package Contents"

Once we Select this menu, We will get a list of files . From this list ,Select iPhoneSDK.dist and edit with any text editor and you have to edit three functions from this file as follows..

- Goto Line number 70 and

function agreedToSLA()
{
var res = system.run("tempfileexists", "insttmp_37253734");
if( res == 0 ){ return true; }
my.choice.tooltip = system.localizedStringWithFormat('TT_NOIPHONESDK');
return true; // By default it is false
}

function SDKPresent()
{
var res = system.run("tempfileexists", "insttmp_37253735");
if( res == 0 ){ return true; }
system.log("To install the iPhone SDK you need to agree to the iPhone SDK License agreement through the GUI interface.");
return true; // By default it is false

}

function isIntel()
{
var res = (system.sysctl('hw.byteorder') == '4321');
// by default is 1234 change this to 4321
if( !res ){ my.choice.tooltip = system.localizedStringWithFormat('TT_NOINTEL'); }
return res;
}

/// End of File
Note :
- Line 71 ( in function agreedToSLA() ) - modify "return false;" to "return true;"
- Line 81 ( in function SDKPresent() ) - modify "return false;" to "return true;"
-Line 103 (in function isIntel() change var res = (system.sysctl('hw.byteorder') == '1234'); to var res = (system.sysctl('hw.byteorder') == '4321');

Save this File, Now we are ready for installation

Once we completed this step, we can directly install IPhone SDK into Power PC . From the Installation Screen do not select Mac OS X 10.3.9 Support and Web Objects (Web Objects is Optional if you want you can select)

Post Installation Steps

1. Once we completed the installation we have to replace a configuration file, which is used to identify the Architecture ( Make sure backup of original) as follows

Once you've moved the iPhone platform directories to their appropriate location under /Developer/Platforms, drill into: /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/
Library/Xcode/Specifications/

In this directory, you will find a file called "iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec" Make a backup of it and open the original in your favorite editor

Replace the file contents of "iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec" with the following line

(
// 32-Bit
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = Standard;
Name = "Standard (iPhone Simulator: i386)";
Description = "32-bit iPhone Simulator architectures";
ListInEnum = YES;
SortNumber = 1;
RealArchitectures = ( i386, ppc7400 );
ArchitectureSetting = "ARCHS_STANDARD_32_BIT";
},

// Old-style Debug
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = Native;
Name = "Native Architecture of Build Machine";
Description = "32-bit for build machine";
ListInEnum = YES;
SortNumber = 101;
ArchitectureSetting = "NATIVE_ARCH";
},

// G3
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = ppc;
Name = "Minimal (32-bit PowerPC only)";
Description = "32-bit PowerPC ";
PerArchBuildSettingName = "PowerPC";
ByteOrder = big;
ListInEnum = No;
SortNumber = 201;
},

// G4
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = ppc7400;
Name = "PowerPC G4";
Description = "32-bit PowerPC for G4 processor";
ByteOrder = big;
ListInEnum = NO;
SortNumber = 202;
},

// G5 32-bit
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = ppc970;
Name = "PowerPC G5 32-bit";
Description = "32-bit PowerPC for G5 processor";
ByteOrder = big;
ListInEnum = NO;
SortNumber = 203;
},

// Intel
{ Type = Architecture;
Identifier = i386;
Name = "Intel";
Description = "32-bit Intel";
PerArchBuildSettingName = "Intel";
ByteOrder = little;
ListInEnum = NO;
SortNumber = 105;
}
)

Location of Configuration File iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec

Xcode Location after iPhone SDK installation

Windows Mobile and Fring

2008-05-02T04:09:00.000-07:00

Take all your buddies mobile with fring™, call and chat with them for free and see who’s online before dialling!

fring™ is a mobile internet service & community that enables you to access & interact with your social networks on-the-go, make free calls and live chat with all your fring, Skype®, MSN® Messenger, Google Talk™, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!™ and AIM®* friends using your handset’s internet connection rather than costly cellular airtime minutes.

Bringing PC-benefits to the mobile, fring will empower you with mobility and availability as never before, integrating all contacts in to one, searchable buddy list, allowing you to see who’s online before dialing with contact availability indicators, engage in multiple conversations simultaneously, send & receive files and more.

You can even make affordable local and international calls to landline and regular cellular numbers using your SkypeOut/SkypeIn account or almost any internet voice service (SIP) such as SIPNET, EuteliaVoIP, VoIPVoIP and VoIPTalk, even from non-SIP enabled handsets.

View fring features:


		take all IM buddies mobile and view them from one, integrated contact list

		free calls

		live chat instead of SMS

		call landlines and regular cellular contacts using SkypeOut or SIP

		view call history

		invite friends to fring

		send & receive files

		choose incoming call and message tones

		auto-roam in and out of WiFi hotspots

* fring is compatible with Symbian 8, 9.1, 9.2, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and UIQ handsets.
** Voice for Yahoo!^TM and AIM® is still not enabled.

HTC Touch Review - Skype

2008-05-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

Performance:

We are not pleased with the operating speed of HTC Touch, the fault for which lies with the 200 MHz processor used in most 2G other manufacturer’s phones. Yet it has been optimized for the device and there are no serious delays, but you often have to wait a little when moving trough the menus and applications. Symbian S60 OS which is much faster in the new smart-phone models of N76, 6120, N95 has a serious advantage here.

We are happy that the Touch can use Skype application for VoIP calls. The processor is not very fast and the system lag when you are during a call, but still you will be able to switch to different tabs and send a chat message for example, while you talk. The Voice is not lagging if you are using fast internet connection. For Skype calls, Touch uses the loudspeakers and you will not be impressed by its quality, but it is still usable. The other party hears you clear, but some echo also appears. For the test, we used WiFi connection.

We also installed Fring application, which connects to both Skype and Google Talk, but strangely, we weren't able to do a call. The application said that the phone has to restart in order to do a voice call, but after a few restarts nothing changed. In order to get installation file for Fring, we had to choose the phone model from the Fring's webpage. The Touch was not listed, so we selected an another HTC smartphone with touch-sensitive display.

We used Spb Benchmark to compare the Touch system performance with other PocketPC Phones. We are pleasantly surprised by the results, showing way better performance than the Wizard, although the two have similar system resources.

During our typical test with decreasing signal Touch did not perform very well and the grade mark we give it is 3.75/10, which places it in the category of Poor, below the standard level. The manufacturer claims 5 hours of talk time, but we are surprised that in our test it scored 6 hours of continues talk time. This is just an excellent result!

We are disappointed by the incoming sound during conversation and particularly by its volume: the loudspeaker is not heard very strongly and as the one for music snuffles at ‘max’ position and has to be turned down. On the other hand, voices through it sound very close to reality, clear and distinct.

Not so however in the opposite direction – you are heard just perfectly, very strongly, clearly and realistically. We have no remarks in this respect.

Conclusion:

We remain with mixed feelings about Touch – the Touch Flo technology is a good idea, but poorly realized and its actual functionality is quite limited opening only one shortcut menu and scrolling through long pages. To be competitive to what iPhone will be, a number of new extras should probably be added, such as a new way of imputing text with fingers, a more innovative display locking/unlocking, menus handling (back/forward), photos handling (zoom in/out, previous/next), etc.

On the other hand, Touch is a small and beautiful WM6 phone with the full functionality of the operating system and with all personalization possibilities, which, on functional level, places it to some extent above iPhone, PRADA and Samsung F700 which are not smart phones. Unlike them, Touch is very flexible thanks to a heap of 3rd party applications. Its interface may be not as interesting and beautiful as that of the competitors – the fashionable PRADA and the innovative iPhone, but if you want a really good-looking small phone using Windows Mobile 6 Professional, Touch is your perfect choice.

2007: A Year of Open-Source Acceptance

2007-12-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

2007 has barely begun, and already I've been asked to look back on 2006! The trends of 2006 are still playing out, and will continue to do so through the first quarter of 2007, making it harder than usual look into the crystal ball for the upcoming year. But in a few years, we will all look back at 2006 as the year everything changed again.

Agile methodologies cemented themselves in the development environments of companies of all sizes, helping to shape the year to come. With increased customer interaction early in the cycle, the reliance on continuous integration tools grew paramount, especially with the maturity of Cruise Control and Cruise Control .NET. Continuous integration will become a cornerstone software development practice, increasing the quality of software releases industry wide. That being said, 2007 will be the year that Cruise Control captures the continuous integration market. The ability to support most major and minor platforms for free will be nearly impossible to compete with.

This brings us to the second trend of 2007, the increased reliance of Open Source software in the revision control and software release fields. Across the industry, companies using CVS, RCS, and looking at Perforce will start the move to Subversion. Visual SourceSafe and Vault will continue to lose ground in their respective niches, while Subversion captures the customer base. The ease of use and integration into all three major operating systems (Windows, OSX, and Linux), combined with its price and stability will force companies to reduce their expenses through quality software. For the first time in nearly fifteen years, free revision control systems can again compete with commercial ones, and on any platform.

Speaking of platforms, the crystal ball holds one more platform surprise in 2007. Having finally (officially) moved to Intel, Apple has guaranteed an interesting year is ahead. Companies will start the groundwork for releasing software on the Mac, with many companies announcing OSX releases in 2007. The Mac will return as a viable platform for software releases as companies slowly move to the Mac OS. Movement will develop slowly at first, but definite groundwork will be laid out for a multi-platform future.

With a revolution year behind us, we have to ask ourselves if 2007 can be even half as groundbreaking as 2006. In truth, I don't know if it's possible to have another year like 2006 so soon on its heals. Either way, 2007 will certainly be an interesting year.

Open source gets European boost

2007-08-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

The European Commission has added its voice to the debate about the use of open source software.
A report funded by the Commission concludes that the software could offer considerable savings to organisations with little effect on their business.

The report found that in "almost all" cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft.

However, it warned that a move to open source could increase short term costs.

This would be largely be due to increased training for users of the software, said the authors of the report who are based at the United Nations University in Maastricht.

But some proprietary manufacturers such as Microsoft do not believe that open source always means cheaper. In 2004 the company launched a campaign called Get The Facts that gave examples of where its software was cheaper and more reliable than open source products.

Voluntary contribution

Open source software refers to software where the underlying programming code is made available to users to read, alter and improve. This is in contrast to proprietary software where a company controls the source code to prevent changes being made.

A great deal of open source software is produced and distributed for free by volunteer programmers, although some companies, such as Red Hat, do sell open source products and associated services to get them up and running.

The study estimates that just one-third of open source programs are produced by businesses in Europe.

Software made by volunteers includes operating systems, such as Linux, and Microsoft Office-like programs such as OpenOffice.org.

Open source programs are already used by many companies particularly to run web servers, the computers that store and deliver web pages.

According to the study, the number of existing open source programs already available would have cost firms 12 billion Euros (£8 billion) to produce.

It estimates that the available programs represent the equivalent of 131,000 programmer years.

"This represents at least 800 million Euros (£525 million) in voluntary contributions from programmers alone each year," the report said.

At the moment, the report said, public organisations were the dominant beneficiaries of this work.

To continue this uptake, the report recommends "correcting current policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly favour proprietary software".

As well as providing incentives to the open source industry it also recommends that schools start to introduce more of the software.

This would instil "an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume," the report said.

