Linux Mint 13 with Cinnamon is the best Linux desktop of the year to date.

The very popular Linux distribution, Mint, has a new version Linux Mint 13, Maya, and a new take on the GNOME 3.x desktop interface: Cinnamon 1.4. The result is, in my opinion, the best Linux desktop for experienced users to date.

Not everyone will agree with me. They’ll find Mint’s other default desktop MATE to be much more their speed. MATE is a fork of that old Linux desktop favorite, GNOME 2.x. While I haven’t looked at the MATE edition of GNOME closely, other Linux reviewers, like Jim Lynch, have and Lynch likes what he’s seen of Mint 13 paired with MATE.

Setting up Mint 13: 2012’s Best Linux desktop

Even with the little work I’ve done with MATE though I can see what GNOME 2.x fans will like it. It’s a very clean desktop and it feels and works like a natural extension of GNOME 2. GNOME fans who abandoned GNOME after the annoying changes in GNOME 3.x for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) will want to give Mint with MATE a try. With MATE, GNOME 2.x is back.

That said, I prefer Cinnamon myself. Cinnamon, which is remindful of GNOME 2.x, is built on Clutter and Gnome 3. I find it more attractive and I like its features. For example, the menu includes drag and drop support. With that, besides just being move icons from the menu to the desktop, I can add them to panel launchers, favorites, and reorder my favorites. I can also right-click the menu to use the menu editor to change edit the main menu itself. It’s pretty, gives me great control over how my desktop, and now

Another great feature is Cinnamon’s new Expo mode is. Expo gives you great control over your workspaces. You can choose how many workspaces to use and drag and drop applications to each workspace. It’s a powerful tool but as easy to use as Mac OS X Lion’s Mission Control and Spaces.

Much as I’d like to recommend Cinnamon for everyone though, I can’t. As Mint’s own developers admit that while, “Cinnamon is among the sleekest and most modern looking environments [and] features innovative features and emphasis on productivity with traditional desktop metaphors, it also has several problems. These are:

Cons:

• Cinnamon requires 3D acceleration and might not work well for you, depending on your graphics card and/or drivers.
• Cinnamon is brand new and unfortunately not yet as stable as more matures and established desktops such as MATE, KDE or Xfce.
• Cinnamon relies on Gnome 3 and Clutter, which are also both brand new and going through rapid transformations.

Of course, you can just switch between MATE and Cinnamon. One of Mint’s new features is an improved version of the old Gnome Display Manager: MDM. With MDM, you can pick which GUI to boot into, configure them, set up themes for them, and set up remote, automatic, and timed logins. There may be display/login manager with more features out there, but I honestly don’t know what it could be though.

For me, however, Cinnamon works just fine. I tested Mint 13 with Cinnamon on two systems. The first was one of my workhorse Dell Inspiron 530S. This system is powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This PC has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set. I also put it to work on my new Lenovo ThinkPad T520 laptop. This, much more up-to-date computer boasts a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 Processor, 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor. On both systems, the old and new, Linux Mint and Cinnamon ran flawlessly.

Installing Mint, as always, is a snap. All you need do is download the Mint ISO, burn it to a CD, DVD, or USB stick and then re-boot your computer with it and follow the instructions. On my PCs, the entire process took less than half-an-hour. Mint will run on pretty much any PC. It requires only 512MBs of RAM, but runs better with at least 1GB of memory.

The only annoying thing about the process is you can’t do an in-place update of Mint 13 from Mint 12 or any other Linux distribution. That’s by design. Mint’s developers feel that you’ll avoid out of date software incompatibilities by forcing you to do a fresh install. That’s true, but it also means you may need to back up and restore your home directories and files. I did this by backing them up to an attached USB drive.

Moving on to the operating system itself, Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04. I like this version of Ubuntu with its Unity interface as well. In particular I think Ubuntu 12.04 is great for users who aren’t computer savvy. But, I’m a Linux pro. I like operating systems that enable me do decide exactly what I want it to do and how it’s going to do it. If you’re a power user too, then you’ll like the taste of Mint.

Beneath the desktop, you’ll find a Linux 3.2 kernel. Mint, like most Linux distributions, is still using ext4 for its file system.

Above that foundation, in applications, you’ll find the usual Linux distribution goodness: LibreOffice 3.5.2 for office work, Firefox 12 for the Web browser; GIMP 2.6.12 for graphics; Thunderbird 12.01 for e-mail; and Pidgin 2.10.3 for IM. I’m not crazy about the choices of Thunderbird, I much prefer Evolution for e-mail or Firefox over Chrome.

The default software choice is no big deal though since Mint’s Software Manager makes adding new programs a snap. The one quirk here is that after you install the program from the Software Manager the screen doesn’t show it as being installed. You need to leave the program installation screen and come back to it before you’ll see that your software was indeed installed. It’s not a big bug, but it’s a bit of a nuisance and I can see someone thinking they really hadn’t installed a program when they’ve actually done so.

As has long been the case with Mint, and it’s first claim to fame, this is one Linux distribution that comes ready to deal with proprietary video and audio codexes such as Flash, MP3 and DVDs. Ironically, thanks to including VLC Media Player 2.01, Linux Mint plays DVDs better than Windows 8 will. You see, Mint comes ready to play DVDs. In Windows 8, DVD playback is an extra-cost item.

It’s not any of these components by themselves that really impress me. I mean they’re all really good. But, what really makes Mint special is how all of them are brought together into one, complete whole. As far as I’m concerned, Mint 12 really is the best Linux distribution so far of 2012. Give it a try yourself. I think you may agree.

Related Stories:

Fedora 17 & GNOME 3.4: Return to a useful Linux desktop (Review)

Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8: Five points of comparison

Linus Torvalds likes the Google Chrome OS Linux desktop

Mint’s Cinnamon: The Future of the Linux Desktop? (Review)

Linux Mint 12 Debian Edition Slideshow

At a time when the spotlight is shining squarely on virtual machine and cloud automation, the two companies collaborated on a software stack based on Puppet’s MCollective enterprise message bus and Facter node inventory technologies that allows system administrators to dynamically inventory, provision and configure hardware infrastructure — bare bones servers.

Both parties say the solution — which is operating system agnostic —  will eliminate manual errors and speed up the time it takes to deploy applications in the DevOps era.

Razor, which offers auto-discovery of real-time inventory data, model-based provisioning and RESTful APIs —  is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and is available now for download.

Puppet Labs has become a gold standard name for management in the on-premise and cloud era, with Zynga, Citrix, Match.com, Twitterand Oracle/Sun among its Puppet Enterprise customers. Physical provisioning is new for Puppet.

Necessity is often the mother of invention and that’s true in this case, said Dan Hushon, who is with EMC’s Office of the CTO.

EMC wanted to apply and manage custom configurations of operating systems and applications and integrate them across multiple servers in repeatable fashion.

Each vendor has their own solution: VMware has Greenplum for ESX, Red Hat has Cobbler,  SUSE and Microsoft have their own offerings, Hushon said, noting that Razor gives EMC one repository of configurations and customizations across a 8,000 node lab environment. The solution speeds up EMC’s appliance delivery process.

EMC began the process of development using Puppet’s state machine design and two two co-developed the solution which is being contributed to the Puppet community.

With Razor, Puppet is now able to offer metal-to-cloud application lifecycle management, executives said.

Razor integrates with Puppet Enterprise and Puppet open source software out-of-the-box, execs from both companies said.

It is still in beta testing but will be productized in Puppet Enterprise soon, execs said. “It’s just another aspect of the platform. Physical provisioning is the first phase in lifeycle management and we do have plans to commercialize,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs.

