From the 'security is not all doom and gloom' files:
At Interop last year I heard David DeWalt President and CEO of McAfee deliver a keynote -- he was new on the job and he spent the bulk of his time on the negative stats of security (more malware infections, more data leakage etc etc..)
Fast forward to 2008, DeWalt is back at Interop and his message is still the same (in fact he could well have used much of the exact same presentation since it sure felt that way to me). He rattles off all kinds of stats that portent doom and gloom.
"I'm going to try my best to scare you," DeWalt said jokingly at the beginning of his session.
Once he finished his canned presentation though DeWalt actually opened up a bit in response to questions from the moderator who asked DeWalt to give Interop attendees some good news.
"Not
everyone is sick, " DeWalt said. "We have stopped viruses. When was the last time you saw a major
epidemic of viruses?"
So what's the real message?
Security threats are real and growing, but security technology isn't necessarily losing ever battle.
From the 'when sessions go bad and people shout and walk out' files:
It's very rare that I've every been in a session at any conference session where an attendee heckles the panel and storms out. In a session at Interop on Open Source Risk that's exactly what happened..and it was intense!
About 15 minutes into the session an attendee shouted out,
"When are you going to talk about risk instead of just going back and forth talking about risks and benefits of open source?" the attendee shouted. "We're not here for the benefits, I don't
want to insult you but that's not why I'm in here and if you're not going to take my question I'm going to walk out."
Linux Foundation COO Dan Kohn who was moderating the panel shot back:
"If you feel you need to walk out...open
source is all about choice," Kohn said.
The Kohn continued on with his panel which included Brian Gentile, President and CEO, JasperSoft, Dominic Sartorio, President, Open Solutions Alliance, Doug Levin President Black Duck Software and Ross Turk Community Manager at SourceForge.
The disgruntled attendee then gut up and left. As he closed the door he shouted out:
"You should stick to
the program! "
I've personally never seen anything like this. To be fair though the panel did seem to be all 'open source is great' but they did (Doug Levin in particular) talk about the risks that may exist.
Also to be fair though, all the panelists were in the open source business. That's how the program was listed in the program guide. If Interop really wanted a more robust/competitive session they could/should have added Microsoft to the panel.
LAS VEGAS. Some conference keynotes are noteworthy, some are just boring, then there are the ones that just go ... well, bad.
I'm sitting in the final afternoon keynote now where Cisco's Jayshree V. Ullal Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Services Group is speaking. Ullal is responsible for $10 billion a year in Cisco revenues across the Catalyst and Nexus product line.
Ullal's keynote was sabotaged by one of the worst things that can happen to any keynoter -- bad audio.
Ullal's microphone hissed and cut out frequently in the beginning of the session, then during a little break in her talk where she showed a video she got a new microphone.
The audio problems still remained though.
"Is it my hair?" Ullal asked in frustration out loud.
She was then forced to do what no modern keynoter ever wants to do, she was forced to stand behind a podium with a fixed microphone (that worked).
"This will be a little
constraiinging because I don't know how to stand in one place," Ullal joked. " Hopefully our
Cisco data center runs better than my mikes do."
For her comments, the Interop audience gave her some polite applause. And Ullal continued on. The gist of her keynote (that I could hear) was that today applications run with the network -- in the future applications will increasingly run on the network itself.
I'm sitting in the main keynote hall at Interop where Microsoft's Bob Muglia (Sr VP server and tools) and Barry Shilmover (Senior Program Manger System Center Cross Platform) just finished the first part of the afternoon keynote session. Guess what?
You can now use Microsoft to monitor/manage Linux and Unix servers as well as open source databases and webservers. Even more surprising is the fact that Microsoft is using open source to enable their management of open source servers and applications. It's all part of the new Miicrosoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 with cross platform extensions.
The key enabling technology is the WS-MAN Web Services standard which is available in open source implementations.
Shilmover showed a live demo of Microsoft's tool actually managing a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and a MySQL database server. To be honest I've never seen anything like it before -- Microsoft demonstrating how it can manage Linux and Open Source technologies.
Shilmover's demo solicited a quick quip from Muglia too which I couldn't help but laugh out loud at.
"I can't say you should run this many non-Windows servers
in your environment," Muglia told the Interop crowd. "But if you do we want you to run Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to manage them."
I'm sitting in a Cisco sponsored media roundtable session at Interop about the Video Ready Campus and I just heard something that I was startled by.
