Windows 7 upgrades – will they or won’t they?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Licensing, Web browser, Microsoft on
And do you even want them to? Yes, Microsoft is planning to offer Windows 7 with IE built in in Europe so users don’t have to jump through hoops to get a browser (and avoiding millions of CDs that go straight into landfill after one installation is a good thing). It keeps the EU happy by popping up a ‘ballot screen’ that lets you pick from a list of browsers - here’s the sample screen Microsoft is showing off.
Incidentally, Opera - who started this whole debacle by complaining to the EU - still isn’t happy. Microsoft says the ballot screen will “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way display icons of and basic identifying information on the Web browsers.” Opera says that’s still biased, because the IE logo is just so recognisable. Newsflash: the reason Opera isn’t the most popular browser isn’t the logo (and making it harder for people who want IE because they’re comfortable with it to find it isn’t the best way to grow your market share).
And “Yes,” confirms a Microsoft spokesperson, “the proposals will also cover boxed copies of Windows sold in Europe”. Does that mean that we don’t have to have an ‘upgrade’ version of Windows that only does a clean install? After all, the reason for the E version is to offer a browser choice to people who have previously had a built-in IE; surely the upgrade install process could offer the same ballot screen and not force you to vape your system in the name of choice? (At least if you’ve got Vista; XP users are stuck with a clean install because it’s too different). Ah, says the spokesperson. “Everything’s just at proposal stage, so specifics of how the upgrade process would work would just be speculation right now.”
And actually, with the relatively low numbers of people who have Vista compared to Windows XP, the current plan of E versions Windows 7 that mean you can buy the full version of Windows for the cost of an upgrade may be a better bargain. Yes, you lose the convenience of an in-place upgrade but a clean install will often give you better performance - and with a full version there are no restrictions on installing on another machine and you don’t have to faff around providing proof that you have a previous version of Windows first. That’s probably worth the time it takes to back up your settings and re-install your apps.
-Mary
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Change ends: Microsoft opening up to open source, Google opening up to DoJ?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Licensing, linux, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple on
Have Google and Microsoft swapped places? Are Microsoft and Adobe going to race each other to open source key technologies as Google gets bogged down by antitrust investigations over Google Books? Not really – but Google is in line for some antitrust grief.
Welcome as the open source announcements this week are, don’t read the wrong things into them. This isn’t religion.
Adobe doesn’t want to open source Flash; it’s a huge business for them. They want phone manufacturers to pay to put Flash on mobile; but Apple said no and Mozilla and Google said ‘video on HTML 5, in Android and Fennec’. Adobe’s response was the Open Screen Project, starting with getting the chip vendors to support Flash and offering a ‘pre-integrated’ version of the Flash run-time. Taking it down to the chip level isn’t just about the multimedia support; it means that none of the hardware guys will want to miss out on a feature their competitors are going to have.
Adobe is swapping licence revenues on phones for ubiquity on phones; as Adobe’s Zeke Koch puts it “now you can have it for free - in return you have to make it open.” That’s open as in ‘Adobe gets to check it’ rather than open as in source. And it means users don’t go off Flash because of shoddy implementation, Flash stays in demand and Adobe can make money on the Flash development tools – and get in a few digs at anyone who doesn’t support Flash as not being open.
And while releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is a good thing both for Hyper-V and anyone who is fed up with the religious debates over operating systems and licence philosophies and Microsoft deserves credit for working through the problems, it’s possible Microsoft didn’t originally plan to release its drivers under the GPL. Supporting Linux in enlightened mode on Hyper-V is crucial; without it VMware can boast better support for more server OS’s. But according to a blogger who calls himself Linux Network Plumber, in the first version “the driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license.”
And actually, the most credit here goes to the anonymous Plumber who, rather than “creating noise” (and you can imagine the noise if Microsoft had been accused of violating the GPL) contacted Novell to find the right person to approach at Microsoft. Result: less of a news story, more of an actual result, grown-up behaviour all round.
As for Google, the EU has a hearing on Google’s acquisition on publishing rights scheduled for September 7th (expect the estate of George Orwell to have an opinion); the House Judiciary Committee might meet sooner than that. Google brushes both off as ‘fact finding exercises’ but Christine Varney predicts “a repeat of Microsoft”. As the attorney who got Netscape’s case all the way to the anti-trust settlement, she should know.
-Mary
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Green if but for the licenses
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Licensing, Software, Applications, Hardware, Microsoft on
Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.
With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.
That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.
So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.
Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.
At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.
Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
–Simon
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