Fedora 17, which was announced today, incorporates the latest “Essex” release of the open source OpenStack cloud platform and the oVirt open virtualization management platform based on KVM.  Red Hat’s recent endorsement of OpenStack drew much public attention as the open source cloud platform race begins in earnest.

The latest Fedora update also incorporates support for the GNOME 3.4 desktop and big boosts for application serving, including the incorporation of the JBoss Application Server 7, a pre-release of the anticipated Juno Eclipse SDK and the Cluster stack for high availability/load balancing.

SELinux: Where the NSA and open source have long met.

The Open Source Software Institute, a non-profit group that supports open-source adoption and the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization in charge of all out of country eavesdropping, will co-host an Open Source Software Industry Day on Wednesday, May 30, 2012. The unclassified, one-day event will be held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Conference Center near Fort Meade, MD, which is where the NSA is based. Alas, pre-registration is already over.

If you were one of the lucky 640 to make it in, you’ll get to hear about agency’s interest in opportunities made available through open source software solutions. Yes, the NSA is looking for a few good spooks. The conference’s speakers will present information on existing open-source software products, as well as service and support offerings; and encourage government suppliers to include open-source options in their strategies and service offerings.

In a statement, John Farrell of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Security and the conference co-chairman said, “The Open Source Industry Day will provide access to a broad array of open source topics. There are nine core topic areas that will be addressed during this Industry Day event.” These will be “Primary topics, or tracks, will include: legal and policy; adoption and strategic management practices; existing and future technology resources; cloud computing; (large) data management; security; social media and collaboration; embedded systems; and risk management.”

“That’s a lot of content to cover in one day,” Farrell added, “but the demand is there, and we’ve had no shortage of subject matter experts volunteering to lead panel discussions. OSSI Mid-Atlantic Regional Director Carl Livesay said, “This is a unique event in that NSA is serving as a co-host and has been very forthcoming with providing access to speakers and helping to define specific areas of interest.”

At this point, some of you may be thinking: “What the heck are open-source and the government agency in charge of electronic snooping doing together?” Well, actually they’re doing what they’ve always done: working together. Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), for instance, the standard for secured Linux, started as an NSA project.

Open-source is no more anti-government than it was Communist when Bill Gates famously mangled opposition to intellectual property laws into Communism. Open source is a method of software development that beleives that’s its better to openly share the work than to keep it to yourself. Given open-source’s track record and that even Microsoft has figured out that some open-source is good for business, it’s no wonder that even the secret agencies have long embraced open source.

As John Weathersby, OSSI Executive Director observed, “While open-source software is currently a hot topic within government circles, it is not a new concept within Defense and Intelligence Communities.” When “In December 2000, the NSA publicly announced the development and release of Security-Enhanced Linux,” said Weathersby, “we recognized that open-source had tremendous potential within government technology systems.”

The Open Source Industry Day has been organized by a volunteer staff of OSSI member industry representatives. Industry members who have served as track organizers include: BAE Systems, Black Duck Software, Cisco, Kryptocore, Hewlett-Packard, L-3 Communications, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMWare.

In short, while the idea of open-source and spies working hand in hand may blow your mind, it’s actually been doing on for years. Indeed the U.S. federal government and open source have a long history together. Events like this just show that well you may not think of them together, open source and government does indeed go together as nicely as peanut-butter and jelly. That reminds me. It’s time for lunch!

Related Stories:

Microsoft is serious about open source: 10 proof points

NSA releases security-enhanced Android OS

The Air Force’s secure Linux distribution

The Linux desktop is great... if it keeps getting the right applications.

The Linux desktop has long had most of the apps anyone could ever really need. Sure, it doesn’t have some specific applications, like Adobe Photoshop or Quicken, but it had other apps. Such as Gimp for Photoshop and GNUCash for Quicken and QuickBooks that can do the job. Lately, however, companies that have supported Linux are moving away from the Linux desktop and that worries me. These companies and groups are: Adobe, Google, and Mozilla.

The first one doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Adobe has long had a “difficult” relationship with Linux. We, the Linux community, wanted the full Adobe suite and what we got was Adobe AIR, Flash, and Acrobat. Well, we used to get AIR and Flash anyway. In February, Adobe announced that Adobe Flash Player 11.2 would be the last native version for Linux.

Newer versions of Flash will still be available for Linux… if you use the Chrome Web browser with its Flash Player browser plug-in. Listen, I love the Chrome Web browser, but I don’t love feeling like I’m forced to use it because Adobe won’t release a universal plug-in for any browser.

Now, some people hate Flash. For them, this is just another nail in Flash’s coffin as HTML5 slowly takes over its place in delivering video, animation and games to users. That’s a nice idea, but the bottom line is today the vast majority still rely on Flash, and not on HTML5, for all those elements. A Web browser without Flash support in 2012 is a crippled Web browser.

There are open-source alternatives to Adobe Flash. My favorite is GNU Gnash, but it hasn’t kept up with the latest Flash formats.

Adobe AIR is dead. The badly out of date Air 2.6 is still available for Linux, but “Adobe has discontinued support for Adobe AIR for Linux operating systems.”

As for Adobe Acrobat Reader, Linux is not listed as an Acrobat X supported platform. Adobe Reader 9.4.7 is the latest available version for Linux. In stark contrast Windows users’ can now download Acrobat 10.1.3. The open-source PDF readers, however, are better than their Flash cousins. I recommend KDE’s Okular myself if you want to read PDF and avoid Adobe’s offerings.

Google is perhaps the oddest case with its hot and cold support for the Linux desktop. Google runs Linux itself on its servers. You could argue that Google is Linux’s biggest success story.

On the other hand, Google has pulled support from Picasa for Linux, a simple, good photograph archiving and editing program. There are many other easy Linux photo programs, like Shotwell, but I always liked Picasa and I was surprised and ticked off to see Google shut Picasa down.

In addition, while I really like Google Drive, Google’s personal cloud storage service, I wasn’t happy that Google didn’t immediately bring out native Google Drive support for Linux. It’s coming real soon now, but it’s still not here today.

Moving along, while it is indeed great that Google Chrome supports Flash, I find it more than a little annoying that, thanks in part to this, you can watch Netflix movies on Chromebooks or PCs running Chrome OS, which is just the Chrome Web browser running on top of Linux, but you can’t watch the same videos with Chrome on any other Linux distribution. I mean come on guys, let’s make this happen!

Finally, there’s Mozilla, Firefox’s parent group. The Mozilla crew is working on a way to install native Web applications on a browser’s operating system. In short, they want to invent yet another app. Store. That’s all well and good, but they won’t be supporting it on Linux. At least, it won’t be in Linux at first anyway.

Some Mozilla developers seem upset that it’s been discovered they’ve placed Linux on the back-burner. On the other hand, it also seems to have lit a fire under some of them to take developing for Linux more seriously again.

And, that last part is a good thing. What I see happening here is that too many companies and programmers, ones that should know better, have started neglecting the Linux desktop.

Sure, the Linux desktop is a small market, but it’s also a vital one that many of the world’s best programmers and developers use every day And, besides the server side of Linux is what makes some of the biggest 21st century businesses go and the mobile side, Android, is in more smartphones than any other operating system. I hope that Adobe, Google and Mozilla all realize that since they’re already supporting Linux in so many other venues they also need to keep supporting it with vigor on the desktop as well.

Related Stories:

Fedora 17 & GNOME 3.4: Return to a useful Linux desktop (Review)

Dell readies Ubuntu Linux laptop for developers

Here’s why Linux is innovating on the desktop

Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8: Five points of comparison

Linus Torvalds likes the Google Chrome OS Linux desktop

The jury has ruled, and Oracle has lost.

I get to say I was right again. First, I told you so when I said the Facebook IPO was dead in the water and now I get to say I was right about Oracle’s Java patent claims being next to worthless in its case against Google and Android. Oracle vs. Google has been a dead lawsuit walking all along, and now as I suspected it would, the jury has ruled that Google didn’t infringe on Oracle’s patents. Game, set, and almost the match to Google.