This view echoes those of 111 UK MPs who signed an early day motion in December 2006 to support the use of open source in schools.

The motion also criticised the "outdated" methods used to purchase software for schools that locked them into buying proprietary software.

The Microsoft/Novell Deal: Has It Divided The Linux Community?

2007-07-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

When Microsoft and Novell announced that they would work together, Linux enthusiasts were shocked. How has the agreement affected the open-source community, and can it recover?
By Jacqueline Emigh InformationWeek

In November, 2006, Microsoft and Linux vendor Novell knocked the software industry for a loop with their multifaceted, multimillion dollar business agreement unveiled. However, the biggest effect may be on Linux, the open-source software operating environment that many companies (and some consumers) are increasingly adopting as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary but pervasive Windows operating system.

Initially announced on news conference November 2, 2006, the deal called for Microsoft, long seen as an enemy by many Linux advocates, to start working hand-in-hand with Novell, producer of the SuSE Linux operating system, in areas that included licensing, support, and joint research and development around Windows/Linux interoperability.

Also under the agreement, the two software makers inked a software patents covenant stating that Microsoft won't be able to sue Novell's customers for any potential infringements of Microsoft's patents, and Novell won't be able to sue Microsoft's customers for potential infringements on Microsoft's patents.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars will change hands between Microsoft and Novell over the next three years for software licensing and patent protection, with a net balance of $118 million going to Novell.

The deal does have supporters among industry analysts ISVs, and VARs, who foresee benefits to Novell and to the advance of Linux in the enterprise. "Novell needs to look at its opportunity to gain Linux customers from highly Microsoft-loyal accounts. And when you consider the money, there'll be a lot of it going into Novell's coffers," said Raven Zachary, an analyst with The 451 Group.
Recognition by Microsoft lends more credibility to Novell as a second major Linux distributor (behind industry leader Red Hat Software), according to Adam Braunstein, an analyst at the Robert Frances Group. "No enterprise customer wants to get locked into a single distribution," Braunstein said.

The Linux Community ReactsBut what about the developers who create the actual Linux code, and who form the heart of what's known as the open source community? How will they be affected? As the calendar turns the corner into 2007, is this community of ISV and corporate developers, already split into hundreds of different distributions, only becoming more divided? Or conversely, is this community growing even more unified through joint opposition to the deal?

So far, the answer seems to be yes on both counts. By and large, Linux developers see the deal as an unwelcome intrusion by Microsoft, a huge and unabashedly proprietary vendor, into the open source world, where software development is highly collaborative, a lot of code is available free of charge, and vendor business models are frequently based more on service contracts than on software licensing.

Linux organizations that sounded disapproval for the Microsoft/Novell plan range from Red Hat to smaller Linux distributors such as Linspire and Mandriva, and open source projects such as Samba, a group that includes even some Novell employees. "I obviously can't speak for the entire community, but I see more banding together [against Microsoft] than divisiveness," said Nicholas Petreley, a professional open source consultant, author, and editor, and the creator of VarLinux.org.

But beyond shared distaste for Microsoft's perceived intrusion, reactions within the Linux community vary, from a cautious watchfulness to a conviction that the deal represents an intentional ploy by Microsoft to destroy the open source movement by pitting one Linux distributor — namely, Novell — against the rest of the Linux community. "[It] is clearly true [that] the agreement sets SuSE apart from the rest of the crowd. The Microsoft message here is clear. 'I can pick and choose among the players and bribe whomever I want,'" contended Francois Banchilhon, CEO of the French-based Mandriva.

The top five open source stories to follow in 2006

2007-05-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

Following a year that bore witness to the proliferation of open source business applications and increased adoption of Linux across the board, experts predict that 2006 will be another big year for open source.

There's been a lot going on, including a hard-at-work open source community ironing out GNU General Public License (GPL) loopholes, plus open source virtualization hitting the mainstream and Sun Microsystems and Novell Inc. anxiously waiting to see if their open source gambits pay off. Indeed, the experts promise plenty more open source news to follow in 2006.

TechTarget spoke to a couple of IT industry experts to get their predictions for the five biggest open source trends and stories to follow in 2006. In no particular order of importance, here's what they had to say:

You can expect the GPL debate to go on for quite some time, but it's really going to take off in 2006 Tony Iams,vice president and operating systems analyst, Ideas International

1. Debate will heat up over GPL version 3

Discussions over exactly what the next version of the GPL should look like have already begun, and experts say the debate could get fairly contentious as 2006 unfolds.

At issue will be what some believe are loopholes in current versions of the license -- loopholes that some think allow vendors to get around the "inconvenience" of having to reveal source code.

Created by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, the GPL is one of the major open source software licenses. It lists the terms and conditions for copying, modifying and distributing free software.

"The GPL version 3 is being developed through an open process, whereas, in the past, the GPL was pretty much developed by individuals and sort of presented to the community," said Tony Iams, a vice president and operating systems analyst with Ideas International in New York City.

Iams said one of the major issues to be debated centers on whether software makers should be forced to reveal source code for applications that are only available on the Web.

"Right now under the terms of the GPL code, you do not have to release the source code unless you distribute the software," Iams said. "But some people are saying that if you're going to take advantage of open source programs to create a really attractive and profitable Internet service, you should also have to make those modifications available."

"You can expect the GPL debate to go on for quite some time, but it's really going to take off in 2006," Iams added.

2. Open source virtualization for the masses

There was a lot of talk about Xen open source server virtualization over the past year, but with Xen version 3 set to debut and vendors like Novell and Red Hat planning to bundle it with their Linux distributions, 2006 could be the year that Xen truly hits the mainstream.

"The parties that are going to be most interested in this are people that run data centers and want to consolidate, improve the way they run their data centers and lower their cost of ownership through better utilization and so forth," Iams said. "Those people are very closely looking at virtualization to help them achieve some of those goals."

Proprietary virtualization technology was pushed into the mainstream by VMware Inc., and later by Microsoft with its Virtual Server. But Iams said those well established players could be significantly disrupted when Xen is included with Red Hat's Linux and Novell's SuSE.

"The disruption is really going to be at the foundation of the virtualization stack with the basic ability to run multiple IS operating systems on a single server [becoming] more or less a commodity," Iams said. "That's going to push the differentiation to the upper levels of the virtualization stack, notably to virtualization management. That's where you're going to see lots of investments and activity in managing virtualized infrastructures."

3. Sun and Novell: Will their open source bets pay off?

Sun Microsystems and Novell have reshaped their respective businesses around open source over the past year, and in 2006, the world will find out if their gambits pay off.

Experts say those two companies are worth watching -- and even rooting for -- in 2006, because their success will have major implications for both IT pros and the industry as a whole. Those implications, says Iams, have to do with choice.

For Novell -- a traditionally proprietary vendor that has refocused its business on open source SuSE Linux -- success means that users will have a greater choice when it comes to Linux vendors.

For Sun -- a company that has opened up all of its source code and is now focusing on providing support for its flagship Solaris operating system -- success means that users will have a viable, high-end and Unix-based alternative to Linux.

"The industry should hope that this pays off, because this would be further affirmation that the open source business model is truly viable, and not just for pioneers like Red Hat and JBoss, but also for the established proprietary players," Iams said.

4. A growing open source challenge to MS Exchange?

When it comes to corporate e-mail systems, the combination of MS Outlook and MS Exchange are king. But more and more open source e-mail vendors -- such as Scalix Corp. -- are emerging to try and take a bigger share of the e-mail market, at least on the back end.

As 2006 unfolds, said Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research Inc. in Black Diamond, Wash., those vendors will focus on providing systems administrators with the functionality they need to swap out Exchange for open source on the back end, while keeping Outlook on the clients.

And keeping Outlook on the client, he said, is the key to building e-mail market share, because users are reluctant to take on new desktop e-mail applications. "I think that by and large [open source e-mail providers] have a growing market," said Osterman, whose firm focuses on enterprise messaging issues. "I anticipate that there is going to be increased use of open source e-mail [in 2006]."

5. Desktop Linux ready for take off -- again

Although it has been said before, experts predict that desktop Linux will gain a stronger foothold in corporate America in the coming year.

But this time, says Iams, don't expect an explosion in desktop Linux adoption rates, but rather slow and steady adoption.

Iams said this sure but gradual move forward for desktop Linux in 2006 will take place with the help of a number of software companies.

Linspire Inc. will continue innovating desktop Linux for the consumer crowd while Mandriva, a Linux and open source products, technology and services company, continues putting heavy focus on corporate desktops. In the embedded space, Iams said MontaVista Software Inc. will be hard at work pushing Linux into clients and mobile phones.

"Every year someone makes [the big desktop Linux] prediction, though it never seems to achieve quite the momentum that the optimists have predicted," Iams said. "But every year moves the bar forward a little bit, and so I expect that to continue this year."

Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?

2007-04-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

Want to get a heated debate going among technologists? Ask them this question: Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace?

With little academic attention focused on this question, Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell decided to dive in. Most research to date into the OSS movement has focused on the organization and management issues surrounding OSS. Ghemawat and Casadesus-Masanell chose to explore the fundamental competitive dynamics question: Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?

"We believe that there is still a great deal of confusion and puzzlement on how this competitive battle will develop," say the authors of the academic paper Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows, which has just been accepted for publication in a special issue of Management Science.

Ultimately, the authors believe, neither side is likely to be forced from the battlefield—Microsoft has too much market share and OSS offers too many benefits for users. But there are strategies each can use successfully against the other, as they detail in this e-mail interview.

Sean Silverthorne: Why should OSS ever displace traditional software?

Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pankaj Ghemawat: One main advantage of open source software is that because users can modify the code directly (as they encounter problems or have new ideas on how to improve it), the development cycle is significantly shorter. Proponents of OSS claim that if this demand-side learning (as we call it) is sufficiently strong, OSS will oust traditional software. In addition, software engineers claim that the better architecture of most OSS projects make them a potentially superior product, adding to the probability of success.

However, OSS has disadvantages too. Most importantly, it comes from behind in terms of market share (installed base). Because the value of an operating system depends critically on the number of users, traditional software has an advantage. Clearly, a larger installed base implies that there will be stronger direct and indirect network effects, and this will enhance the value of the operating system to current and potential users. In addition, a larger installed base also implies that there will be more feedback on bugs and more suggestions for new features.

Our paper introduces a dynamic mixed duopoly model in which a profit-maximizing competitor (Microsoft) interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (Linux), with the installed base affecting their relative values over time. We use a formal model to ask what conditions are needed for Linux to take over Windows. The questions that we address are: Is Linux's superior demand-side learning sufficient to win out? What is the effect of forced procurement by governments and some large corporations on the long-run equilibrium? How do cost asymmetries play out? Can Microsoft use piracy strategically to improve its market position?

From a managerial perspective, these are significant questions. If it turns out that OSS will incontestably displace traditional software, software firms need to adapt as quickly as possible to the new competitive landscape by, for example, incorporating some aspects of the open source development model, or else be ready to exit. In fact, the model suggests ways in which the likelihood of OSS winning out can be minimized (see below). If, to the contrary, OSS turns out not to be a threat to the traditional model, firms should not waste time and attention trying to figure out ways to fight this battle.

Q: Could you summarize your results?

