There’s a reason smartphones are locked down
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, smartphone, linux, Google, Apple on
If Google’s Android OS is open source, why is the company going after an Android developer? Because not everything that you think of as Android is actually open source.
CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ is an alternative, unauthorised, third-party version of Android for Android phones. As Android is an open source operating system, why has Google hit the developer behind it with a cease and desist letter? Because the Google Maps, Android Market, Google Talk, Gmail and YouTube applications on Google’s own Android builds are Android apps rather than part of the OS - and they’re not open source. That means Google has every right to tell the developer behind Cyanogen that he can’t distribute them as part of his build http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble. Google told Intel the same thing back in the spring when it was trying out Android on netbooks. Search, and the apps powered by search, are where Google makes its money and they’re not open source and you can’t use them without permission. Parts of the Android SDK are proprietary as well.
Microsoft has never seriously gone after the developers on sites like XDA Developers who create ‘cooked’ ROMs for Windows Mobile devices. That might be because Microsoft makes its Windows Mobile money by selling licences to the phone manufacturers. There’s also the fact that many of the XDA developers work for phone manufacturers and mobile operators and have a fairly good understanding of what you don’t want a phone to be able to do - as least as far as the phone network is concerned.
The mobile networks have a rather ambivalent attitude to open source on phones. On one hand, anything that makes it easier to make powerful phones cheaply is good, because it costs them less to subsidise. Plus open source should make it cheap for developers to create apps for the platform. This is a big change in attitude because an open, easy to configure, easy to develop for platform is also very scary for the operators because they’re paranoid about a rogue - or just badly-written - app or phone taking down the phone network. That’s why the OpenMoko phone - a truly open phone - never got very far; the operators were just too worried about having it on their network.
Vodafone’s support of the JIL platform in the 360 launch shows that the networks have realised - with a lot of help from the iPhone app store - that having lots of apps on a phone is a good thing. The reason Windows Mobile looks so far behind in the app space isn’t that it’s hard to develop good apps for - although the mix of screen resolutions and Compact and Micro Framework versions certainly doesn’t help. It isn’t just that it’s too complicated to find, install and uninstall apps (I can’t find a good version of Spider solitaire from a site that I trust and I can’t find a way to get Windows Live off now that I’ve realised that having Hotmail on my phone isn’t worth it if it’s going to slow down the mail interface this much). It’s also that the over-cautious operators held back the first wave of app developers by insisting on lengthy certification and approval systems.
The operators are a lot more confident now (although there were still some nerves at the Vodafone 360 launch yesterday - “Is opening up our network services like this a good thing?” asked one spokesperson rhetorically; “we hope so!”). It’s also interesting that despite being a member of the Open Handset Alliance, instead of following Motorola down the Android route Vodafone has put MotoBlur-competitor Vodafone People onto the LiMo platform instead. Linux Mobile (and Maemo and Moblin) aren’t just different flavours of Linux from Android (which Google says is built on the Linux kernel, but is not actually Linux); they’re Linux-based mobile operating systems that Google doesn’t control.
Handset manufacturers and operators like Linux phones for lots of reasons. They like open source for lots of reasons. But for an industry that contributes as much to UK GDP as the oil and gas industry, few of those reasons are connected with the philosophy of openness that draws developers like Cyanogen.
–Mary
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
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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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Does a netbook look like you mean business?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Christmas, Processors, operating systems, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Laptop, linux, Hardware, Mobile on
Thinking about a netbook as a last-minute stocking filler for yourself? There are some very usable netbooks now, especially the Dell Mini 9 and the new Lenovo. But they’re still cheap and cheerful personal machines with consumer features, and many of them look it.
In an ideal world, the ultraportable you want for business needs a few more features. A fingerprint sensor and Vista with BitLocker encryption would be a good start, along with a keyboard you can actually type full documents and emails on. A battery that lasts a full day saves you starting every meeting by looking for a power socket. Built-in 3G is more efficient, giving you better bandwidth and using less power than a USB dongle. And while looks aren’t everything, it doesn’t hurt to carry something stylish that marks you out as a success. Many of the netbooks on the market have basic looks to match their basic price and basic features. Customers and partners will want to take a look at a netbook and may be impressed by how much you can get done on it despite the limitations, but they can go away with the impression that you can’t afford anything better.
You certainly won’t give that impression with the unfeasibly light Toshiba R600 or the slim, sleek Sony TT. At the launch, the Chinese artist commissioned to produce signature chops for the journalists at the launch kept saying. TT. Like the Audi? That’s not a bad impression to leave people with.