To be exact, the U.S. District Court of Northern California jury ruled unanimously that Google did not infringe on six claims in U.S. Patent RE38,104 as two claims in U.S. Patent number 6,061,520.

Not mind you, that it would have mattered much had the jury ruled the other way. As Oracle’s own expert, Boston University professor Iain Cockburn had said earlier, even if Google were found guilty on all those counts, Oracle would had won maximum damages of $32.3-million. Oracle may have spent more than that every month keeping this case going.

After the verdict, Judge William Alsup dismissed the jurors, and said he’d be deciding on the related application programming interface (API) copyright issue next week. I find it highly unlikely that he’ll rule that APIs can be copyrighted.

If Alsup does rule that APIs can’t be copyrighted that leaves Oracle with nine, count ‘em, nine lines of copyrighted code in the tens of millions of lines of Android. Those lines are now long gone. Actually, those miserable nine lines are even less impressive than they sound.

During the trial, Alsup said that he had learned how to write enough code leading him to believe that anyone could have written those nine lines of code. As Alsup told Oracle counsel David Boies, “The idea that somebody copied that in order to get to market faster when it would be just as fast to write it - it was an accident that it got in there. You’re one of the best lawyers in America. How could you even make that argument?”

Given that comment, I don’t see any way Oracle will get a thin dime from those few lines of code.

So what will all this mean? First, it’s not the end. Oracle will appeal. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t know the meaning of the word “Quit.” I don’t see any chance though that any higher courts will give Oracle’s arguments any credence.

As Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, observed on Google+, “Prediction: instead of Oracle coming out and admitting they were morons about their idiotic suit against Android, they’ll come out posturing and talk about how they’ll be vindicated, and pay lawyers to take it to the next level of idiocy.” Alas, he’s right.

Looking beyond the courtroom, unless, Alsup rules that APIs can be copyrighted, there shouldn’t be any real effect on open-source programming in general or Android programming in specific. For all practical purposes, Oracle has failed completely.

At the same time, Oracle, which, believe it or not, is an open-source company in many ways with its MySQL database and its own house-brand of Linux, continues to lose what respect it has left in the open-source community. Most of Sun’s open-source leadership left Oracle immediately after the takeover; Oracle gave OpenOffice away to Apache; and long before that, Oracle tossed OpenSolaris to the roadside. As Torvalds comment shows, Open-source developers are not happy with Oracle.

Java developers in turn have never been happy with first Oracle’s lawsuit or its management of Java. Java has been slowly declining in popularity for years. While neither this case not its verdict will have a direct effect on developers, I do see it as giving open-source and Java developers even more reasons to grow ever more wary of Oracle and its products.

Related Stories:

Jury clears Google of infringing on Oracle patents

Copyrights, APIs, and Oracle vs. Google

The muddled mess of the Oracle vs. Google trial

Oracle vs. Google: Dead lawsuit walking

Oracle’s Google Android patent lawsuit cut down to size

Like clouds, but don't trust cloud vendors? Roll your own with ownCloud.

Big businesses use cloud services. You and I use cloud storage services like DropBox, Google Drive, and Amazon Cloud Drive every day. But, with each you have to trust your data on other people’s systems. With ownCloud, an open source file sync and share project, which began as a KDE project, you can keep your data on your servers and decide what other public cloud services you want to integrate into your personal cloud.

OwnCloud is primarily as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service. With it you can store your files, folders, contacts, photo galleries, calendars and more on a server of your choosing. You can then access that storage from your mobile device, your desktop, or a Web browser. You can also sync your date with local devices and share your data either with the world at large or specific approved users.

With the new, just released version, you also now get file versioning, which allows you to “rollback” to previous versions; file-level encryption, Web-based drag and drop file management, and a built-in Open Document Format (ODF) preview.

OwnCloud is built on top of a MySQL database. The program itselfis written in PHP and JavaScript. It now has a new application programming interface (API). This should make it easier to build applications on top of ownCloud’s built-in capabilities.

In addition, ownCloud 4 includes an “experimental” feature for mounting of external file systems–including Dropbox, FTP and Google Drive–enabling users to have all their file sync and share tools in a single ownCloud interface.

OwnCloud can now also be used in a business network environment. It now includes system logging and enables administrators to manage users and groups from Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory (AD).

“Version 3 represented a great technology leap forward. As our community continues to grow, Version 4 has benefited greatly, and the result is the most innovative and flexible sync and share platform to date,” said Frank Karlitschek, founder of ownCloud in a statement. “The latest ownCloud offers features businesses and service providers have been asking for, and adds new features and applications that meet the needs of the community and will greatly enhance our upcoming commercial editions.”

I’ve downloaded ownCloud for my CentOS 6 and openSUSE 12.1 servers and I like what I’ve seen so far. No, it’s not as easy as Dropbox nor as powerful as the Amazon Cloud, but it lets me run my own file sync and share services on my own hardware and storage, and use public hosting and storage offerings. I like it. OwnCloud will also run on Windows 7 or Server 2008.

Sure, I could have built something like this myself. Heck I have built things like this over the years, but ownCloud brings everything I need in one place so that I can run my own cloud my own way. And, that my friends, I find a very attractive option indeed. As I continue to work on it, I’ll let you know what I find. For now, I can recommend anyone who’s Linux savvy and wants their own customized cloud service to give it a try.

Or, if you like the idea, but don’t have the expertise, ownCloud offers commercial support options.

Related Stories:

Hands on with Google Drive (Review)

Amazon tries to catch up in personal cloud storage and falls further behind

How to calculate what to move to the Windows Azure cloud

As this classic xkcd cartoon reminds us, sudo is very powerful indeed

Linux and Mac OS X users and system administrators, and long before them, Unix users and sysadmins, have used sudo as an essential computer management tool. With it, users are given the power to make essential, but sometimes dangerous, changes to their systems. Recently a fundamental security bug in sudo was discovered, In some network this security hole could allow a cracker unlimited control of Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix systems. Fortunately, the bug has now been fixed.

Sudo, which system operators (sysops) use all the time, has been around for almost as long as Unix has been. People often think sudo stands for “do as superuser.” That’s because it’s most commonly used by trusted ordinary users to run a single command as if they were the “superuser” aka the root user or system administrator. Actually, it stands for “substitute user identity and do.” It’s commonly used to let an ordinary users do extraordinary things like call the shots with your Web server or database with the powers of the appropriate management account.

The idea in all cases is to keep people from, during their ordinary run of the mill work, mistakebly make fundamental changes to the system or core services. Of course, any problem with sudo can easily lead to an escalation-of-privilege exploit. If you can break into sudo there’s really very little you can’t do to a system.

Of course, as powerful as sudo it is, it’s much better than simply allowing users to use the root account all the time for all their work. That way leads to almost certain disaster.

For years, decades, sudo has been used with little trouble. Recently, however, it was found that on a networked system that uses both IPv4 and IPv6-which is becoming increasingly common-it was found that if you also used a sudo configuration file, sudoers, on a network that used LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to manage sudo accounts sudo accounts weren’t being properly regulated. What was happening was that, if sudo use was managed by their network addresses and network masks, a user with an invalid IPv4 Internet address would still be passed through to the IPv6 check… which would then approve them automatically. Whoops!

The problem, which existed in sudo versions 1.6.9p3 through 1.8.4p4, has since been fixed. System administrators should upgrade to 1.8.4p5 or higher as soon as possible.