A: First of all, let us make a caveat regarding our approach. Our methodology is formal economic modelling. What this means is that we construct a stylized mathematical model of the relationship. The model captures what we believe are the most important features of the Linux-Windows competitive battle (faster demand-side learning on the part of Linux and an initial installed base advantage for Windows), but makes important assumptions regarding other aspects. Without these simplifications, the model would not be tractable and it would not be possible to obtain results. After having analyzed the base model, we relax some of these assumptions.
Harnessing demand-side learning more efficiently is not sufficient for Linux to win the competitive battle against Windows.

Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position. This result holds true regardless of the strength of Linux's demand-side learning. Furthermore, the result persists regardless of the intrinsically better design and potential differential value of Linux. In other words, harnessing demand-side learning more efficiently is not sufficient for Linux to win the competitive battle against Windows.

Having obtained this basic result, we investigate the conditions that will warrant that Linux ends up forcing Windows out. We do this by modifying the model in two ways. First of all, we look at the effect of having buyers such as governments and some large corporations committed to deployment of Linux in their organizations. We call such buyers strategic. In addition to cost-related reasons, governments back Linux because having access to the source code allows them to verify that sensitive data is treated securely. Binary code makes it hard to figure out who has access to information flowing in a network. Companies such as IBM, in contrast, back Linux because they see in OSS one way to diminish Microsoft's dominance. We find that the presence of strategic buyers together with Linux's sufficiently strong demand-side learning results in Windows being driven out of the market. This may be one main reason why Microsoft has been providing chunks of Windows' source code to governments.

Second, we look at the role of cost asymmetries. In the base model we assume that the cost structures of Windows and Linux for the development, distribution, and support of software coincide. A natural question is then whether the central result that Windows survives in the long-run equilibrium regardless of the speed of Linux's demand-side learning persists if there are cost asymmetries. We find that because OSS implies lower profits for Microsoft, the larger the cost differences are between Linux and Windows, the less able Microsoft is to guarantee the survival of Windows.

We also show that it is not all bad news to Microsoft. We analyze the effect of having forward-looking buyers and the presence of piracy, and conclude that both benefit Microsoft.

We question the effectiveness of influencing forward-looking buyers' perceptions on the value of an operating system. The model suggests that the more forward-looking buyers are, the more advantageous it is to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) tactics to drive the competing system out. Consider SCO, a small "vulture" firm that had bought up the intellectual property rights to a particular version of Unix and threatened Linux users with lawsuits over infringement of those rights unless they agree to pay substantial licensing fees. IBM, which was one of the prime corporate sponsors of Linux as well as the target of a lawsuit by SCO that sought $1 billion in damages, alleged in mid-2003 that SCO was in cahoots with Microsoft. Our model indicates that if buyers are sufficiently forward-looking, such actions may jeopardize the ability of Linux to continue as an effective competitor in the operating system space.

We also look at the effect of piracy and ask whether piracy can ever be beneficial to Microsoft. This extension was motivated by analyzing data on a cross-section of countries on Linux penetration and piracy rates. We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate. The model shows that Microsoft can use piracy as an effective tool to price discriminate, and that piracy may even result in higher profits to Microsoft!

Finally, the paper investigates the societal welfare consequences of OSS availability by comparing different industry structures (monopoly and duopoly). We find that while a monopoly of Linux is always preferable (from the point of view of societal welfare) to a Windows monopoly, it is ambiguous whether a duopoly Linux-Windows is better than a Windows monopoly.

The basic trade-off is the following: With a duopoly, more individuals and organizations use PCs because prices are lower, and this raises welfare. However, with a duopoly, no operating system ends up exploiting fully its potential because developers' efforts wind up divided between the two systems. However, with a monopoly, the efforts to develop new software and improve the platform are directed towards one system only and this may turn out to be better from a social welfare perspective.

Q: In general, what surprised you about the results? What assumptions did you have going in that didn't hold up?

A: When we began the project, we thought that network effects and demand-side learning would result in Linux forcing Windows out. After all, we reasoned, if Windows is sold at a positive price and Linux is free, there will always be Linux users, and if the strength of Linux's network effect is large, the value of Linux to prospective users should eventually become larger than that of Windows.

Well… we were wrong (and this illustrates the usefulness of developing a formal model). What we had missed is that Microsoft's initial advantage (larger installed base) together with its pricing power allow the company to price strategically to control Linux's market share going forward. By lowering the price of Windows, the demand for Linux shrinks to the point where Linux is not a threat to the survival of Windows. The model also shows that a "milking strategy" (setting high prices in the short term and leaving the market at some point in the future) is not desirable to Microsoft. The reason is that if Microsoft follows such a strategy, as the last period becomes closer and closer, the relative benefit of abandoning it and lowering prices to survive a few more periods increases dramatically.
The model shows that Microsoft can use piracy as an effective tool to price discriminate, and that piracy may even result in higher profits to Microsoft!

The "Windows persistence" result turns out to be robust to different specifications of the model. In fact, in the first few months into the project we had developed several alternative models and every one of them yielded this very same finding.

In addition to this main result, we were also surprised to find that piracy may end up increasing Microsoft's profits. To understand why, notice that there are two types of pirates: those who would not have bought Windows in the first place because it is too expensive, and those who would have bought Windows but now decide to pirate it. The first category increases Windows' installed base without affecting sales. As a consequence, this group increases the value of Windows. And thanks to these pirates, Microsoft is able to set higher prices in the future (because the value of the system goes up). In addition, having these pirates means that Linux's installed base does not grow as much as it would have if piracy weren't there. The second type of pirates (those who in the absence of piracy would have bought Windows) reduces Windows' sales and profit. Thus, if the proportion of first-type pirates is sufficiently large, Microsoft's profits will increase with piracy.

Finally, the social welfare result that a Windows monopoly is not always worse than a Linux-Windows monopoly was also unexpected. This questions the social desirability of policies aimed at guaranteeing Linux's survival.

Q: You mention in the paper that the model is not to be taken as a literal model of the Linux/Microsoft competition. But can you say anything about why Linux has enjoyed success against Microsoft?

A: Linux's success against Microsoft is still relative. In the client space, Windows is the undisputable leader, and in the server space, Linux and Windows have both been gaining positions for the past ten years. The big losers are Novell, Unix, Solaris… everybody except Linux and Windows.

Despite this, Microsoft is visibly concerned about Linux's upsurge. The Halloween memos (see http://www.opensource.org/halloween/) are an obvious testimony of this concern: "OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mindshare threat."

Microsoft has a great deal to lose if Linux wins the operating systems battle. Microsoft is a software company, and a defeat in operating systems would point to the vulnerability of its entire business portfolio. In addition, the operating systems group is one of Microsoft's biggest revenue generators. Moreover, to a large extent Microsoft's sustained success over time in such a dreadfully rugged landscape has been due to its dominant position in operating systems. It is well known that Microsoft won the browser wars leveraging its dominant position in client operating systems. And the same will happen in the media player space unless the American or European antitrust authorities prevent it. We expect Microsoft to put all its ammunition to fight this battle.

Part of the reason why Linux has made significant inroads is the determination of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to have a free (as in freedom) operating system. According to Stallman, application software will never be truly free unless there is a free operating system that supports it. Thus, since the moment Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman joined forces, a big chunk of the foundation's efforts have been directed at building a free operating system.

Then there are some large corporations and governments backing the development of Linux. These players use Linux as a way to curb Microsoft's dominance. This support is important because there are tedious portions of the code that would rarely be developed spontaneously by members of the Linux-developer community.

Q: From your modelling, what can Microsoft do strategically to remain competitive against a product that is argued to be of better quality, is updated more frequently, and is free?

A: A few actions that the model suggests Microsoft could do to remain competitive are:
Increase its own demand-side learning.
Listen to the demands of the user community to better exploit the benefits of demand-side learning. Microsoft must facilitate communication between the user base and the company to have prompt feedback on the performance of its products.
Make an effort to incorporate improvements in the code (fix bugs and introduce new features) as soon as possible.
Reward those who propose improvements for the code. At the very least, Microsoft could publicly acknowledge those who proposed new features or discovered bugs.
Feed its direct and indirect network effects.
Support as much as possible the independent software vendor community so that the quantity and quality of complements is substantially above that of Linux.
Encourage competition between the different ISVs. The lower the prices of applications, the more appealing the Microsoft system will be.
Price discriminate. Give Windows and applications away to schools and universities so that users build their file libraries on Microsoft, not Linux.
Minimize the number of strategic buyers.
Let governments access the source code and give guarantees that sensitive data is treated confidentially.
Price discriminate. Give binary away to organizations and individuals who are not willing to spend money on Windows but who would be willing to use Linux because it is free.
Reduce costs to be able to sustain long periods of time with low prices.
Decrease Linux's demand-side learning.
Because the way to do this involves some questionable (from a legal point of view) actions, we will refrain from suggesting specifics.
Lessen Linux's direct and indirect network effects.
Make it as hard as possible for Windows applications to work on Linux.
Same for MS Office documents.
"Promote" Linux's code forking.
Infuse fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the Linux user community. For this to work, the statements must be perceived as credible. Credibility requires some past FUD announcements to be realized.

Q: Is there a scenario where Linux could be kicked out of the market by Microsoft?

A: Strictly speaking, within our model the only way in which Microsoft can get rid of Linux is by setting the price at zero. But, even if Microsoft did that, the company would still be selling MS Office for a positive price. Thus, we conjecture that even in this case, there would be people developing and using Linux.

The more important question is: What motivates developers to contribute to open source projects in the first place? As long as the drivers are there, Linux will persist. Given that Linux was born in 1992 in an industry already dominated by Microsoft, and given that the financial motive is secondary, it will be very hard for anyone to oust Linux.

The organizational stream of research on OSS has identified several drivers of motivation to contribute to open source projects. For Microsoft to have a chance to kick Linux out of the market, it needs to successfully fight them.

First, some developers see software as scientific knowledge to be shared "like the sharing of recipes among cooks." In fact, some describe software developers more like artists seeking fun, challenge, and beauty in their work than like calculative, square-minded engineers. Second, some individuals find it fun to go against Microsoft. As the OSS/free software movement gains momentum and developers foresee that victory is within reach, they increase their effort to accomplish this. Third, because most OSS projects have a log file listing all contributors to the code, some developers find it desirable to participate in OSS projects to signal their ability and to enhance their chances of promotion and professional advancement. Finally, user-developers sometimes fix bugs that they find and then release the improved code so that everybody can benefit.
It will be very hard for anyone to oust Linux.

To the motivations of independent developers to contribute to Linux, we have to add the important support that the free operating system receives from companies and governments. As long as the motives that induce these organizations to back Linux persist, Linux will not go away.

Finally, and as we mentioned above, having a free operating system is central to the mission of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds. It is thus hard to see how Microsoft can "persuade" Stallman or Torvalds to cave. And even if it did… Linux is no longer Stallman's or Torvalds' property. The project is dispersed and there is no "owner" of the code. Thus, someone else can take the lead.

Q: What's next for the both of you for future research projects?

A: There are several ways in which our work on Linux can be extended. One avenue would be to empirically estimate the difference in demand-side learning between Linux and Windows. This would allow us to make educated guesses on the chances of survival of Windows and make managerial and policy recommendations to OSS advocates, Microsoft, and administrations.

In its present form, the paper models the organization of Linux's development in a very stylized way. Having a closer look at issues of effort coordination may help us better understand how to deal with code forking, one of OSS's biggest potential problems.