Robert Whiteley Principal Analyst and Research Director at
Forrester Research argued that 'video is a goodthing
from a morale perspective for networking people.'
In Whiteley's view, enterprises want video and when networking people are able to deliver, it helps to show the value of networking people (and IT in general). Whiteley sees the enterprise move to video as a real trend at this point in time even though he admitted that at first he was skeptical.
Whiteley also briefly shared some details from an Forrester study that showed that a third of surveyed companies rated video as a deployment priority. Furthermore, Forrester is forecasting that by 2012, 80 percent of organization in North America and Europe will have rolled out video deployments.
Cisco also brought in Markus Bost CIO of Adena Health System which is a
hospital system in southern Ohio who explained in very real terms how
video saves costs and lives. IT (in his case Cisco hardware) was the
key enabler
So while YouTube may well have the catalyst for getting video on the networking radar screen, video may yet prove to be the next true killer app for enterprise IT as well.
From the 'if you can't measure it, it's not true' files:
Green IT and power saving has been a hot topic ever since the inconvenient truth of our planet's global warming crisis hit the mass media. Sure there are a lot of vendors that have green initiatives but how do you actually measure how green you are?
IP performance test vendor Ixia (Nasdaq:XXIA) is announcing a new solution at Interop (that I just got demo'ed by their President and CEO Atul Bhatnagar) that may be the answer.
In a nutshell the IxGreen solution (which is still a proof of concept) accurately measures how much power a given piece of network equipment uses. The solution will load traffic and applications in a testing environment that shows precisely how different applications and loads affect network power usage.
Bhatnagar explained to me that with IxGreen you can measure the eco-efficiency of a switch. The solution will also help network administrators to determine how to operate in an a optimal manner.
It's a great idea in my opinion and one that is needed. We know that different loads take different power requirements but if you can't measure it, you can't improve it can you?
Somehow I don't think so. SCO has managed to use the legal system to its advantage for years. Somehow it manages to appeal things, and somehow it keeps managing to find people to help bankroll its efforts.
This is however closer to the end-game than ever before, it will be very interesting to see as the trial goes on, exactly how close.
I've spoken to many vendors over the last few years about
application and WAN acceleration.The
gist of the conversation is usually the same, 'we can accelerate more than our
competitors and we're better because...blah blah blah...'
So you can imagine my skepticism when I took a briefing
with Sanjay Uppal, Citrix VP of Marketing for the Advanced Networking Group
about their latest NetScaler device. I've written about NetScaler and its
counterpart WANscaler before (typically around Interop time, surprisingly
enough) so I've heard
their spiel (and I've heard their competitors trash talk it too).
This time out they're announcing a new top end device -
the NetScaler MPX - which Citrix claims does 2.5 times the application delivery
traffic of the previous top-end Citrix device. Though speeds and feeds are a
core part of the network business, that's not the part of the conversation that
really got me interested.
What really peaked my interest is how the NetScaler MPX
ties into Citrix's XenSource virtualization technology assets to dynamically scale up or scale down
virtual servers on demand to meet network traffic demand.
"If there is a surge of traffic NetScaler informs
the XenServer which then provisions an additional server," Uppal explained
to InternetNews.com. "This goes beyond load balancing
with a pool of servers, as this solution will actually power up a server that
wasn't on."
So let's step back here for a minute to understand the
significance of this technology integration.
In order to provide
network capacity, generations of network administrators have had to run
multiple servers and then put in a front end load balancer to distribute
traffic. What Citrix is now promoting is the idea that you can power up and
power down servers dynamically based on demand together with application
acceleration. The implications for power and overall utilization efficiency are
tremendous.
It also really makes a whole lot of sense for Citrix
(since they own XenSource) to fully leverage and integrate assets.
Is this a game
changer for application acceleration?
I think it could be, since a fundamental
part of acceleration is availability. It's something that stands out amongst
all the similar commoditized messages and pitches that I've heard over the
years.
I expect that it's something that Citrix CEO Mark
Templeton will also highlight in his Interop keynote address this week.
Virtualization isn't just about consolidation anymore it's about efficiency
overall.
RHS if you're wondering defines itself as, "...the leading global society committed to changing the way we view women aging. With close to 40,000 chapters in more
than 25 countries, Red Hatters are redefining traditional notions of aging through fun, friendship and freedom."