To exploit the bug, a would-be cracker needs to be in the sudoers file (or sudoers LDAP data) and be granted access to commands on hosts on one or more IPv4 networks. If sudoers doesn’t include IP networks in the host specification portion of the sudoers rules, the bug has no effect. So, if for some reason you can’t fix the problem immediately, you can still block it by removing IP network addresses from your sudoers rules host specification settings.

To my knowledge, no one has exploited this bug yet. Still, any bug that has the potential to give untrusted users absolute power over a system has to be taken seriously and eradicated as soon as possible.

The xkcd cartoon is used under the xkcd License.

Related Stories:

How to lock down Linux

Kaspersky denied iOS app: Apple buries its head in the security sand

Apple releases QuickTime 7.7.2 for Windows, fixes 17 flaws

Avira Antivirus update cripples millions of Windows PCs

Windows malware: are you safer today than you were 10 years ago?

Anytime a company spends almost $13 billion for a company, it’s news. And anytime Larry Page writes a blog, it’s news. But today’s announcement, made possible after Google finally cleared government scrutiny in the U.S. and China, is huge news. It is how Google aims to compete against Apple.

In his blog, Page predicts that mobile devices will replace desktop PCs, namely smartphones, including Motorola’s hugely successsful Droid line, and tablets, where Motorola has failed to elevate Google’s Android to the same stature. (Hence the buy)

See also: CNET: Google closes $12.5B deal | A daunting to-do list ahead | Google: We now own Motorola Mobility | Android tablet surge will be led by Google-Motorola, HP, Dell | The tablet revolution is coming

“We all remember Motorola’s StarTAC, which at the time seemed tiny and showed the real potential of these devices. And as a company who made a big, early bet on Android, Motorola has become an incredibly valuable partner to Google,” Larry Page wrote today in an announcement. “It’s a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term. Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound–as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone.”

No one underestimates the importance of this buy to Google’s future.

Google is now a hardware company. Its decision to marry its massive software business with hardware, a model championed by Apple and passed over by Microsoft, will have long term ramifications for the company and indeed the entire ecosystem around Android and Chrome.

Compared to Apple’s iPad, Motorola’s Xoom has been a market flop. Google’s next, next generation Android tablet has to be much better.

The combined company has been making some improvements in the sales and marketing of the tablet, such as the “Ice Cream Sandwich” of Android now available on Motorola’s Xoom, and devising a strong, comprehensive strategy that melds Google’s Chrome and Android software (and enterprise applications) with Motorola Droid and Xoom lines. The $449 price cut on the Xoom also helped.

I am a longtime Droid owner and occasional iPad user who has longed for a viable Motorola tablet that can compete head on against Apple. I have hesitated on a tablet buy in part because I am awaiting a blockbuster next generation Xoom that runs a much better Android, in more elegant fashion, the way the iPad does. I want it to run Chrome well, enterprise apps well and to see some amazing innovations in the Google software space, due to the additional points of integration enabled by the marriage of Google’s software with Motorola’s mobile hardware.

I was also an early owner of Motorola’s StarTAC. I like my Droid but continue to run into snags that sometimes require a phone reboot. That may have been acceptable in the early days of the PC but they’re not in the mobile device era.

Becoming a smartphone and tablet manufacturer will have a huge impact on Google’s OEM relationships, and probably not for the better.

I would argue that it’s critical for Google to raise its stature in the open source side of the business. Getting developer buy-in for the next round of competition, in the cloud era, is huge. It appears the company is working harder to become a better citizen in this community. The Android code is back in the Linux kernel. Google continues to invest in leading open source projects such as Firefox. But the company has a ways to go to shed its proprietary image in the pure open source community.

At the launch of the Open Source Business Conference, two key backers in the open source space, Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, issued their sixth annual survey results including key findings and challenges for open source in 2012.

Open source is driving innovation not solely because of low cost but because of its perceived high quality, the survey of 700 respondents found. That’s due to the open source development model itself, the survey’s creators opine. “”The quality of open source, and the ability to continuously improve, is now one of the top reasons for its adoption,” according to a statement of findings released yesterday.

The results indicate that more than 50 percent of software acquired in the next five years will be open source and that an increasing number of non-technical segments such as health care, automotive and government as well as stronger enterprise adoption will drive high growth.

Nearly 50 percent of the respondents identified data management as the segement to be most affected by open source in the coming year and roughly half also pointed to project maturity as the most significant factor considered when selecting open source.

The big challenges continue to be finding skilled open source technical talent, management of open source software and figuring out how to engage with the open source community. “The complexity associated with OSS use, from choosing the right project from the over 600,000 available to managing the acquisition, integration, maintenance and support needs off OSS,” continues to be a big challenge, the survey found.

You don't have to get on Windows 8's Metro ride.

Some people are still sure Windows 8 is going to be the cat’s meow. I’m sure Windows 8 and its Metro interface will be more like a cat’s yowl of pain. The more I look at Metro, the more I’m sure that Microsoft’s new desktop will flop as badly as the Facebook IPO.

It’s not just me. Business analysts, who couldn’t care less about technology but care a lot about what customers think, are saying things like “Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment.”

Windows users who were already unhappy about having to learn Metro, which doesn’t work or look a thing like Vista and Windows 7’s Aero interface never mind XP’s familiar appearance, are finding out there’s more trouble ahead for them. Windows 8 will cost more at launch to upgrade to from Windows 7. DVD playback and media-center functionality will now be an extra-price option.

Oh as for Metro-friendly applications, here’s what Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, an independent software development consultant, speaker, author, and trainer and all around Windows guru who’s writing the book “Programming Windows 8 Apps with C#” had to say: “does Metro actually work? In my opinion: No.”

I don’t care if your most prized possession is an autographed copy of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, you have got to be wary of moving to Windows 8. So what can you do to avoid, or at least delay, the day you have to start using it?

1. Stick with Windows XP

OK, so your PC is getting a little older, but it’s still working isn’t it? According to some estimates, most PC users are still using XP. Certainly hundreds of millions of users are still using it. If it’s not broke, why fix it?

Well, there is one reason: On April 8, 2014, Microsoft says it will officially end support for XP–and Office 2003 while they’re at it. Of course, Microsoft has extended XP’s life support before. Today, they swear they wouldn’t do it again. But, if say 20% of users still have XP running in their PCs in 2014… well let’s just say I won’t be surprised if Microsoft has a change of heart.

2. Stick with Windows 7 or move to it

So, let’s say its 2012’s holiday season and all the new PCs are coming out with Windows 8, what do you do? You don’t ask, you demand, Windows 7 instead.

Yes, I’m a Linux guy, but if you really want Windows, and I know most of you do, Windows 7 SP 1 is easily the best version of Windows to date. Yes, it’s not the same as XP. There is a learning curve. On the other hand, while it’s not as safe as Linux, Windows 7 is a lot more secure than XP. There are also plenty of useful, easy to-use tools to move your XP data and applications to Windows 7.

3. Move to a Linux or Mac Desktop

Since Microsoft wants to force a radical change on you, why not really make a change and move to Linux or a Mac? The Linux desktop is great for both power users and for users who just need a computer for the basics. Specifically, I think XP users will find Linux Mint with the Cinnamon interface to be inviting. And, Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity interface is much easier to use than Metro. Heck, my 80-year old mother-in-law is a successful Ubuntu user!

Macs, of course, are Macs. They’re pricy, you’re locked into Apple’s hardware and software in ways that Steve Ballmer can only dream about, and, and, gosh they’re pretty and easy to use. Well, easy to use so long as you do exactly what Apple thinks you should be doing anyway.

4. Move to the cloud with Google’s Chrome OS.

Chrome OS hasn’t really caught on yet, but I think Google’s Chrome OS is a real alternative to Windows for many users. It’s not so much Chrome OS itself, it’s the whole concept of being able to use a Web browser and the cloud for everything you need to do and that you want to do instead of a fat client desktop operating system.