A second organizational issue that could also benefit from formal analysis is that of incentives to contribute to OSS. While most research on this issue has been sociological in nature, the economic approach may shed light on why supposedly rational individuals are willing to spend valuable time and effort without extrinsic, financial incentives.

A final question that we believe is of utmost importance but that has not attracted much attention thus far (at least among academics) is: What are the drivers of adoption of OSS? Aside from its empirical relevance for both individuals and organizations, it is an interesting question from a theoretical point of view, too. The presence of network effects and demand-side learning make this a non-trivial problem. We conjecture that there are multiple equilibria and that the use of FUD to mold perceptions about future value becomes crucial.

Microsoft and Open Source

2007-03-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

Microsoft and Open Source Software

Microsoft has been learning from the OSS community regarding the benefits of deeper collaboration and increased transparency leading to better communication with customers. We believe the most effective pathway for a commercial software company is to strike a balance between investing in research and development and the release of intellectual property assets in the form of source code for both reference and collaborative purposes.

The increased competition resulting from the proliferation of OSS has been constructive for the industry as a whole. The implications of OSS within multiple market segments are causing organizations to figure out what is most important to them. It has placed a higher premium on innovation and a drive to deliver greater value for lower costs. The big winner in this equation has been the software consumer, whose choices have increased dramatically.

The Shared Source Initiative is the manifestation of these factors within Microsoft. With more than 80 source code offerings being used by more than two million developers, Microsoft is looking to apply the best of open source while helping its customers avoid many of the model’s pitfalls. There is no one, correct way to create software. The ecosystem as a whole will benefit from a rich tapestry of development, business, and licensing models.

Read It Microsoft Web Site :)

Kerala's draft IT policy released

2007-02-10T07:46:00.000-08:00

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The draft information technology (IT) policy released by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan here on Wednesday proposes to make Kerala a cradle of knowledge workers. It aims to upgrade the productivity, skill and knowledge levels of the citizen.

Proposals include establishment of an International Centre for Free Software and Computing for Development, ITES Training Centre (in Kochi) and extension of Internet to all educational institutions and villages by 2010. Around 3,000 broadband-enabled information hubs called Akshaya e-Centres will be set up in difference parts of the State.

The Government will support private initiatives to set up IT parks. Private IT parks that meet a minimum set of standards shall be promoted by the Government as an integral part of the State's IT infrastructure, if the parks desire so. The Government will expand Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in Kochi on its own accord and in partnership with private infrastructure providers. Focus areas include e-governance, free software and development of appropriate technologies. The State will network with national and international organisations and industry for research and development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and knowledge sharing. The proposed Centre for Free Software will focus on developing technologies relevant for social and economic advancement in developing countries.

The policy stresses that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) will be used in e-governance projects. Open standards such as Unicode and Open Document Format and Open Architectures will be followed in e-governance projects to avoid total dependence on select vendors. The Government proposed to develop the State as the FOSS destination in the country. It will provide special incentives to companies developing FOSS. The policy says that the State will try to make maximum use of ICT in governance. Taking the Right to Information Act in its true spirit, the Government will take up ICT-enabled programmes for efficient flow of information between citizens and the Government.

The Government will make use of all the media tools and emerging technologies to ensure proper communication between the Government and the citizen. The Government will promote the use of Web sites, e-mails and other news communication facilities in various Government and semi-Government organisations.

Tamil Nadu (India) may shut door on Microsoft

2007-01-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

Chennai, Dec. 31: The Tamil Nadu government, which is on a fast-track pushing the state to the top in the Indian IT sector, has almost shut its door on the software giant, Microsoft, preferring the Open Source Systems (OSS) for reasons of costs and easy migrating capabilities.

“Initially, 99 per cent of government systems have been running on Microsoft systems but then 2007 will be a watershed year for the state IT sector. We are fast migrating to Linux operating systems which are so much cheaper and can be operated at low cost, besides offering continuous updates and freedom from viruses,” says Mr C. Umashankar, managing director of state-owned ELCOT, vested with the responsibility of overseeing such ambitious government projects as e-governance, enumerating the beneficiaries of the free TV scheme, family ration cards and the free sari-dhoti distribution.

“We have already dispatched 6,500 Linux systems to village panchayats and another 6,100 Acer desktop systems with Suse Linux operating systems are on their way. We are procuring 20,000 desktop systems for schools, which will run only on Suse Linux. Remaining 30 desktop systems will also migrate as and when the new machines arrive,” Mr Umashankar told this newspaper.
He said all the ELCOT servers were on Redhat Linus and the government IT company’s 28-seater software development wing was fully on Suse Linux.

“We will train over 30,000 government officials in Linux Operating Systems and Open Office. A contract has been already finalised with the government departments and we have set up a Linux support centre with two Linux-certified professionals to assist the state officers. This number will go up to ten or more in 2007, which will be a path-breaking year for government on migration to Linux Operating System,” Mr Umashankar said. “India can live without Microsoft packages and even progress but Microsoft will find it tough without a huge country like India buying their software packages,” he said.

He said a top official from Microsoft India had met him twice to convince him to continue with MS products. The official offered the XP operating system for about Rs.7000 while he quoted Rs.500. “I explained to her that for a mere Rs.300, I could get the entire operating system, office productivity software and a wide range of utility tools, such as DVD/CD writing software, database software, multimedia editing software, vector map-drawing software plus a whole range of software development tools. Also, I have the option of downloading this entire package in DVD media and not even pay that Rs.300, which is the media cost and not the software charges,” said the ELCOT chief, an IT expert himself besides being a senior IAS bureaucrat.

He said he had also pointed out to the Microsoft official that MS Office did not allow saving of documents in open document format. While it was possible to open all MS Office files using Openoffice.org, the vice versa cannot be done. “I asked her why ELCOT should buy such an inferior product when
Openoffice.org is available free of cost for Windows as well as Linux.

She said Microsoft are working on open XML format,” he added. Mr Umashankar said he had written to state finance secretary enumerating the “huge financial and working advantages” of shifting to Open Source Environment in all government departments. “I have been receiving great support from all the senior IAS officers here, from the chief secretary downwards. It is very encouraging.

ELCOT is not the loser when Microsoft did not accept our price of Rs.500; on the other hand, Microsoft loses out due to our big volumes involved,” he said.
“There is a gross misconception among the governments and officials that if they migrate to Open Source platform, Microsoft would get angry and the entire software industry could come to a grinding halt. This is totally misplaced fear,” Mr Umashankar said.

“Within the next five years, it is going to be the IT services which would dominate the revenue share of the IT companies, because more and more users, governments and the corporate sector have started migrating to OS software, thus removing the scope for more revenues from products. It is time that the users understood this scenario and start saving their precious revenues,” Mr Umashankar said.

Talking of the changes happening in this direction, he said he had ordered 43 rack servers for ELCOT to host various government applications. “All the applications are to run under OS software. I would have paid Rs.20 lakh per server if I had adopted proprietary software but now I have saved over Rs.8 crore from this one transaction.

We intend to procure 1000 servers in the next two years. Imagine the amount of savings we are getting out of this,” the ELCOT chief said. “In my view, a state government of TN magnitude would be able to save Rs 200-500 crores every year, when the National e-governance action plan gets implemented,” he said, adding that school children too could get the benefit of “more robust, secure and economical Open Source software for their work,” he added. “Today, there is more demand for OSS trained engineers. I require at least 500 trainers to train 30,000 state officials across Tamil Nadu in the next six months.

MAVERICK RICHARD STALLMAN KEEPS THE FAITH

2006-10-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

When Richard Stallman gave Bill Gates the finger in front of Stanford's computer science building, I got nervous. No, it wasn't the real Bill Gates -- it was just his name, engraved in giant letters over the main entrance to the 2-year-old, Gates-funded building. But it didn't seem like a Stanford thing to do. The campus is immaculately manicured, dotted with picture-postcard palm trees and squeaky-clean students. It's just not a flipping-the-bird kind of place.

It didn't strike me as a Richard Stallman kind of place, either. Stallman is a legendary hacker, the founder of the free software movement, a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient and a programmer capable of prodigious exploits. But on this day in Palo Alto he looked unkempt and off-kilter. I had already spent a good part of the afternoon watching in bemused silence as he painstakingly examined his long, stringy brown hair for split ends. I was also mesmerized by his piercing green eyes, radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet. I feared his wrath.

We had come to Stanford in search of a place where Stallman could download his e-mail. Two hours away from catching a long flight to New Zealand -- partly for vacation, partly to continue proselytizing his free software "mission" -- Stallman was jonesing for one last connection to the Net. Being Richard Stallman, he figured he could just drop in on the computer science department at Stanford. He hadn't visited for several years, but he was good friends with equally legendary Stanford professor John McCarthy -- the man who invented the Lisp programming language and coined the term "artificial intelligence." Stallman himself programmed the multipurpose Emacs editing tool, a kind of nuclear-powered Swiss Army knife favored by top-notch programmers and computer scientists. Surely some Emacs acolyte would be delighted to help the one and only Richard Stallman grab his e-mail.

First we tried to sneak in through a side door of the Gates building. Over a lunch of ribs, duck, trout and popcorn shrimp at Palo Alto's MacArthur Park restaurant, Stallman had told me that he didn't despise Bill Gates as much as other free software guerrilla fighters do. But he clearly wasn't eager to legitimize Gates' stature by walking submissively through his totemic gate. Free software and Microsoft don't mix. There had to be a better way.

Except there wasn't. The path to McCarthy's office from the side door entrance was obscure. We sucked in our guts and headed for the main gate.

"Hey," Stallman called out to a graduate student opening the door in front of us, "is it the tradition here to give Bill the finger whenever you go through these doors?"

The student looked over his shoulder, twitched a nervous smile and disappeared inside. Stallman shrugged -- and right there on the spot decided to start his own protest movement. As we entered the building, out came what the ancient Romans used to call the "digit impudicus." Stallman flashed me a sly grin. I glanced around, looking for security.

Over the course of about half an hour in the building, Stallman encouraged three other people to join his campaign. No one signed on unreservedly, but two recognized him right away -- one from a conference some six years earlier and another from his picture in a recent Forbes magazine article celebrating the surprising commercial success of the free software (or, as it is now more commonly called, "open source") movement.

Would the movement to deride Gates have as much success? Stallman didn't know and didn't care. As he pointed out to me repeatedly through the course of our afternoon together, he doesn't do things because they are socially acceptable or strategically appropriate. Success is not his measure for accomplishment. He does what he does because he thinks it is the morally correct, or simply fun, thing to do. And he brooks no compromise.

The Challenge of the Multi-site Nonprofit

2006-07-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

Why is it more difficult for nonprofit organizations than, say, retail chains, to run efficient multi-site operations? A recent Harvard Business Review story concluded that nonprofits waste $100 billion a year through inefficient fundraising and dispersal practices and clumsy administrative operations.

The problem, according to Harvard Business School professors Allen Grossman and V. Kasturi ("Kash") Rangan, rests in inevitable tensions and battles for power that arise between national headquarters and local operations.

Not helping the problem is the fact that many nonprofits employ management techniques developed for for-profit companies. "We say this is not a good approach," said Grossman. Instead, nonprofits need their own management practices that recognize the unique characteristics of the nonprofit enterprise.