"I never would have thought that giving one friend a festive red hat to celebrate her 50th birthday would catch fire the way it did," Sue Ellen Cooper, founder and president of the Red Hat Society said in a statement."But clearly this gesture symbolized something to older women -- that the second phase of life is ripe with potential for living life to its absolute fullest."
So I guess Marc Ewing (the original creator of Red Hat Linux) isn't the only person that wears red hats after all...
From the 'you've got a lot more browser choices than just the little blue e' files:
Opera claims that it has 20 million users of its Opera web browser and that 500,000 people have tried out the early development releases of Opera 9.5. Not too shabby.
There a few key things coming in Opera 9.5, among them are some really interesting (and fully integrated) syncing capabilities. The idea is that you can sync bookmarks and other data using the Opera Link service to move your data with you to another machine or even to a mobile phone. Sounds a bit like Mozilla Weave (or even del.icio.us), the difference though is tha this isn't an add-on, it's fully baked into the browser.
They've also made search improvements with a 'Quick Find' feature that lets you search through your history (Mozilla is doing that too for Firefox 3 with its Places engine).
Then of course there is performance -- which is something that every browser vendor is trying to continuously improve and Opera is no different.
"We're pleased with the progress we've made towards the release of Opera 9.5," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software in a statement. "We've had contributions from millions of people who use Opera. Their suggestions for improving features, for crushing bugs have helped reach this milestone. We welcome their continued candor, suggestions and feedback as we improve Opera 9.5 ahead of its final release."
With a new Firefox coming soon, Apple out with Safari for Windows and IE 8 in active development, Opera 9.5 (when becomes finalized later this year) will be entering a very challenging market. Then again, Opera has always had an uphill battle, so the current environment is nothing to new.
Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different.
For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007. Those students will work with 175 Free and Open Source Projects as mentors to help improve and expand their development.
Google pays each accepted student developer a stipend of $4,500 and provides $500 to the mentoring organization. So doing the quick math for 2008 -- Google is pumping $5.625 million into open source this summer.
Full details on all the actual accepted individual developer projects has not yet been available, though the semi-complete list on the SoC page (click on ideas) is staggering. I've been covering Summer of Code (SoC) since its inception in 2005 and I'm excited to see it continue to grow.
Students are now in the 'bonding period' with their mentoring projects where it's hoped that they'll gain familiarity with process and code. The actual coding will run from May 26 through August 18.
Congratulations to all who were accepted, and I'm looking forward to tracking (and reporting) on your progress!
From the 'I can virtualize faster than you' files:
Red Hat has been partnering with chip vendors AMD and Intel for a long time. Every so often though Red Hat will announce something specific with one vendor (or the other) -- that's the case with the announcement today on a speed/functionality announcement with AMD's processors running on HP hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Red Hat is announcing that users can, "...achieve significant performance gains by
coupling new high-performance device drivers with the features provided
by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, available with HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers."
The improvements are non-trivial. By taking advantage of AMD's silicon based Rapid Virtualization Indexing, the promise is that users will reduce the overall number of cycles required to enable virtualization. The problem with virtualization has always been that it requires a certain degree of processor utilization which tends to impact performance such that often times virtualized application simply cannot perform at the same level as their non-virtualized counterparts.
The actual metrics reported by Red Hat show that in an OLTP (online transaction processing) environment test, with a 16-CPU system, there are considerable gains to be had. With a fully virtualized system running the Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature Red Hat reported a 21-fold performance gain over regular (non-Rapid) virtualization metrics.
"RedHat and AMD
have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that
full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the
first Quad-Core AMD Opteron
processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM," said
Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD
in a statement. "We've been able to ensure that customers can reap the
benefits of this new virtualization technology right away."
The problem though, in my simple layperson's opinion is that even though the AMD/HP/Red Hat metrics are significantly improved, they are still not at the same level as non-virtualized (that is native) environments. Red Hat reports that the AMD/HP/Red Hat solution, "...reached 77 percent of the
performance of a non-virtualized environment on one of the industry's
most difficult database OLTP workloads."
So in my opinion, while this is certainly a good piece of forward momentum news, for data centers with heavy OLTP workloads, the case for virtualization will still remain a utilization versus performance issue.
I would suspect given this massive leap forward, that others (be it IBM and/or Intel) will soon enough come out with their own tests that will continue to push Linux virtualization closer and closer to fully native performance levels.