Think about what you’re doing today. Web-browsing, e-mail, IM, VoIP, maybe using Google Docs, whatever, how much of that actually requires that you use a local application? If 99% of what you’re doing on your computer can be done on the Web, what more than you really need than the Chrome Web browser, or-and there’s the point–an operating system like Chrome OS, which is just the Chrome Web browser running on a barebones Linux structure?

5. Use an iPad or Android tablet instead.

Microsoft really wants people to switch to Windows 8, and its close cousin Windows RT smartphones and tablets. I’m not holding my breath. I actually think Windows 8/Metro on Intel actually makes sense–Windows RT, which doesn’t have Active Directory support, not so much. Metro looks and works better on a tablet than it ever will on a desktop. There’s just this one little problem: People love iPads and they’re getting fonder of the Android tablets with their lower price tags. If I were a Microsoft fan, I’d worry if there’s any room left in the market for a Windows 8 tablet.

At the same time, as Microsoft is painfully aware, tablets are becoming popular as desktop replacements. As ZDNet’s own James Kendrick points out, “It is now possible to get a full day’s work from almost anywhere, without compromise,” on a tablet.

So, come the day you go to a Best Buy and all you see is Windows 8 PCs from one end of the store to the other, just remember you do have other, better, options.

Related Stories:

No Windows 8 DVD playback will mean increased costs, and consumer confusion

Windows 8 will “disappoint”: Analysts cut price targets on HP, Dell

Windows 8 Pro upgrade for new PC buyers set at $14.99

Windows 8’s five biggest enemies

Five Reasons why Windows 8 will be dead on arrival

One reason to unify Android? Too many shipping versions.

For all its popularity, Android programming, sales, and marketing has been… chaotic. Every hardware vendor makes its own Android mix, which more often than not is based on an older version, and each company sales and markets their smartphones and tablets independently of each other. That may be changing now. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “Google is shifting its strategy for its Android mobile operating system, in a bid to create a united front with smartphone and tablet makers to take on rivals like Apple and prevent wireless carriers from controlling the devices.”

Wall Street Journal reporter, Amir Efrati reports that “Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter.” In the past, Google would pick a single vendor to introduce major Android updates in lead devices, and then all the other vendors would follow. These devices were then, as now, sold to end-users through wireless carriers or retail outlets.

By the holiday season though, there were be as many as five manufacturers creating a portfolio of “Nexus” lead devices that include smartphones and tablets. While the old sales channels will still be there, Google will sell the gadgets directly to consumers in the U.S., Europe and Asia via its website. These will run on be running Google’s next version of Android, Jelly Bean.

Google did not respond to a request for comments.

So who might these companies be? We don’t know. At a guess, Motorola has to be in there. ASUS, HTC, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson would also seem like natural partners.

This news comes ahead of final approval for Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Many people are speculating that Google is trying to centralize Android programming, sales, and marketing to reassure its partners that Google is going to use Motorola devices to compete with them.

While I certainly think that plays a role, I suspect other factors are involved as well. Android operating system fragmentation is a real problem. The core operating system is always the same, but there are too many shipping versions for end-users or independent software vendors (ISV)s to be happy.

Apple, Android’s only real rival, on the other hand, offers a single, unified software stack. Users who buy an iPad or iPhone don’t have to worry about it they’ll get the newest update. Until Apple stops supporting their particular device, which Apple does do, they’ll know that they’ll get the latest and greatest version. By contrast, Android’s newest shipping version, Ice Cream Sandwich, after first shipping seven months ago, is still on only 5% of Android devices.

Apple is also fighting with Google’s Android partners in courtrooms around the world on various intellectual property (IP) issues. A united Android front could potentially, if nothing else, cut down on Google’s partners’ legal bills.

Put it all together and there are many reasons why a more united Android effort would make sense both for Google and its partners. So, while we don’t for certain that is what Google will really be doing, this centralized development, marketing, and sales plan does make sense. If Google is to get this off the ground by the 2012 holiday season, we’ll soon see if this indeed what Google has been working on.

Related Stories:

Smartphones: Commoditization looms; shakeout can’t be far behind

The Android dilemma: Too much choice, yet not enough

Gartner: Samsung steals Nokia’s crown as global phone leader

Judge warns Oracle could end up with nothing in IP trial

The Apple/Google war rages on; manifests itself in Maps

Here's last year's winning t-shirt design.

The Linux Foundation, in honor of Linux’s 21st birthday is having another t-shirt competition. So, if you really love Linux, can make cool t-shirt designs (That leaves me right out), then this contest is for you!

This year the theme is “Inspired by Linux” and calls on people from around the world to create a design with that in mind.

You can find the complete rules here, but to cut to the chase, it needs to be an original design.

It has to be in a file that can be no larger “than 640×480 (.jpg, .png, .gif) and must be under 1MB in size. The winner will be required to provide a vectorized version (.svg, .eps, .pdf) of their design to print on the T-shirt.  It may be in any colors you like.”

In addition, “In your description, please tell us how Linux inspires you and explain the inspiration behind the design. The design can depict literally or figuratively the events or ideas that get you pumped up for Linux. Let Linux be your muse.”

For some added inspiration, here’s the Inspired by Linux video:

You have until June 8, 2012 at 11:55 PM Pacific Time to get your designs in so get cracking!

Related Stories:

Gallery: The 20 most significant events in Linux’s 20-year history

Linux Foundation’s t-shirt competition (2011)

Red Hat celebrates 10 years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

20 Years of Linux down, and the best is yet to come

Red Hat has seen 10 very good years.

In 2002, Red Hat was perhaps the biggest of the Linux distributors, but the biggest? SUSE and Caldera–before its went over to the dark side and became Darth SCO–were also contenders for the top spot. Behind them, now struggling Linux companies such as Mandriva and deceased businesses Progeny Linux, which tried to take Debian Linux to market, were also potential players. Then, ten-years ago, Red Hat completed the move, which would take it from first among equals to being corporate Linux’s top dog: the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to being the first billion-dollar pure open-source play company.

Today, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies said in a statement that “Red Hat is thankful to the worldwide Linux community and all our partners, and is proud to recognize the achievements we’ve made with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Building on the last decade, today Red Hat enables the most advanced IT environments in organizations that offer products and services that truly enhance the way we work and live. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great example of making disruptive technology an industry standard.”

Indeed it has, but back when Red Hat first made its “disruptive” move, many Linux fans hated Red Hat’s change in direction. They did so because at the same time Red Hat was launching RHEL, it was closing down its low-end Linux distribution: Red Hat Linux (RHL)

The last boxed distribution—yes Linux used to come in boxes—Red Hat Linux 9 was meant for everyone but home users to corporate IT departments. With the release of RHEL and retirement of RHL, Red Hat’s non-business users often felt like they were being forced to upgrade or even abandoned.

Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution was OK, but it wasn’t the same thing. From its first days, it was clear Fedora was meant for developers who wanted the freshest code and not for small office/home office Linux users.

As Cormier told Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register, “We were faced with a really tough decision back then, and we really bet the company on this and it paid off in a billion ways. We made a decision to stop Red Hat Linux, which at the time was the most popular, hobbyist Linux operating system out there. It was a very, very, very unpopular decision with the engineers and with some people in the community. The engineers asked the CEO to fire me at the time.”

They did indeed. I heard all about it at the time from several of them. Red Hat’s timing and how it delivered its message to its users also have been handled better. Red Hat 9 had a very short supported life-span. In addition, Red Hat fans of the day suspected that Red Hat was beginning to move away from the Linux desktop. They were right.