Grossman and Rangan presented their findings—and some possible solutions—at the Faculty Research Symposium held at HBS on May 20.

Whether a particular nonprofit organizational structure favors central or local control, inevitable tensions develop between national headquarters and local operations, Grossman said. These disputes often result from the unique characteristics that differentiate them from for-profit concerns:
The real value creators for nonprofits are the dispersed units, where money is raised and good deeds accomplished. With for-profits, headquarters is usually where the value is created.
A constant power struggle takes place between local and national leaders.
Wide use of volunteer labor makes worker motivation more of an issue.
Up to 60 percent of a nonprofit CEO's time is spent fundraising, time that could be spent building a more effective organization.
The strong emotional environment around nonprofits can challenge rational decision making.
Nonprofits often have a cultural opposition to structure.
A lack of theory of management practice exists for nonprofits.

These characteristics lead to a number of disputes between headquarters and affiliates, according to Grossman and Rangan. For example, who controls the donor list and money raised? Is it the affiliate that actually raises the funds, or the national organization that provides the overall brand and direction? Are affiliates delivering the level of service defined by the national organization? Does the affiliate adequately represent the values and goals of the national brand? Do affiliates receive an appropriate level of national services from the fees they pay?

Traditionally these strains have fueled centralization versus the decentralization debate in the nonprofit community, Grossman told his audience. And that's the wrong approach to take—the value proposition created by a national organization with local units is lost. Instead, the debate should be reframed with autonomy and affiliation as the key dimensions.

In their research, Grossman and Rangan looked at the system behaviors of five nonprofits: Outward Bound (where Grossman once served as CEO), Planned Parenthood, Habitat for Humanity, SOS Kinderdorf, and The Nature Conservancy. Each was mapped on two dimensions—one that exerts forces toward unit autonomy and the other influencing the degree of organizational affiliation. (The Nature Conservancy and Habitat for Humanity were the highest affiliation organizations; Planned Parenthood and Outward Bound were high autonomy organizations; SOS Kinderdorf ranked lowest on the autonomy scale, and about in the middle for affiliation.)

The point isn't whether an autonomous-biased organization is better than a more affiliate-driven one, but rather to identify "levers of influence" system managers can employ to get their organization the desired balance between the two forces.

"Headquarters should undertake actions to enhance system value and then sustain it, and affiliates should maximize local resources to enhance their credibility and increase their voice in the running of the system," Grossman and Rangan wrote in a working paper on the subject. "The key for management is to develop a governance system that accommodates this tension in a constructive rather than a destructive fashion."

To get constructive co-existence of unit autonomy and organizational affiliation, organizations must have in place a clear process for making decisions as to who will perform the functions necessary for the system, and a process that commits operating units to adhere to systemic decisions.

At the seminar, Rangan cautioned that there is no single cookie-cutter approach to solve the problems of all nonprofits. For example, if a meal kitchen has 100 strong, local operations there is little need for national people to come in, other than to provide a few services.

Among their conclusions, Grossman said, are:
A multi-site nonprofit's value proposition must be real, and consistently communicated externally and internally.
Strong unit autonomy and strong systems can be compatible and mutually supportive.
Lack of understanding of multi-site dynamics leads to a waste of money and resources.

More research is underway on several issues. To what degree are corporate structure and strong unit autonomy incompatible? How much strong national leadership is required to complement local program customization? And how important is national leadership in determining the success of a multi-site nonprofit?

VMWare - Virtualization

2006-06-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

VMWare - Virtualzation the new business model for Low cost virtual machines

The Secret of How Microsoft Stays on Top

2006-03-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

Perhaps no technology company outside of IBM has been able to keep on top of the industry as much as Microsoft. What's more, Bill Gates & Co. have achieved this success during times of incredible technological transformation, usually just the period when titans are vulnerable to being knocked off by disruptive technologies.

To understand the way Microsoft manages IP, you have to go back to the roots of the company. Back in the late 1970s, its first products were aimed at helping other programmers develop applications for the computing hardware of the day. It focused on developing programming platforms, in contrast to most other firms who focused on stand-alone applications. It was an approach that permeated both their tools business—the software they provided to other programmers for developing applications; and the operating system business—the software upon which these applications would run.

It was during these early days that Microsoft began to invest in creating libraries of programming "components": building blocks of intellectual property that could be used to develop different software applications. The original impetus was the need to provide programmers with pre-defined interfaces through which they could access commonly used functions and features. Why reinvent the wheel if someone else had already worked out what it should look like? In essence, Microsoft began codifying knowledge and embedding it in a form that could be leveraged, both by itself and others. But it got to decide which components to "expose," and which to keep hidden, providing a mechanism through which its core intellectual property could be protected.

As the company expanded, Microsoft formalized this component framework and developed a "programming model" to go along with it—in essence, defining the way that applications should interact with its preexisting software components. It extended the model to its application business, sharing increasing amounts of code between products like Word and Excel. Over time, as more and more partners signed up to use the model, developing applications for Microsoft's operating systems and using Microsoft's tools in the process, the power of the platform became evident. It was a win-win relationship—the community of development partners received benefits in terms of enhanced productivity, while Microsoft's position was strengthened through the deployment of products that were complementary to its own. This made it tough for competitors. They were not just going head-to-head with Microsoft's products—they were also competing against the repository of knowledge accumulating in Microsoft's component libraries.

By now, you will see that Microsoft was building a rather unique resource. Its approach to software "componentization" allowed the firm to leverage intellectual property across multiple product lines. And it also made it attractive for third-party firms to leverage Microsoft's platform, as opposed to others. But how did this allow the firm to respond effectively to technological change? First, it had an established base of knowledge that could be brought to bear on newly emerging opportunities. Second, it had a well-defined process through which new intellectual property could be codified and integrated into this knowledge base in a way that ensured compatibility with its existing components. And third, it established processes to evolve this knowledge base to ensure it reflected changes in the broader technological context. For example, the programming model was updated in the early 1990s to reflect the increasing use of networks. Then later in the 1990s, Microsoft once again began "re-architecting" its component base to facilitate the delivery of "Web services," applications that can be activated remotely over the Internet.
Only once in fifteen years did Microsoft products fail to win more than 50 percent of these reviews.

Putting this all together, we see that much of Microsoft's long-term success can be attributed to investments that have created "dynamic capabilities" for responding to technological change. These investments include: the process of software componentization through which it captures and embeds intellectual property in an accessible form; the component libraries that result from this process, which form a vast repository of knowledge that can be leveraged across its product lines; a programming model that allows developers, both inside and outside the firm, to access these components through well-defined interfaces; and the process through which both its software components and programming model are updated to reflect developments in the broader technological context.

Microsoft has been criticized as a company that relies more on predatory tactics than great products and innovation to succeed. What can you say about Microsoft's product development performance over the years?

We analyzed the development performance of Microsoft products for the past fifteen years. Our aim was to come up with an objective measure of performance—one that was unrelated to arguments about market power, monopoly position, or predatory tactics. This meant we excluded any consideration of measures like market share or profitability, and focused instead on the ratings given to Microsoft products by independent reviewers. We found that Microsoft products were consistently rated highly when compared to competitive offerings, a result that held true across different product categories and over time. On average, Microsoft products "won" more than two-thirds of the competitive reviews we examined. Indeed, only once in fifteen years did Microsoft products fail to win more than 50% of these reviews. Given the number and diversity of competitors they faced in each different product category, this consistently high performance is striking.
When developers find attractive alternatives to Microsoft technologies as they did when the Internet first emerged—it's not long before the tools division starts to hear about it.

We also evaluated Microsoft's response to a "technological transition"—a major change in the industry that required the firm to rethink its strategy. We chose to examine the rise of the World Wide Web, given that this transition brought about the rise of a new product category—the Web browser. Microsoft therefore needed to develop a product based on technologies with which it had little previous experience. Our analysis focused on Microsoft's first two internal browser development projects, comparing their performance to a sample of Internet software projects completed at the same time. We discovered that Microsoft's projects exhibited significantly higher productivity than the sample average. Furthermore, we found that the resulting products were rated as equal to or higher in quality than competitive offerings. These results often surprise people, given the perceived wisdom that incumbents have difficulty responding to major technological changes.

Microsoft was originally late in its embrace of the Internet. Yet Bill Gates was able to quickly change strategy to allow the company to become a top competitor in selling Internet-related technologies and services. How did Microsoft accomplish this?

In any industry subject to rapid technological change, a firm faces two big challenges. The first is in recognizing the threats (and opportunities) presented by newly emerging technologies. The second is in mounting an effective response to these threats. Microsoft appears to have solved these problems, giving it the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. The way they have tackled each however, differs in nature.

In terms of recognizing potential threats, Microsoft has built-in "sensing" mechanisms to keep abreast of what is happening in the broader technological context. Much of this ability comes from their tools division, which tracks the needs of the many developers worldwide who write for Microsoft platforms. When these developers find attractive alternatives to Microsoft technologies—as they did when the Internet first emerged—it's not long before the tools division starts to hear about it. You also have to realize that Microsoft has several thousand developers inside the company who are constantly examining the potential of new technologies—"lead users" if you like. When all these sources start telling you the same thing, it's hard not to pay attention. Even if it takes a while to work out exactly what should be done.

In terms of responding to potential threats, Microsoft consistently plays to its strengths—its overall platform strategy, its existing knowledge base, and its process of componentization. For example, when developing the new Internet Explorer browser, the development team opted to leverage its existing programming model, despite the fact that this would initially slow the project down. From this point on, competitors in the browser space faced a formidable challenge—they were competing not only against the Explorer team, but also against the continual improvements made to Microsoft's underlying platform over its many years of existence.

What should company leaders everywhere take away from your research in terms of how to compete in the middle of a technological revolution?

Our research highlights two major themes. The first is the importance of taking a proactive approach to managing the development of a firm's intellectual property. We're not talking about patenting strategies here, but rather the set of processes that contribute to building and evolving a firm's knowledge base. These processes fall into four categories: creation/codification; integration/assimilation; application/exploitation; and evolution/adaptation. Inside Microsoft and other successful firms we've studied, managers give careful consideration to how each of these activities is conducted. In doing so, they pay explicit attention to the way these activities interact with processes that leverage the resulting intellectual property assets (e.g., product development).

The second theme that emerges from our work is the importance of architecture. This theme emerges at multiple levels—in the design of Microsoft's products, its platforms, and its intellectual property. At the product and platform level, the key idea is that in today's networked economy, no firm can remain an island. Technological innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, each focused on only specific pieces of the overall puzzle. Competition takes place both between competing platforms and between products that build on top of these platforms. Managers must therefore make explicit choices about the technology architectures they adopt, deciding what to "design/make" themselves, and what to rely upon others to provide.

With regard to developing intellectual property, our work demonstrates the need for an architectural framework that defines how the various building blocks of IP should fit together. Without such a framework, these efforts are likely to be fragmented and difficult to integrate. At Microsoft, this role is performed by its programming model, which describes the interfaces through which its software components can be accessed. Critically, this model is designed to be flexible enough to facilitate future evolutions in content, as required to reflect changes in the broader technological context.

Gates has said, and history suggests, that Microsoft one day will fail. What will be the company's downfall?

If we knew the answer to this question, we'd be rich!