From the 'it's not what you know, it's who you know' files:
SugarCRM the open source customer relationship management (CRM) software platform provider announced today a very large reseller agreement with one of the world's largest telecom providers -- BT (formerly known as British Telecom).
BT will offer its customers SugarCRM's commerical offerings of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise - either as an on-site deployment or over the web as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
"The combination of BT's
incredible reach in the UK market and SugarCRM's
industry-leading CRM solutions makes this a perfect partnership for the
UK market," said John Roberts, CEO of
SugarCRM in a statement. "This alliance strengthens our
global reach and further exhibits SugarCRM's
momentum as a global provider of business applications."
The fact that BT is now offering SugarCRM to its customers doesn't automatically mean that they'll all magically now become users, but it does open up a massive new sales opportunity for the open source CRM.
It also potentially opens up a vast storehouse of innovation for the broader SugarCRM community as well.
Let me explain my rationale : SugarCRM (like MySQL) has a dual-source model with community and commercial offerings. While Sugar Professional and Enterprise are on the commercial side, they are both still based on the an open source core (and with SugarCRM 5.0 that core is GPLv3 licensed). As the demand and needs of BT's customer base for SugarCRM grow, I would hope (and expect) that there will be improvements to SugarCRM and those improvements will become manifest in the community core (and therefore benefit the community as a whole).
Certainly open source software on it own can generate users, but the reality of the modern IT marketplace is that you really need to have partners (like BT for SugarCRM) to really take off commercially.
Yes Cross Site Scripting (XSS) errors are all over the place. And YES they can affect very prominent web sites.
The discussion forum area on Barackobama.com is allegedly the victim of a XSS exploit that redirected comments from Obama's site to....HillaryClinton.com.
A hacker going by the alias of 'Mox' has claimed responsibility for the exploit. Mox argued that the Obama site was not 'hacked'.
It is because what I did was not hacking in the sense that I burrowed
into some dusty served and changed the Obama site and stole all your
credit card numbers. All I did was exploit some poorly written HTML
code.
The application security vendors (Fortify, Coverity, Watchfire, Cenzic etc) will all likely have a field day with this one. Clearly as InternetNews.com and other technical trade outlets have been reporting for the last two years, XSS attacks are a serious issue. With a high profile public exploit of a presidential candidate now attributed to XSS, the notoriety (and popularity) of XSS will unfortunately likely grow even more.
I track Ubuntu development reasonably closely, which is why I was surprised to see a release this AM titled," Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition Released." After all, according to the publicly available info I had on Friday, the release was set for an April 24th release.
Perhaps I was mistaken? Nope, that not the case. Ubuntu in my honest opinion has just put up a slightly misleading headline for its press release.
After you get pulled in by the headline -- (with the 'released' in it) - if you actually read the very first sentence of the release it states:
LONDON, April 21, 2008 Canonical Ltd. announced the
upcoming availability of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition for free download on
Thursday 24 April. In related news, Canonical also announced the simultaneous
release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition.
Aha! So it is a Thursday release! So if you see the press release (or some unfortunate mis-informed press story on it) and think that you can get the full GA version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 today...cool your heels for a few days until Thursday. There is however a release candidate that you can get today, but with a full version out in a few days, it's likely a smarter move just to wait.
Certainly Ubuntu isn't the only software vendor to pre-announce availability of software. However to state in a headline that something is released - when it's not - is not something that I think is a good thing.
A year and a half after first announcing their landmark interoperability and patent protection deal, Novell and Microsoft are now targeting China.
In their release (which they sent out late Sunday night) the two partners called the new push, "an incremental investment in their relationship."
Essentially what they're doing is providing a focussed effort to China in the cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing to get CIOs to move to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from other unsupported versions of Linux.
"We
recognize that our customers want to use Microsoft products in heterogeneous
environments, and therefore we are pleased to offer this option to meet customer
needs in one of the leading global markets," said Ya-Qin Zang, Microsoft
corporate vice president and chairman of Microsoft China in a statement. "We are very pleased
with the initial response in the Chinese market to our joint offerings for IP
peace of mind and technology interoperability in such areas as virtualization
and high-performance computing."
Novell has been a leading Linux distribution in China for some time, and as far back as March of 2006 they were actually claiming to be THE leader. The Chinese market for Linux however is increasingly competitive with offerings from TurboLinux, Red Hat and Asianux all competing for a slice of the world's fastest growing economy.