While Red Hat still has a desktop version, RHEL Desktop Red Hat’s real desktop interest, in so much as it has one, is its thin-client Linux desktop model. This is based on a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The bottom line though, as Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO told me last year is that he thinks the “Fat client operating system [the traditional desktop] is becoming a legacy application.” Ubuntu. Linux Mint, MEPIS, and Peppermint OS users, to name a few, would beg to disagree.

All that under the bridge, Red Hat was proven right. The real riches for Linux would come from servers. That’s true to this day. While relatively few people run Red Hat on their desktop, major companies and Web sites rely on Red Hat every day.

As Al Gillen, IDC’s program VP of System Software said in a statement,“Red Hat broke new ground not only for its own benefit, but for a multitude of other business entities that offer commercial support for open source-based products, Try and imagine a world today if Red Hat had not successfully introduced the concept of enterprise-class subscription-based support for an open source product.”

OK, I tried. I can’t. Anyone who’s anyone in open-source software, SugarCRM, Alfresco, and even black-sheep Oracle, rely on enterprise subscription models.

Today, Red Hat is continuing to move forward with its business oriented take on Linux. In a press conference today, Red Hat executives said to forget about Linux. Instead, users should focus on open-source based cloud technologies and virtualization. It is these, and the Linux plumbing that supports them that will keep Red Hat moving ahead and companies like VMWare or Microsoft that try to stick with proprietary ways to deliver enterprise servces will be left behind.

Like that first move to RHEL, these words are going to annoy Linux’s strongest fans. I’ll be willing to bet though that just like the shift to RHEL this approach of focusing on what Linux can deliver rather than on Linux per se will be exactly what businesses want to hear.

Related Stories:

Execs: Red Hat to debut EL7 in late 2013, take lead in cloud era

Fedora 17 & GNOME 3.4: Return to a useful Linux desktop (Review)

Red Hat debuts OpenShift Origin project, takes swipe at VMware’s Cloud Foundry

Red Hat and SUSE join IBM in new Linux system, Canonical opts out

Red Hat cautiously optimistic about Microsoft’s Open Technologies Inc

In an hour long webcast today, the Linux leader publicly celebrated the 10th anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its recent success at hitting the $1 billion mark, but more importantly, positioned itself as the heir apparent to the infrastructure throne of the future.

The keys to the kingdom? Red Hat’s open source innovation model and open source architecture, which, executives emphasized, is the foundational layer of cloud computing.

Make no mistake about it, VMware and Microsoft, and any other company trying to reform their proprietary image in the open era: Red Hat has the not-so-secret sauce — the stack of open source technology and open source development model — necessary to make it the king of the cloud era.

“We’re straddling both worlds …. we’re driving the future,” said Red Hat’s longtime engineering chief, Paul Cormier, noting that the stack of Red Hat software once described as the Open Source Architecture is the cloud computing platform today.

Cormier said Red Hat’s introduction of an open source software subscription model in 2002 was perhaps the most important event in the company’s history, while its embrace of the open source community led innovation model via its merging with the Fedora project, embrace of the KVM open source hypervisor in the Linux kernel, and its pioneering role as Amazon EC2’s first cloud partner, locks in its future supremacy.

It’s common for US companies to predict triumph well in advance of its fruition. But holding a press conference to announce it is a bit risky, even for an open source company whose software now runs about 20 percent of all servers.

Forget about Linux, executives said. The future is about cloud technologies and virtualization. Red Hat will move well past its 2.5 million subscribers today because customers want an open source infrastructure and an open source hypervisor and there’s nothing that VMWare or Microsoft can do about it, execs insinuated.

Red Hat said little about RHEL 7, which will offer, of course, performance and security improvements and innovations in file systems and hardware.

The goal of today’s webcast was to give notice to Microsoft, the only other viable data center inrastructure provider, and VMware, the only other viable hypervisor, that their days are numbered because of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud environment, which will be the foundation to delivering the IaaS and PaaS in cloud computing.

What do you think? Will the first $1 billion open source company soar to the top in the cloud era?

Fedora 17 with GNOME 3.4 is much better than the last version, but is it good enough?

UPDATED FOR FINAL RELEASE: May 29th, 2012: I have been using Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, since day one back in September 2003 when Red Hat split its commercial Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Back then, people hated Red Hat for this move, but businesses soon learned to love RHEL and Linux fans grew to love Fedora. But, then along came GNOME 3.x, Fedora’s default desktop choice, and it all changed.

GNOME 3.2, which was Fedora 16’s desktop, was dreadful. You don’t have to trust me on that though, just ask Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder. He hated GNOME 3.2.

That was then. This is now. Fedora 17, with the ungainly name Beefy Miracle–no I’m not making that up, that really is its name–is now out and it’s much better than it was.

Finding your way through Fedora 17 (Gallery)

Fedora 17’s release was delayed until May 29th,  but some last minute bugs were ironed out in the process. so I have no complaints.

I tested Fedora on my faithful old Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This four year old notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also used it on a VirtualBox virtual machine on one of my Dell Inspiron 530S PCs. This systemis powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This PC has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

Fedora 17 is built on top of the Linux 3.3 kernel. Its default file system though is not, as was once expected, btrfs, aka Butters FS, but ext4 instead.

One fundamental and controversial under the hood change is that Fedora 17 has started work on “getting rid of the separation of /bin and /usr/bin, as well as /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. All files from the directories in / will be merged into their respective counterparts in /usr, and symlinks for the old directories will be created instead.”

The idea behind this switch to a unified file system is that it will increase Linux’s compatibility with other Unix-like systems such as Solaris. Its supporters also argue that it will reduce the complexity of Linux systems and make it easier to run virtual systems, share files, make back-ups simpler, and so on. Fedora is the first of the major Linux distributions to make this move. The critics of this change simply don’t see much point in making such a fundamental transformation to the traditional Linux file systems. For day to day use, you won’t notice any of this.

Fedora 17 also includes a wide variety of open-source programs. These include Firefox 11, for its default Web browser; Evolution 3.4.1 for e-mail, Empathy 3.4 for IM; and the just released GIMP 2.8 for graphics work. Its office-suite, like many Linux distributions these days, is LibreOffice 3.4.3 instead of OpenOffice.

Firewalld is now the Fedora’s standard firewall. Unlike earlier Linux firewalls Firewalld lets you reset your firewall’s rules but never takes it down even for an instance. I like that in a firewall!

As you would expect given Red Hat’s recent interest in high-end and cloud-computing, Fedora includes an improved cluster stack. It also includes built-in support for the Nebula Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the OpenStack cloud. Fedora’s take on OpenStack includes support for OpenStack’s latest edition, 2012.1, aka Essex.

As usual in Fedora, which has always been a Linux distribution, which was first and foremost for developers and bleeding edge users, Fedora includes a pre-release of Juno, the next release of the Eclipse software development kit (SDK). For better or worse, considering how Oracle is being with Java these days, it also comes with Java 7 and OpenJDK 7 as the default Java runtime and Java build toolset. GCC 4.7.x is now Fedora’s primary compiler.

Fedora also includes a lot of D programming language tools. In addition, as you’d expect in a Linux that’s the staging platform for RHEL, which is meant mostly for server use, it includes the latest updates of Ruby, PHP 5.4, and Erlang.

The improvement that everyone wants to know about in Fedora is GNOME 3.4.1. It’s much better than the version of GNOME used in Fedora 16. Unlike earlier versions, GNOME 3.4.x will now run without the need for a 3D driver. This has been a real problem for some users trying to run GNOME in virtual machines.

Borrowing from Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop forks, Unity and Head Up Display, GNOME 3.4 new and improved search function in its activities overview makes it easier to find programs. Search functions in general are much faster than they were than in its interface’s earlier incarnations.

This new edition of GNOME also includes an application level menu that sits on the top of GNOME Shell bar and contains the application’s menu. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s also taken from Ubuntu’s Unity interface. The bad news is that, just like Unity, not all applications use it so the interface has a half-finished feel to it.