Slightly more seriously, the main threat probably comes from competing platforms—alternative systems that enable large numbers of developers to form competing innovation ecosystems. These other platforms, promoted by competitors such as Sun and IBM, are currently strong alternatives to Windows and the Microsoft Developer Network. One of the most interesting is the Linux/open source platform. This platform has recently become associated with IBM, which has invested resources in its development and extension, and used it to promote complementary hardware, software, and services. However, this is less a story of sudden dramatic failure and more a story of ongoing competition at the platform level. The presence of competing platforms like Linux requires that Microsoft continue to invest in its IP base and integrate new innovations into its own platform. If it fails to do this, it will be certain to lose out to alternatives.

Why Evolutionary Software Development Works

2006-01-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Given the importance of software, the lack of research on the best ways to manage its development is surprising. Many different models have been proposed since the much cited waterfall model emerged more than 30 years ago. Unfortunately, few studies have confirmed empirically the benefits of the newer models. The most widely quoted references report lessons from only a few successful projects.

Now a two-year empirical study, which the author and colleagues Marco Iansiti and Roberto Verganti completed last year, reveals thought-provoking information from the Internet-software industry—an industry in which the need for a responsive development process has never been greater. The researchers analyzed data from 29 completed projects and identified the characteristics most associated with the best outcomes. (See "Four Software-Development Practices That Spell Success.") Successful development was evolutionary in nature. Companies first would release a low-functionality version of a product to selected customers at a very early stage of development. Thereafter work would proceed in an iterative fashion, with the design allowed to evolve in response to the customers' feedback. The approach contrasts with traditional models of software development and their more sequential processes. Although the evolutionary model has been around for several years, this is the first time the connection has been demonstrated between the practices that support the model and the quality of the resulting product.
Research on the internet-software industry

A study of projects in the Internet-software industry asked the question "Does a more evolutionary development process result in better performance?" The study was undertaken in stages. First, the researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with project managers in the industry to understand the types of practices being used. Next, they developed metrics to characterize the type of process adopted in each project. Finally, the metrics were incorporated into a survey that went to a sample of Internet-software companies identified through a review of industry journals. The final sample contained data on 29 projects from 17 companies.
The most remarkable finding was that getting a low-functionality version of the product into customer's hands at the earliest opportunity improves quality dramatically.

To assess the performance of projects in the industry, we examined two outcome measures—one related to the performance of the final product and the other to the productivity achieved in terms of resource consumption (resource productivity). To assess the former, the researchers asked a panel of 14 independent industry experts to rate the comparative quality of each product relative to other products that targeted similar customer needs at the time the act was launched. Product quality was defined as a combination of reliability, technical performance (such as speed) and breadth of functionality. Experts' ratings were gathered using a two-round Delphi (in which information from the first round is given to all experts to help them make their final assessment). To assess the resource productivity of each project, the researchers calculated a measure of the lines of new code developed per person-day and adjusted for differing levels of product complexity. Analysis of the data uncovered four practices critical to success

ONE -Your Source for Open Source Solutions

2005-12-16T22:31:00.001-08:00

Your Source for Open Source Solutions

Welcome to linuxclub.org - an opensource developmet community site dedicated to providing a forum for open source software used in e-commerce,CRM,CMSin LAMP environments. While we have predominantly included software to date that we have created, we are looking forward to adding more software / developers from all of you as it is submitted to us for inclusion. If you are working on any type of software developemt for ecom, b2b,b2c development, this is your right place,

This Service is Managed by Biju Gopinath and Praveen Kumar

BS 1799

2005-09-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

BS 1799 Started . Process For Security Auditing

The Organizational Model for Open Source

2005-07-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Programmers contribute to free software and open source projects for many reasons—some for the fun of it, some to improve their skills, others for a paycheck. Many people have wondered why these people give their work away. The truth is that many projects have incorporated in order to protect themselves from individual liability. Since the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985, a number of new nonprofit foundations have formed, often around specific technologies, to serve the interests of programmers.

HBS professor Siobhán O'Mahony discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source Web server.

Stark: Could you explain why the emergence of nonprofit foundations in the hacker culture appears to be a contradiction in terms?

O'Mahony: The hacker culture prizes autonomy and self-determination. Eric Raymond defines hackers as those who love programming for the sake of doing it, for the sake of obsessively solving a problem. Thus, hackers who contribute to the open source community are often intrinsically motivated.

It is important to realize, however, that hackers are a diverse group. I have interviewed hobbyists, students, academics, software professionals, and government workers who identify themselves as hackers. It is not safe to generalize about all of the values that hackers share, but they tend to agree on at least one thing: Respect must be earned and cannot be derived from position.
There are three big challenges that I identified.
—Siobhán O'Mahony

Much of what is funny about Dilbert cartoons is the disgust that technical workers have for managers who do not have intimate knowledge of the content of their work. This emphasis on demonstration of capabilities is even more critical in the open source community. One earns the respect of peers by demonstrating skills and making valuable contributions of code to a project.

Associated with these values is an embrace of informality and distaste for "administrivia"—for this too can take away from the pure joy of programming. So I suppose what can be considered to be contradictory is that many community-managed open source projects have incorporated and created nonprofit foundations with formal boards and designated roles and responsibilities.

Now there is a wide range of foundations that are emerging. At one end of the continuum are nonprofit foundations that act as little more than legal shells to hold a project's assets and allow it to collect donations. At the other end are nonprofit foundations that have elaborate committee structures, manage releases, and even hire employees.

Q: What were the greatest challenges faced by the three nonprofit foundations you studied?

A: There are three big challenges. One, which is common to all start-ups, is resources. Many foundations have been successful in garnering donations of hardware and equipment when needed, but do not have vast reserves to support legal expenses, travel, or conferences. However, since these foundations are primarily electronically constituted and manifested in the physical world only by a mailing address, their capital needs are minimal.
People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.
—Siobhán O'Mahony

Second is the tension between embracing the informal work norms and ethos of the hacker style of programming with the need to be more predictable and coordinated in managing software releases. Projects that are more closely coupled with commercial firms have experienced direct pressure from firms to communicate better and do more formal planning of what will be included in a release and when. Several projects that have created foundations are experimenting with this tension now—"How much structure can we impose on volunteers?" People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.

Lastly, open source software foundations have been thrilled to receive support from Fortune 500 firms in the software industry. This support is attenuated by the fact that no community-managed software project wants to be "taken over" or co-opted by one firm. The biggest tension here is how to sustain pluralism. If open source contributors only recognize each other based on individual merit, to the exclusion of monitoring where those people of merit are employed, then the pluralism necessary to maintain a community form could be threatened.

One of the most important roles foundations can play is to ensure that pluralism in the governance of these projects is sustained.

Q: Will the nonprofit foundation be an organizational model that will define future software development?

A: I cannot see into the future, but I think the first experiment is in play.

I see the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF) as an example of the next wave. Mitch Kapor, a successful venture capitalist who founded Lotus Software, invested $5 million of his own money into building a personal-information manager, Chandler. In his own words, "The whole idea of founding a company to develop new productivity software was a complete non-starter. No sane VC would or should fund a venture to compete with the Microsoft monopoly."

Even though his project is in the early stages, over 33,000 people downloaded the very first release in its first two weeks and OSAF has received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to further their work for educational environments.

I doubt that nonprofit foundations will define the future of software development, but all evidence would indicate that they will continue to play an important role. Keep in mind that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which defines the protocols of the Internet, is a nonprofit professional society. What is different from professional nonprofits or nonprofits focused on charitable causes is that open source foundations produce software that is resold by third parties on commercial markets.
The more fundamental question that firms and policy makers need to be thinking about is just what type of good is software?
—Siobhán O'Mahony

Similar issues surface in the biotechnology world, where university and market conceptions of the life sciences can become intertwined. The more fundamental question that firms and policy makers need to be thinking about is just what type of good is software? The answer to this question may be shifting just as economic and social life becomes dependent upon a common computing infrastructure. When a successful entrepreneur with every possible advantage chooses to found a nonprofit instead of a firm, because this is more likely to lead to success, what can be inferred about the state of the software market?

Organizational theorists argue that nonprofit foundations are created to protect goods too valuable and socially desired to be left to the market, goods like education. If we are granting special tax privileges to organizations to produce software, we as a society are saying something about the nature of that good and the nature of the markets that create it.

Q: What were the biggest surprises that you encountered in this project?

A: The biggest surprise to me was the level of involvement that firms engage in with community forms on software development and standard setting in general. That is, forms that are not government sponsored nor formally constituted by partnership, alliance, or consortia agreements.

It is interesting to watch how individuals with limited power and resources negotiate and collaborate with the largest of corporations. Community may not be exactly the right word to describe these forms, as the term denotes more consensus than reality might dictate. I do think that we need to expand our definition and construction of the types of corporate alliances that are possible and productive to include collaboration with collectives that identify with political or occupational norms and values.

See Related Articles
Nonprofit Foundations and their Role in Community-Firm Software Collaboration

by Siobhán O'Mahony

Contributors to community-managed projects have created nonprofit foundations despite the fact that such formal structures are an anathema to the hacker ethos of technical autonomy and meritocratic decision making. The technical organizations that emerged since the federal government privatized the Internet may have partially influenced the design of these foundations, but some features are the unique product of managing community software in a commodity world. One thing that stands out from either the early Internet working groups or the typical corporate standard-setting bodies of the past is the role of nonprofit software foundations in enabling collaboration between a community of individuals and corporate actors.

...

Facilitating Community-Corporate Collaboration: A New Actor in the Supply Chain
The foundations that emerged in this study are incorporated, organized by and for individual members, and produce benefits for the public, but do not redistribute profits to their members. What is unique about these foundations, in relation to technical communities of the past, is that these foundations also own assets that are sold by third parties in commercial markets and may in fact compete with other commercial offerings. Firms that use free and open source software have, in effect, allowed community-managed projects that grew out of a politically motivated social movement to become a part of their supply chain. This interdependence has fostered a new set of working relations among community projects, their foundations, and firms. Figure 1 [not shown here. -Ed.] outlines the role of nonprofit foundations in this new collaboration model. Foundations hold the assets and property rights of technical communities that produce software, but do not pay their developers or redistribute profits to their members. Community members retain the ability to set their own technical direction and manage the culture, norms, and governance of their own projects. In return for assigning their intellectual property to a foundation, they are granted protection from individual liability and a means to represent the project.

Firms can sell and distribute the community's work at a profit by creating complementary software, hardware, and services that reflect their conception of market needs. They can modify the work of the community as long as they respect the terms of community licenses and contribute improvements back to the code base where required. In return, firms offer sponsorship and support to both individuals and foundations. Individual volunteers that are working on components of critical interest to firms may be hired to continue their efforts as sponsored contributors. Proprietary code, financial resources, hardware, and equipment that firms wish to donate to the project are entrusted to the foundation. In return, some foundations offer firms advisory or sponsor roles: mechanisms that can provide them with a voice on the project. On a day-to-day basis, commercial support of community-managed projects is enacted through the sponsored contributors that work on those projects. On a legal basis, the foundations play an important mediating role. In Figure 1, release coordination is depicted with a question mark sitting between the authority of projects and their foundation. The strength and role that foundations play when collaborating with firms may well depend on the degree to which the authority of the foundation touches the technical core of the project.