Whether or not a joint Microsoft/Novell push will help or hinder Novell (and Linux in general) remains to be seen. That said, in my honest opinion it seems unlikely that the additional effort with Microsoft could be anything but a good thing for Novell's prospects in China.
First the good news. Fedora 9 Preview is now out -- woohoo!
The bad news? Well since Fedora 9 Preview is out a little late, Red Hat has now pushed back the official release date of Fedora 9 by two weeks. The original release date for Fedora 9 was set for April 29th, the new date is now May 13th.
According to Fedora Release Manager Jesse Keating:
The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the final spit-and-polish. There needs to be sufficient time between the PR and the release for testers to find and report issues.
In the grand scheme of things, two weeks isn't really a big deal at all. Especially since the extra two weeks are really all about testing. Fedora 9 is an important release for both Red Hat and the Fedora community in that it will introduce several new innovations to the Linux distribution.
Key among those innovations is FreeIPA, which is a tool for system administrators to install, set up and
administer centralized identity management and authentication. The new PackageKit system that I wrote about at the time of the Fedora 9 Beta last month is also very interesting.Fedora 9 will also be the first Fedora release that will provide full support for the KDE 4 Linux desktop.
Fedora currently claims that there are now 2 million unique installations of Fedora 8 which was released back in November of 2007.
From the 'apparently it's not the year of the Linux desktop' files:
For years, we've heard various vendors and pundits proclaim, ' the year of the Linux Desktop' . Linux leader, Red Hat however isn't proclaiming 2008 to be the year of the Linux Desktop, in fact they're being very forthright about the difficult prospects that the Linux Desktop faces.
We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.
The post notes that Red Hat is a publicly traded for profit company and that making money with desktops is harder to do than with servers. That said Red Hat did indicate that they are NOT abandoning the Linux Desktop all together. Red Hat still plans on working on the Red Hat Enterprise Desktop (which first debuted in 2004), as well as Fedora (which runs multiple desktops including KDE and GNOME).
Work is also still ongoing with the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD) which has been somewhat delayed. RHGD is supposed to be a smaller Linux Desktop for emerging market deployments.
So why isn't Red Hat going after the consumer market? The answer is really simple. They don't want to get killed by Microsoft.
The desktop
market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still
perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical
alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and
companies have discovered that today's Linux desktop is indeed a
practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business
around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example
efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as
charities.
Being a curious journalist, I contacted Red Hat to see if I could get any additional insight, but unfortunately I was denied.
"At this point we are not granting any interviews on this topic, just pointing folks to the blog," a Red Hat spokesperson told InternetNews.com.
Considering that Red Hat is literally giving away a very viable Linux Desktop today for free -- with Fedora, I'm not at all worried or surprised by Red Hat's desktop disclosure. The technology is there today for those that have the willingness to experiment and tinker. Providing support to millions of end-users, at what would likely be very low margins is undeniably a tough business. Ubuntu is kinda/sorta trying to do it with Dell today and it still remains to be seen how successful that effort actually will be over the long haul.
In the new era of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing though, the need for an actual desktop -- beyond just a web browser -- is also becoming increasingly limited.
Barely three weeks after its last update, the Mozilla Firefox
2.x browser is again being patched for a security issue. Firefox 2.0.0.14 fixes
a single issue that is a result of a fix that Mozilla made in the Firefox
2.0.0.13 release.
The fix for 'Crash in JavaScript garbage collector' MFSA
2008-15 that Mozilla fixed with Firefox 2.0.0.13 is the culprit. Mozilla explains in its advisory that the fix, introduced a stability problem:
This is being fixed primarily to address stability
concerns. We have no demonstration that this particular crash is exploitable
but are issuing this advisory because some crashes of this type have been shown
to be exploitable in the past.
Talk about FUD. I came across a release this AM titled, "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion," New Standish Group International Study Finds".
This 'research' firm claims in its release that they've spent 5 years studying the Open Source market (funny since in the last five years I've never heard of the Standish Group). After all that 'research' they've come to a big conclusion and one that is obviously very debatable.
"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the
ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated
trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion
in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The
Standish Group International, Boston, MA in a statement.
Unfortunately I don't have a full copy of their research, so I'm unable to comment on their methodology. But to make an outlandish statement saying that open source represents such a dramatic loss in revenues is -- to say the least - inflammatory.
According to IDC (which in my opinion has perhaps the most accurate stats on the issue so far), $21 billion in revenues came from the Linux ecosystem in 2007 alone. That's only Linux (and Open Source is more than just Linux) and that's only 2007.