After Steven Sinofsky flashed a Lenovo S10 around on stage at the Windows 7 announcement at PDC, Mike Nash did a little repositioning of the Windows 7 netbook story, telling a story about visiting a big-box store where the 20-year-old assistant insisted that the only people buying netbooks were “really old people!” Really old people? How old? “Old! 40 or 45!”
Leaving aside the way anyone over 21 looks old from a certain angle - like the New Yorker map of the world, where anything outside Manhattan might as well be in Australia - and whether white plastic looks more like a child’s toy than black metal, the real question is what can you achieve on a cheap machine. Hardly anyone wants a PC just for Web browsing, especially now the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold and even Windows Mobile with Skyfire (http://get.skyfire.com) mean you can see real Web pages on a phone. There’s the ‘familiar applications from Windows’/'any application that does something similar so Linux is fine’ debate. And there’s can I run the applications I want, fast enough to do something useful and with enough battery life to make it worth carrying a netbook with me. Three hours doesn’t cut it for me, I want to be able to run five Office applications and a Web development tool, and I want a fingerprint sensor and a TPM while I’m at it.
It’s like the HTC Advantage, which I still think of as the first Mobile Internet Device by Intel’s definition; as soon as the screen was big enough and the processor fast enough I wanted all my usual PC applications instead of the cut-down Windows Mobile equivalents. I prefer Office to Google Docs because I like features like document reviewing and AutoCorrect and colour conditional formatting to show values visually as well as numerically. And I’d rather have an ultraportable than a cheaper netbook, because it does more. It’s nice if it looks as good as the Sony TT, but the Toshiba Portégé R600 isn’t any prettier than a netbook; but it is the thinnest, lightest machine I’ve ever picked up, which also has a DVD drive. Just as Apple products are undeniably desirable on a visceral level, netbooks are a hard to resist combination of cheap and cute. But if they don’t do what you really need, they’re no bargain.
-Mary
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Servers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Enterprise, virtualisation, operating systems, linux, Intel, HP, Server, Windows, Microsoft on
Server sales went down 3.8% and up 4.9% this summer. That’s up if you’re counting how many servers companies have been buying in EMEA in Q3, by nearly 5% and down by just under 4% if you’re counting how much they cost. It’s the biggest fall in the amount spent on servers since the end of 2005, and la the news is much worse in Western Europe, at least for server vendors. Revenue went down 7.6% compared to last year, although unit sales are only down by 0.6%; that means you can buy almost as many servers as you did last year and pay rather less for them.
Dig into the IDC figures and there are some other interesting trends. Central and Eastern Europe are using more and more IT and it’s not just commodity x86 servers (up by 15/9%); pricier Itanium, mainframe and other non x86 servers went up by 22% and IBM saw almost 50% increase in revenue for z OS here. Windows didn’t lose any revenue this year either, all though all other server operating systems did, including Linux (although only what IDC calls a ‘very minor drop’); in fact Windows gained another 2% of server OS market share across EMEA.
It’s still the year of blades: up by 37.5% in sales compared to last year, and now 12% of all server sales by revenue. IBM lost as much on falling sales of x86 servers as it made on System z mainframes. Sun’s SPARC Enterprise systems sold well but Sun still lost share in the server market. Like IBM, it’s losing out to Dell and HP: HP was the number one server vendor with 2.4% growth, mainly because of ProLiant sales. Dell had a small increase in revenue and a 4% increase in shipments: more than HP but much less than the double-digit growth it had been seeing in previous quarters.
So, yes, servers sales are down overall and manufacturers will be hurting; but so far it seems to be canny buying that’s affecting the market as much as buying fewer servers. And that makes me think that while some companies may be skipping new servers in favour of SaaS and the cloud, more are just tightening their belts. The credit crunch has led to plenty of mergers and acquisitions (some more voluntary than others); that’s a lot of heterogenous IT systems to integrate, which means less time to go building new systems that need new servers - and more servers in a business that might get better economies of scale.
And then there’s virtualization. The server vendors have been supporting virtualization to the point of putting hypervisors in flash on new servers to get you running 20 servers’-worth of VMs on your new box more quickly. I’ve been asking vendors if this isn’t storing up trouble and lost sales for the future. You might never have bought the other 19 servers, but how about just another two or three? Answers have ranged from blank looks to assurances that it wouldn’t be a problem for long enough to let them find a way around it (often followed by ‘people will always need new servers’) to the very honest ‘yes, but we have to do it these days’. VMware revenue was up 32% for Q3 2008 compared to the year before; growth for 2008 might “only” be 42% rather than 45%. Microsoft has only just got into the serious hypervisor market with Hyper-V but it’s free with Server 2008 so you can expect it grow fast; Citrix and Red Hat have been chalking up the numbers for a few years too. Maybe the credit crunch will be the point at which virtualising servers also comes to mean not buying as many new ones
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Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT.
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