In this model, the ownership and maintenance of code is decoupled from its sale and distribution. Without some means to retain their rights it is unlikely that community-managed projects would have had the base of power necessary to engage with firms and create this model (O'Mahony, 2003). Firms, for example, could have legally used community-developed software without necessarily collaborating with them. Community-managed projects held two bases of power that helped firms consider them a credible partner for collaboration: the market share and user base that derived from a project's technical excellence, and the legal and normative controls that encouraged users to "give back" to the project. These two bases of power offset technical communities' lack of economic and political power and helped establish them as a viable commercial actor with which firms could partner.

Granted, this analysis provides a rather static view of the legal and organizational structures that undergird a larger and more complex network of social relationships that flow in and out of these different forms. For example, a volunteer contributor could become sponsored by a firm and then be elected to a board position of a nonprofit foundation. Individuals who were once volunteers and have since founded firms may be active in shaping the nonprofit foundations that represent their project. Informants often stressed that they wished to perceive each other as individual contributors without regard to organizational affiliation. And yet many informants who occupied two or more roles acknowledged that they often experienced role conflict when their activities touched multiple interests.

This touches on an implicit but unarticulated tenet of the hacker ethos: the desire to maintain pluralism. This belief takes two forms. First there is pluralism in voice and process. Raymond has argued that with "more eyes, more bugs are shallow" (1999). An unstated condition is that diverse eyes are necessary for this lay maxim to hold. The more programmers from diverse cultures and backgrounds run various applications in different computing environments, the more likely it is that each user will detect problems unique to them. This allows code to be tested and contributions designed at a level that would require more permutations than are possible at most software firms. Diversity matters as much as volume. The second form of pluralism is required to make multilateral contributions possible: pluralism in the computing infrastructure itself. Software that is created independent of any one vendor's terms; is portable to different types of operating systems; and is interoperable with other applications allows pluralistic contributions to continue. The principle of pluralism depends upon shared standards and protocols, but, I would argue, it also depends upon a form of organizing that prevents dominant interests from forming.

Herein lies a source of conflict. Individuals contributing to community projects want to recognize each other as individuals, retain their individual autonomy, and remain as free from their employment affiliations as possible. On the other hand, without recognition of organizational affiliation, preserving pluralism will be more difficult. Project responses to potential conflict of interest problems have varied, but one feature that works in their favor is public disclosure. The organizational affiliation of project leaders is typically publicly available. When the relationship of one's activities to one's organizational affiliation becomes suspect, other community members are likely to be vocal about their concerns. For contributors who adopt project-based e-mail addresses, affiliation is less public. Over time, this could lead to further blurring of these different roles. The structure foundations provide may become one means to help preserve pluralism.

The evolution of a symbiotic relationship between community-managed projects and firms required adaptation from both actors, and some of these changes are manifested in the roles that nonprofit foundations fulfill, but not all. An understanding of how community-managed projects and firms maintain this relationship at the level of code contribution requires much more explication than has been discussed here. This structural examination of the community-firm collaboration model distributes a very different set of power, ownership, and rights than has been fully appreciated. From an economic perspective, one might ask, have community-managed projects outsourced their distribution costs? Or, have firms outsourced their development costs? Arguments could be made to support both lines of thought. That is in itself perhaps a test of mutualism. A more sociological perspective might question whether community-managed projects that are both politically and pragmatically motivated have successfully resisted co-optation by powerful market dominants. Legally, nonprofit foundations play a critical role in preventing this from happening, but this role reinforces mutual relations that are normatively maintained. Equally significant implications are likely to stem from the intellectual and innovative contributions that can result from collaboration with a new type of actor in the software industry.

Excerpted with permission from the chapter "Nonprofit Foundations and their Role in Community-Firm Software Collaboration" in Making Sense of the Bazaar: Perspectives on Open Source and Free Software, Siobhán O'Mahony, ed. O'Reilly & Associates Publications, 2003 (forthcoming). Copyright (c) 2003 Siobhán O'Mahony. Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License."

Microsoft claims to love the open-source concept

2004-06-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

For years, Bill Gates and other top executives at Microsoft railed against the economic philosophy of open-source software with Orwellian fervor, denouncing its communal licensing as a "cancer" that stifled technological innovation.

Today, Microsoft claims to "love" the open-source concept, by which software code is made public to encourage improvement and development by outside programmers. Gates himself says Microsoft will gladly disclose its crown jewels--the coveted code behind the Windows operating system--to select customers.

"We can be open source. We love the concept of shared source," said Bill Veghte, vice president of the Windows Server Group. "That's a super-important shift for us in terms of code access."

Did Microsoft suddenly find open-source religion? Hardly. It was dragged there kicking and screaming by its customers, who are increasingly drawn to open-source software like Linux, whose inner workings of code can be seen by anyone and modified.
While small in scope, Microsoft's adoption of some key open-source tenets is monumental in meaning. It is an acknowledgement that the company sees the technology as its most serious competitor in years and is taking steps to make sure its Windows franchise can survive the attack.
The open-source movement also represents a larger threat to Microsoft that transcends any particular technology or company: The high-tech industry has undergone a psychological shift that encourages challenges to Microsoft, which for many years had been technologically possible but practically unthinkable.
For a combination of reasons ranging from the troubled economy to mistakes in Microsoft business strategies, many large companies are wondering, for the first time in maybe a decade, why they pay so much for its products and how they can get by with less.
"This is going to force Microsoft to look at how they structure their software architecturally, and how they package and market their products, and I think that's good," said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.
Microsoft has itself to blame at least in part for strengthening the hand of its rivals. A controversial new software licensing policy, which raises prices for some customers and asks them to pay in advance for future releases, has angered many Microsoft customers and driven them to seek cheaper alternatives such as Linux.
While no one expects the open-source trend to affect Microsoft's profits immediately--the company is still ringing up record sales and has roughly $40 billion in cash--it is clear that the technology's popularity has forced the company to respond.

Q&ABallmer's tangled .NetMicrosoft's CEO say she's untangling the .Net mess

"Microsoft hasn't yet been hurt by Linux in any absolute sense, but open source gives customers alternatives," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with market researcher Illuminata. "It means Microsoft has to devote some of its resources to thinking about how to combat it. It makes Linux and open source a strategic problem, not a 2002 revenue-loss problem."
Microsoft customers say the software giant has already made significant changes, such as sharing source code with large customers and launching a "trustworthy computing" initiative to button-up troublesome security holes in its software.

The company's next server version of Windows will ask clients to join online newsgroups for support and advice, following the community-based traditions of the open-source philosophy.
"With open source, I can make systems work where closed-source software just won't," said Phillip Windley, chief information officer of the state of Utah and a longtime Microsoft customer. "I can't always afford to wait for a software vendor to come around to my way of thinking."
Too little, too late?The question is, did Microsoft act too late? In just the past year, many companies have found that open-source software has gained a level of sophistication that makes it a viable alternative to Windows for server systems and Web site operations. Amazon.com, Verizon Communications and Air New Zealand have all switched to Linux over the past 12 months to cut costs.

Initially, Linux was seen as a competitor to Windows only for server operating systems, used by roughly 27 percent of corporate servers and more than half of all Web servers, according to industry researcher IDC. Recent moves, however, have begun to strengthen Linux's appeal in desktop PCs when combined with open-source alternatives to Microsoft's Office, such as Sun Microsystem's StarOffice.

That's leading some longtime Microsoft customers to the next, once-unthinkable step: serious consideration of Linux and other open-source software as a replacement for Windows and Office on their desktop systems.

Satish Mahajan, chief information officer of American Automobile Association, is evaluating Linux for his server systems and beginning to eye the open-source software for his desktops as well. "When I talk to my colleagues, I hear more and more willingness to move a portion of their businesses to Linux. I'm still weighing the pluses and minuses, but it has moved up on my scale," he said.
Mahajan and others say cost is only one reason for the decision to evaluate Linux. In Microsoft's modern world, its products are seen by a growing body of corporate technology managers and even some of the world's governments as inflexible, expensive and bloated. Large companies and public agencies--some of Microsoft's best customers--are weighing Linux and open source to simplify their operations and get off the update-replace treadmill long prevalent in the computer business.
Microsoft executives acknowledge the rising threat but, mindful of the popularity of Linux and open source among their customers, have tempered their comments.

RoundupEyes on LinuxGamers, hackers, virus writerstake notice of the OS

"We need to take a balanced tone," said Microsoft's Veghte, the man assigned by CEO Steve Ballmer to come up with a competitive strategy toward Linux. "No matter how you look at it, Linux is a huge competitor and isn't going to go away."
Still, Ballmer--never known to mince words--is quick to point out where he sees Linux lacking. "The Linux client hardly runs any applications except a bunch of shareware stuff that’s not very good," he said. "There has yet to be any innovation, new features, new capabilities out of the Linux platform.

"First they cloned Unix, and there are people working on cloning some of our stuff. But it’s just a cloning OS. I don’t think anyone should expect anything innovative coming out of that world," said Ballmer.

The most difficult part of this competition is one of simple economics: Linux and other open-source technologies are licensed for free. That’s where Microsoft can’t compete, a point Ballmer willingly concedes. As Ballmer said at a recent conference in London, "We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing."

But Ballmer thinks price is only one reason why companies are considering Linux. "People are going to look at Linux, whether our stuff costs $5, $50 or $100. So we have to work that value proposition every day." Numbers cause concernIn a recent survey of 225 chief information officers, 29 percent said they owned Linux servers and 8 percent are formally considering buying them. More troubling for Microsoft, 31 percent of those who recently purchased a new Linux server used it to replace a server running Windows.Many technology managers cite the controversy over Microsoft's new licensing plan in their reasoning.

"We're looking at Linux as a less expensive alternative to Windows and Office," said Alan Flint, systems applications manager at Richmond Wholesale, a food distributor in Richmond, Calif. "I'm looking for more simplification in my environment because I'm displeased with Microsoft's licensing programs."

Mahajan said Microsoft's licensing plan is also driving him to take a closer look at Linux. "The cost of Microsoft's software continues to increase and change from the old days, where you could buy Windows 98 and keep it for three years. That's not an option anymore. You have to pay."
Utah's Windley agrees, saying the new plan "just makes people more leery" of Microsoft. "I've got a whole group of IT workers in this state who are tired of the licensing headaches with Microsoft. They want OpenOffice (an open-source version of Sun's StarOffice) just to do away with the headaches."

Flint sees another trend driving large companies away from Microsoft: the company's practice of issuing frequent upgrades and new versions of its products, often ahead of its customers' willingness to buy those products. "Microsoft wants to lock in their revenue by having customers tied to subscriptions. I think they are changing their licensing because there aren't many features that users are clamoring for."

Cherry of Directions on Microsoft said these comments are echoed throughout the industry as technology buyers are much more price-conscious than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. "Linux is becoming more of a threat because customers used to be a lot less sensitive. Whether it was money or whether each version of Windows had enough compelling features, they were willing to upgrade even if it cost them more hardware," he said.

"Now they look at something like Windows XP and say, 'OK, it's more stable, but I have to buy new machines. I don't think Microsoft has ever made a version of its products that used less resources than the previous version.' Or, 'Windows 2000 Server looks really good, but all I need is a Web site, and I can take this old 486 and I can put Red Hat Linux and Apache on it and have a Web server up in no time at all,'" Cherry said. News.CommentaryLinux's foot in the doorForrester says CIOs can be confidentthey'll get first-rate Linux support.