It also doesn’t help any that the scrollbars are smaller, and thus harder to use, than ever. Even more annoying, there’s still no easy way to minimize or maximize applications. While it’s better than it was, this is still a design decision that I find annoying.

Still, it’s a lot easer now to use multiple programs and file systems in GNOME than it once was. The new GNOME box interface also makes it easy to use remote systems or virtual machines. The Documents application finally supports search, removable devices, and other features which I have long considered minimum requirements for what was a de facto file manager.

Last, but far from least as silly as it may sound, you can finally easy log out or turn off Fedora. Believe it or not, under GNOME 3.2, simply shutting your PC down was a major chore.

Still, while Fedora 17’s GNOME 3.4 desktop is a lot better than it used to be, I still find it far less useful than Unity or Linux Mint’s recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x interface, Cinnamon. Take a look at them yourself, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

A walk through Mint Linux’s new/old Cinnamon desktop (Gallery)

Ubuntu’s Unity, like GNOME 3.x, is quite different from earlier Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer (WIMP) interfaces, but it’s easy to use. Heck, my 80-year old mother-in-law can use Ubuntu 12.04. And, Cinnamon is a recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x desktop on top of a GNOME 3.x foundation.

That said, I did find this new Fedora with GNOME to be usable. I have to say I didn’t find the last version to be at all useful. Still, I’m left wondering why Fedora and GNOME first went in such a mis-guided direction in the first place. It’s great that Fedora and GNOME are much better than they were, but they’re still not for me, anyway, as useful as the last Fedora with GNOME 2.x was. I can see that Fedora is better, but I’m going to be sticking with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and openSUSE for my daily desktop use.

If you want to make up your own mind, you can download Fedora 17 and check it out for yourself. Some people though are telling me that they’re running into very slow downloads from the direct links. If you find that to be the case, try downloading the new Fedora  by BitTorrent instead.

Related Stories:

Fedora 17 boasts OpenStack, JBoss, oVirt support

There’s trouble with three major Linux desktop application developers

Red Hat celebrates 10 years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat to debut OpenShift PaaS solutions for on-premise enterprise use soon

Red Hat debuts OpenShift Origin project, takes swipe at VMware’s Cloud Foundry

Red Hat and SUSE join IBM in new Linux system, Canonical opts out

Richard M. Stallman, free software's founder falls ill at technology conference.

Richard M. Stallman, aka RMS, creator of the concept of free software, president of the Free Software Foundation, and the primary author of the vital free software/open-source license the Gnu Public License (GPL), became ill during a speech at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain and had to taken to a hospital.

Some reports on Twitter said that Stallman had suffered a heart attack, but that was not the case. He began suffering in the middle of his speech and para-medics were called in Stallman tried to continue his speech, but finally had to give it up. He kept his sense of humor throughout the episode. When he ambulance crew took over 20 minutes to arrive, Stallman made a joke of it saying that due to Spain’s recent austerity cuts “Here’s the truth, [Spain's President Mariano] Rajoy wants to kill us all.” (Spanish language link).

It appears that Stallman was suffering from high blood pressure or hypertension. Officially, according to the FSF, Stallman, who was first treated at the site, was taken to a hospital and later discharged.

Stallman is a father figure of the modern free software movement. While, personally, he objects to the term open-source software, his work is also regarded as one of its ancestors. Stallman also claims that he’s one of the creators of Linux. Supporters of this position call Linux, GNU/Linux.

Over the last few years, Stallman, despite his continuing popularity is free software circles, has become seen as something of a crank. For example, after Steve Jobs’ death, Stallman wrote that while “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.”

Be that as it may, Stallman was the primary creator of the GPL and GNU C and many other important free software development tools under the GNU name. Without his programming and licensing work, the modern Linux and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) world wouldn’t exist. Health permitting, he will continue to fight for his vision of free software.

Related Stories:

Richard Stallman: Facebook does massive surveillance

Richard M. Stallman on Steve Jobs: “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone”

In the beginning: Linux circa 1991

Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

First, the Linux giant said it expected to launch its fee-based version of OpenShift with support later this year.

The developer preview has been available since May of 2011. Last month,  Red Hat announced an open source project — OpenShift Origin —  to grow and evolve the core PaaS platform.

To date, the core focus has been on serving developers needs including the demand to quickly build and deploy applications in automated fashion. The next step, Red Hat said today, is to develop the platform to better serve enterprise needs.

As part of that, the Linux company will deliver a number of integrated solutions built on the company’s software stack beginning this summer that will allow customers to deploy PaaS on premise and deploy it on a variety of cloud and virtualization providers.

These include:

a DevOps model for developers to deploy application on OpenShift.com, another Public PaaS or a private Paas with OpenShift on premise.

an ITOps model that allows IT administrators and operations specialists to extend the PaaS to developers while also maintaining control of applications and infrastructure via Red Hat’s CloudForms offering.

An offline model that allows developers to self manage and run OpenShift on a laptop. The online OpenShift PaaS for developers is available today.

Red Hat was not prepared to offer specific availability or pricing on these solutions (which will include the Linux OS, JBoss Middleware and PaaS) but said the first deliverables are expected beginning this summer.

Red Hat also enlisted the help of analysts and service provider Accenture to identify the PaaS market opportunity and define what enterprises need.

Enterprise use of PaaS is still very limited but is expected to grow quickly, to a $3 billion [NOTE:correction] market by 2015, the 451Group research shows.

The first stage, DevOps, is the do-it-yourself brand of application development  and deployment largely being practiced today by developers on today’s PaaS.

But the strong move to the cloud , fueled in part by the driving need for faster and flexible application development and deployment, as well as the need to innovate quicker and migrate existing .NET and Java and legacy applications to the cloud, will enable the PaaS market to overpace the Software-as-a-Service market in the next year, one 451 analyst said.

Enterprises want the rapid pace of innovation and change enabled by PaaS platforms. Accenture used a PaaS, or example, to deliver for its telecom clients an agile, flexible  reservation system for pre-ordering new iPhones in four weeks that was able to seamlessly handle demand that far exceeded the initial forecasts.

Accenture has worked with 52 of the Fortune 100 on developing cloud strategies. It’s still early, but enterprises will catch on quick to the benefitsof PaaS once their cloud architectures are in place, said Adam Burden, global lead of Accenture’s Cloud Applications and Platforms.

“Today a lot of demand is focused on defining  strategy.  Many enterprise customers are dipping their toe in the water,’ said Burden. “We’ve seen with the largest enterrpises investment in constructing those platforms [but]the biggest inhibiitor has been general availability and supportable alternatives like those that will be in place in the near future.”

“Having these PaaS architectures on premise is pretty new,” Burden said. “But over the next yer we’ll see tremendous uptake in building and deploying those offerings.”

During a webcast, Red Hat VP Scott Crenshaw said OpenShift will compete head on with another relatively new open source Paas, VMware’s Cloud Foundry, but will offer three key differentiators that will distinguish it from its rival — a world class open source operating system that powers many of the world’s biggest clouds, a rich appdev and middleware platform and built-in two tiered multi-tenancy support in its Linux distribution that will allow enterprises to run multiple application instances on a single VM securely.

“We’re glad that VMware has decided on something in the open source space and is providing  relatively open platform for developers,” Crenshaw said when asked about the competition. “We applaud them or joining us and leading the charge for an open PaaS but openShift and Cloud Foundry are competitive and developers have to choose,” he said.

Dell is working on an Ubuntu laptop just for developers.

Dell has been on good-terms with Linux vendors for ages. The Austin, Texas-based company was the first major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to ship an Ubuntu Linux PC. Long before that, Dell was shipping Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on its server lines. Now, Dell is renewing its Linux ties with a new Ubuntu Linux-based developer laptop.