What would make for an interesting study though, is a full study on how
much open source in total has contributed to growing software revenues
(considering that nearly every major software vendor uses open source
software in some way shape or form). Open Source certainly represents a threat to proprietary closed software vendors, but it also represents an opportunity for them and for the entire software market as a whole.
Sarge finally reported for duty in June of 2005, and now three years later it's coming to an end -- Well an open source end which isn't a finite end since users can still choose to update packages themselves. Sarge was supplanted in the Debian product lineup by 'Etch' which is now celebrating 1 year since its release.
The next Debian release is codenamed 'Lenny' and it's not yet 100 percent clear when it will be released.
Release dates...that was the problem that plagued Debian back in 2004 with Sarge. Ubuntu which is based on Debian, has been successful in part because of its predictable release schedule. It's something that Debian developers have tried and continue to try to improve. The latest release update for Lenny notes that there are now 475 open release candidate bugs.
Can a 'pure' Free/Open Source development group put out a Linux distribution 'on-time'? I personally think so, though I also think that it's always best to first get it right. Debian (though often delayed) tries hard to get it right, often at the expense of getting a release date entirely wrong.
As for Sarge - I will remember Sarge as the distro that turned me onto Ubuntu. For Debian I'm not sure if Ubuntu is a curse or a blessing overall though -- I suppose that's still a matter for considerable debate.
Instead of needing to rely on Red Hat or Novell to supply Linux running on servers from HP, IBM, Dell, etc., a user that already has an ISR (and there are 4 million of them out there) can just buy an AXP from Cisco, put that module on their ISR and -- badda boom badda bing -- they've got a Linux application server.
The Cisco execs I spoke with downplayed the competitive effect on the server marketplace: Certainly, the AXP is not going to replace all servers as we know them today -- but it will replace a few of them.
Beyond technology, Cisco's single greatest strength in my opinion is its incredibly massive and aggressive sales force. Every time I've ever seen Cisco CEO John Chambers speak, he almost always makes a quip about how he loves to sell. In a real sense, Chambers is one of the best salespeople the networking business has ever known.
If Cisco puts the full force of its sales machine behind the AXP (and why wouldn't they, considering they've got at least 4 million potential customers) the footprint for Linux application servers will grow dramatically. Yes, it would be a win for Cisco, since Cisco is using its own flavor of Linux. But it would also be a massive win for Linux overall. Cisco understands the dynamics of open source even though they are very much a proprietary vendor.
I asked Cisco the other day specifically about the open source GPL license -- something that is often misunderstood, but not by Cisco.
"From a GPL perspective, we've taken all the things that are GPL and reciprocated the code back to the community," said Joel Conover, manager of network systems at Cisco.
For the record, that's the right answer. Linux grows because of contributions.
It's a tremendous thing, to have Cisco contributing back to Linux. When you think about all the things that Cisco is likely to learn as it deploys the AXP across potentially millions of routers, the potential for innovation is staggering.
According to a recent Linux Foundation study, Cisco is already contributing to Linux and currently represents 0.5 percent of changes (which is a good number). I would expect that with the AXP in the market, Cisco's contribution rate will go up.
Nearly two years ago, I saw a panel at LinuxWorld talking about all the reasons why Linux has been successful over the last 15 years. One of the reasons cited was Oracle's support for Linux back in 1998.
In my analysis, Cisco's AXP in 2008 will be a big part of the reason why Linux will continue to be successful moving forward in the next 15 years.
From the 'just because people use it, that doesn't make it a commercial success' files:
When I first talk with a vendor (any vendor) they're always talking about the good stuff, their successes and why their technology is better. That's the stuff that makes press releases and PR pitches.
Then there are the failures. The companies that just don't live up to their initial promises and expectations.
To that list, I'm now going to add Qlusters and its openQRM project. This is an open source systems management project that I have written on before and I even interviewed Qlusters CEO Ofer Shoshan in a Q&A last year. Shoshan is no longer the CEO and apparently isn't with Qlusters anymore either.
In a posting on the Sourceforge.net open source repository site Qlusters announced that it wasn't going to support openQRM anymore.
Barely three weeks after its last update, the Mozilla Firefox
2.x browser is again being patched for a security issue. Firefox 2.0.0.14 fixes
a single issue that is a result of a fix that Mozilla made in 