Support from big gunsMoreover, technology buyers said Linux is getting better in quality and range, largely because of help from Microsoft's rivals. "Once folks like IBM and Sun started providing support for Linux, (they) made Linux better by plugging some holes and providing better support," Mahajan said.

That, coincidentally, is exactly how Microsoft got its foot in the door with Windows back in the 1980s. "Microsoft used the divide-and-conquer marketing tactic. They didn't go to IT managers--they went to business departments. And suddenly, the IS manager looked around and said, 'Man, we're running a lot of Microsoft stuff.' So I think that's going to happen with Linux," Cherry said.
Nevertheless, despite the significant challenge posed by Linux and open source, Microsoft hardly has its back against the wall. Linux may have become a bona fide competitor in the server market, but Microsoft still rules on the desktop.

Special coverageIt's a Linux worldFull coverage of the 2002 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo

Industry veterans, including many Microsoft customers, note that it is extremely difficult--and expensive--to unseat the incumbent technology in large companies. One of the largest costs is retraining users.

"It would be very hard to convince the mainstream user in Utah state government that Linux is the right desktop choice for them. Most of the reason for that is not functionality--it's training," said Windley, who supports 22,000 desktops throughout Utah. As a CIO contemplating making such a huge change, he noted, "you have to be willing to fall on your sword, because you very well may expire doing it."

In addition, those companies that did agree to Microsoft's new licensing program have paid to use the company's products for up to three years in advance, making it unlikely that they will switch to a competitor.

But the mere existence of Linux will most likely benefit Microsoft's customers in the long term. In fact, many longtime analysts said that, with the slump in the technology business and the weakening of some key rivals, Microsoft needs Linux.
"The funny thing about this Linux thing is it might just end up being the perfect kind of threat for Microsoft," said Rob Horwitz, another analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "It's something that ain't gonna kill Microsoft, but it is something that will help it focus on who the enemy is and what they have to do."

Key to that battle plan is making its products more secure and reliable, customers say, as well as changing licensing policies to be less complicated. Otherwise, Microsoft will find itself the victim of a time-honored trend in the computing business: obsolescence.

"Linux is the end game in 'good enough' computing," Illuminata's Eunice said. "It's great stuff, it comes at little or no cost, and it's good enough to do the job. Just as Windows gave Unix makers fits in years past--and the Unix makers gave minicomputer guys fits, and minicomputer guys gave the mainframe makers fits--open source is giving Microsoft and Windows fits."

The Business of Free Software

2004-04-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

IT vendors including Oracle, IBM, and Sun that traditionally have built offerings based on proprietary technologies are now investing billions of dollars into open source software—arrangements that are transforming in some ways the fundamental nature of technology strategy development, according to recent research at Harvard Business School.

In "The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community," the authors—HBS professor Marco Iansiti and Gregory L. Richards of Keystone Strategy—examine what drives companies with large, proprietary software portfolios to invest in open source software (OSS) projects that can sometimes seem unrelated to their core business.

"This new reality upends the classic rules of strategy," Iansiti says, "and it's changing the way technology firms approach the development process. How much of your product do you share? Does your business model extract value from a core product or a portfolio of complementary products?"

Most academic research has focused on individual contributions to OSS, but this working paper is among the first to consider the impact of massive IT vendors like IBM and Oracle on the open source community.

Why are proprietary firms diving into open source? The answer (it's good for business) is hardly shocking. But the line from investing in OSS to profiting from a product is not as straight as one would expect.
Influencing what you don't own

"In a complex, sophisticated environment where so many products and services are connected, strategy has become, in large part, the art of influencing assets that you don't own," Iansiti observes. It's the old saw of the razor/razor blade business model, with many more options for profit. "For IBM, Linux is the razor, and WebSphere software and its related services are the razor blade," he says.

"The question of how you invest and extract money becomes much more interesting when you consider the different layers of the software 'stack' and how they can be leveraged," Iansiti adds. As a measure of IBM's commitment to open source, the company announced its intent to invest $1 billion to the development and promotion of the Linux operating system.
This new reality upends the classic rules of strategy and it's changing the way technology firms approach the development process.

In their paper, Iansiti and Richards divide a sampling of OSS projects into a "money-driven" or "community-driven" cluster. The former group has received over $2 billion in investment in technologies including Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice, while support for the latter derives solely from the voluntary efforts of vendors' employees.

Not surprisingly, they find that the money-driven cluster consists mostly of high impact OSS projects that draw customers to a vendor's mainly proprietary, core businesses.

"OSS is a business tool that has been used by a variety of corporations for very logical purposes," notes Iansiti. "If you have an environment in which part of the service you provide and the product you sell can be given away for free, that changes the dynamics of the industry. As a company, you will most likely spend more time thinking about exactly what to give away and how to couple it with complementary products and services than you do anything else."
Wooing open-source developers

Another focus centers on determining how to make it easier for the open source community to work on projects that are consistent with your company's strategy.

"There are five or six million people in this space," Iansiti says of the open source community. "It's important to ensure they're doing something that helps your cause."

It makes sense to provide tools that help programmers develop applications that will make Linux more successful if it drives other aspects of your business. (And it doesn't hurt that you're also putting a stick in the eye of a competitor who makes money from the operating system layer of the software stack.)

"It changes the way we think about business development and alliances," Iansiti says. "Traditional alliances are formed between a business development executive and an individual company like IBM or Cisco. In the open source scenario, you could say that there's an alliance between IBM or HP and every Linux developer out there. And that alliance is being mediated by dynamics that are less investment-oriented than a traditional deal and more oriented toward indirect tools to make money."

The payoff

Sometimes the strategies software companies employ are so complex that it isn't immediately evident why a company is investing in a particular area, Iansiti notes. There can be a significant lag time between a company's investment and extraction of a profit.

"People can be too quick to point fingers, saying that one company is stealing while another is giving something away. In fact, the whole picture is often below the surface."
It changes the way we think about business development and alliances.

In another ironic twist, some developers who were motivated toward open-source software development in rebellion against huge proprietary software vendors now find themselves being paid for work from those very same companies.

While research indicates a large majority of those who contribute to the open source community do so in order to learn and share new knowledge and skills, over half cite direct payment for their work or the chance to improve their employability as motivating factors.

Iansiti is the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration. He is the author, with Roy Levien, of The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability.

Installing Different Linux Distribution

2003-01-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

Installing different Linux distribution in a single machine along with Microsoft Windows

Web based Instant messaging System

2002-09-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

A Web based Instant messaging System, with a white board capabilities have to developed for on-line technical discussion, there are few open source tools which allows us to customize the web based chat, these tools have to modified by adding a white board capabilities.

Online Catalog Systems

2002-08-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

Online Catalog Systems are the next generation of Product and Service Listing through Internet,May companies spending massive man power to manage their product listing. It is a better idea to create a best cataloging systems which have an embedded content authoring capabilities with pictures. I think it is better to have separate directory or a different services for picture hosting( that can be another business model in future).

Content Management Systems(CMS)

2002-07-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

CMS or web content management Systems - They are the new way to manage websites with Open Source way Content management Systems have a great future in IT world to manage new generation website, this will the future of web authoring.

PHP Using for Web Templating and Development

2002-06-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

PHP Using for Web Templating and Development

Apple Mac and Linux

2002-05-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

A Comparison Study of Apple Mac and Linux

Linux Distros Look Like Windows

2002-04-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Linux Distributions which look like windows

Open Source Promotion

2002-01-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

Linux Club is a Techno-Community, and Innovation management group which is geographically distributed and centrally managed and coordinated using Open Source Tools and Technologies.

Linux Club has two main wings. The core section, a professionally managed Company that provides services, creates Products and ideas for corporate and individual clients. The other wing of the organization functions to build Technology Clubs across the globe, driven by the tech-community.

Linux Club helps you in setting up a Techno-Club aka Linux Club. We provide all support in all meaning, even financial or space for regular meetings, providing equipments and training in the required technology

As a Technology Club, we have our own activities. Here Linux Club is experemeting with a new concept of technology business, we prefer to call it "Idea Building Space". We provide a space for Open Thinkers to shower their ideas, discuss with peers and refine them. The important aspect of technical community is the ability to express what you think. The open source model can be an important factor in innovation, but it comes with limitations. Linux Club tries to override current limitations by linking Open Thinkers with our Innovation management model along with Club activities. Successful innovation requires processes and tools that can recognize good ideas and transform them into successful projects. We conduct Distro Fests, Install Fests, Bar Camps, Seminars, Webinars and training in different places.

We mentor individual Techno-Clubs. The Club can be started for a specific technical purpose or as a Techno-Fun Club. This requires approval from Linux Club. It can be started in a school, college, or in a corporate. The major role of our Club Managers are to maintain a core-group of whiz-kids in various technology domains, these whiz-kids then become part of Center of Excellence Group of Linux Club. Anyone who has great interest in technology, high-tech devices, particularly computers + Radiowaves can join our club building activities.

The major services of Linux Club as a Company includes Engineering Services, Software Engineering and Customization, Open Source Training, Security consultancy and Solutions, Cyber Law Consultancy, Digital Animation and Designs, Project Management Consultancy and Training. We provide customised solutions in various new tech business areas.

A part of our revenue from business goes to the Human Community. We help build a strong young Techno-Driven community. We believe every child has to have an option to experiment with technology at their very young age to enable them to be passionate with technology, irrespective of the technology variant, whether it is computer or electronics. We help to transform our Whiz-kids to super kids by polishing their in-born talents at a very young age.

Linux Club is maintained by me, Biju Gopi Thilaka ( Linux Club ) aka Biju GT, a real nice guy living in India, I started coding and soldering since 1990 when I was 15 years old. Originally from sunny Trivandrum in India, I recently moved to Zurich in Switzerland.

When I was fifteen, I created a small morse code undulator that can connect to a morce key, marking morse code onto a paper tape. This device had a narrow tape being drawn (at speed) under a pen that moved across the tape when a morse element was being received. I used an old tape recorder mechanism and few relays and a lot of small paper rolls. Making paper rolls were really time cosuming and my younger brother had spend a lot of time creating those papper rolls. Later, I modified and connected this unit to a radio receiver that could convert morce signal from a key or a fine tuned radio morce signal to dots and dashes (and it is still working;).

During my college days I met Johny Johnas from Helsinki University of Technology that was in december 1992. I was surprised to see a different OS in his laptop and was interested to know more about it, and when I asked him about it, he said it was LINUX. That was the begining of everything. After my college, I moved into the IT world. Those days, I had a dream to start a technical club promoting GNU LINUX and that sowed the seed for LinuxClub of today.

I do transreceive radio waves anywhere anytime in between 7000 MHz and 7150 MHz.I have few Pages for Nature Photography and I like to travel around the world, tasting different cultures and customs. Seeing the miracles of man and nature.Now I have a few like mided friends and we are working for a travel documentary.

2003 onwards, I started contributing to SourceForge by starting a few projects and joining with others. unfortunatly I am not active in that space now.

My Projects
• CARE2X php Integ Hospital Info System
• DBConnect API
• dotProMan - A Remote WatchMan
• Futures Gateway Educational Tool Suite
• Image Genie
• Morscool
• MultiX - All in one BOX
• Pelegrine Bulk Email Engine (PBEE)
• PHPeclipse - PHP Eclipse-Plugin