Barton George, director of marketing for Dell’s Web vertical, announced that Dell is working on creating an open-source laptop targeted directly at developers. It is based on the brand new Ubuntu 12.04 and Dell’s XPS13 Ultrabook.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

George explained that Dell is doing this “to better understand and serve the needs of developers in Web companies. We want to finds ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible.  And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.”

Specifically, Dell started this effort, codenamed Project Sputnik, to focus on companies who use the Internet as their platform. Analysts, customers, and developers kept suggesting Ubuntu Linux as their operating system of choice, so since to Dell’s knowledge, “no other OEM has yet made a system specifically targeted at devs and figured it was time to see what that might mean.  When the XPS13 launched we realized that we found the perfect platform to start with and when Dell’s incubation program was announced we knew I had the vehicle to get the effort kick started.”

George added “that Ubuntu was a natural choice not only because of its popularity in the Web world but Dell has quite a bit of experience with it. In fact Dell has enabled and pre-installed out-of-the-factory Ubuntu on more computer models than any other OEM.”

System76 and ZaReason would disagree with that. Dell’s support for Ubuntu Linux desktops has waxed and waned over the years. At the moment, I am unable to find any shipping Dell laptops or PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed in the U.S. market.

That said, Dell is working hard on this project. An Ubuntu ISO image of this developer release is already available for download. for users who are comfortable with bleeding edge technology.

It’s not perfect. Dell had some hardware drivers problems. Most of those have been licked now though. The remaining one, dealing with multi-touch on the touchpad, is proving tougher to knock out. Dell is working with the vendor though for a permanent fix and with Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, for a temporary patch to deal with the problem.

But, George, continued, “Where Sputnik starts to get interesting is when we talk about profiles.  No two developers are alike so instead of stuffing the system with every possible tool or app a developer could possibly want, we are trying a different approach. As mentioned above, the actual “stuff” on the install image is pretty basic, instead we are working with a few developers to put together a tool that can go out to a github repository and pull down various developer profiles. The first profiles we are targeting are Android, Ruby and JavaScript.”

One goal of the project though is to provide a “meta-system to manage your developer configuration.” With it, programmers could set up their tools just the way they wanted, store them in a repository, and then configure any system with their customized development environment. If they can pull this off, I can see this feature being very popular.

Want to join in on the this project? You can. Dell has set up a wiki for developers to get their say in what should be in Sputnik.

Related Stories:

Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8: Five points of comparison

Ubuntu 12.04 arrives and it’s great

Next Ubuntu Q to bring font, icon, Quantum Openstack service to Linux

If my mother-in-law can use Ubuntu Linux, anyone can

Enterprises: Embrace open source development or go extinct

The really important issue in Oracle vs. Google is what it will mean for copyrights and APIs.

We still don’t know what will happen with Oracle’s accusations that Google violated its patents. Given that Oracle itself doesn’t value the two remaining patents as being worth much, that decision won’t matter much. No, the real question is what will U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup will do with notion that Java’s application programming interfaces (API)s, and hence all APIs, could be copyrighted. That’s the real $64-million (billion?) question

Alsup instructed the jury to treat APIs as if they could be copyrighted, and they agreed with him on that. What they couldn’t do is decide though whether Google had violated fair use in what it did with Java’s APIs in creating Android.

As Pamela Jones, intellectual property law reporter, paralegal, and founder of Groklaw explained to me, “The jury didn’t decide API are copyrightable. They can’t. That’s a question of law, and the judge is the one that has to decide that issue.”

Jones stated that Alsup “decided that he’d let the jury decide the fair use issue first, and then if they found fair use, he wouldn’t have to reach that decision. But if they found infringement and no fair use, then he would decide if APIs are copyrightable and more specifically if their arrangement is protectible.”

Is it? Oracle would have it that APIs are like music. Yes, APIs are just made up of descriptions of inputs and outputs, but then music is just made up of notes.

To this argument, Thomas Carey, a partner at Sunstein, a major intellectual property (IP) law firm and chair of its Business Department said, “Oracle’s lawyers compared the creation of APIs to writing a piece of music, to which I say ‘Balderdash.’”

The First Circuit opinion in Lotus v. Borland found the command structure of Lotus 1-2-3 to be unprotectible under copyright because it was functional, not expressive. According to that opinion, the IP protection for functionality is to be found, if at all, under the patent laws, not under copyright.

“Is there anything more functional and less expressive than an API?” continued Carey. I don’t think so, and I suspect that you don’t either. Thus, the infringement of APIs should not be possible unless they are patented. The First Circuit [which ruled in Borland's favor in this important case over a program's menu interface] got the principle right (even if I disagree with them about the command structure of 1-2-3).”

So why did the jury find “Balderdash?” Jones thinks it because the final jury instructions led the jury to find “infringement because they thought they were supposed to.” In the end, the jury came up with a conclusion that leaves the question of whether APIs can be copyrighted in the judge’s hands.

What happens next? Matthew Levy, a partner with the small IP firm, Cloudigy Law, said: Judge Alsup has not made any decision yet as to whether APIs are copyrightable. And it’s very likely that whatever decision he makes will be appealed to the 9th Circuit, so we won’t know the answer for some time.”

Levy continued, “Even if Judge Alsup holds that Java’s APIs are copyrightable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all APIs are copyrightable. Other languages use header files for APIs; a header file contains little more than method/function signatures, type definitions, exposed variable names, and constants. Those are completely dictated by the function of the code. Arguably, the way those things are arranged in a header file requires some creativity, but I think that’s stretching the law too far.”

If the judge finds that APIs can be copyrighted, “I see a couple of big problems with allowing all APIs to be copyrightable. First, developers will have to be very careful in choosing a programming language. The reality is that things won’t change a lot (although Java will take a hit), because most programming languages already come with fairly broad licenses. Still, I expect that developers will start to read those licenses a lot more carefully. But the bigger problem is for consumers. If all APIs are copyrightable, we can end up with a situation where a company builds a specialized API to control a device or other platform and then locks down the market for after-market components using copyright of the API combined with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Levy concluded.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a far darker view of what the world would be like if APIs could be copyrighted. “Treating APIs as copyrightable would have a profound negative impact on interoperability, and, therefore, innovation. APIs are ubiquitous and fundamental to all kinds of program development. It is safe to say that all software developers use APIs to make their software work with other software. For example, the developers of an application like Firefox use APIs to make their application work with various OSes by asking the OS to do things like make network connections, open files, and display windows on the screen. Allowing a party to assert control over APIs means that a party can determine who can make compatible and interoperable software, an idea that is anathema to those who create the software we rely on everyday. Put clearly, the developer of a platform should not be able to control add-on software development for that platform.”

The EFF then gives two concrete examples: “Take, for example, a free and open source project like Samba, which runs the shared folders and network drives in millions of organizations. If Samba could be held to have infringed the Microsoft’s copyright in its SMB protocol and API, with which it inter-operates, it could find itself on the hook for astronomical damages or facing an injunction requiring that it stop providing its API and related services, leaving users to fend for themselves.”

“Another example is the AOL instant messaging program, which used a proprietary API. AOL tried to prevent people from making alternative IM programs that could speak to AOL’s users. Despite that, others successfully built their own implementations of the API from the client’s side. If copyright had given AOL a weapon to prevent interoperability by its competitors, the outcome for the public would have been unfortunate.”

Let’s hope, oh how we should hope, it doesn’t come to that.

Related Stories:

Android chief called back in Oracle-Google trial to discuss patents

Google: We developed Android not knowing Sun’s patents

The muddled mess of the Oracle vs. Google trial

After mixed copyright win over Google, Oracle looks towards patents

Oracle vs. Google: Dead lawsuit walking