Linux is the world’s largest collaborative software development project. People from all over the world have influenced the Linux kernel code, and it runs on everything from mainframe computers to wristwatches. Linux, and free software development in general, provides some tremendous insights into what makes a successful project. Can today’s startups learn anything from the history of Linux?

The history of Linux proves that collaborative development speeds true innovation. If Linus Torvalds were left to work on Linux alone, there’s no way it would be the success it is today. A great many of the things that Linux does today are a direct result of people scratching their own itches, and then contributing their work back upstream to Linus. Many people focusing on their own little (and not-so-little) problems have made Linux the powerhouse that it is today.

It might not make sense for every startup to develop their project in public, but they can certainly avoid reinventing many wheels by using existing free software projects wherever possible. Many smart people are working all day every day to improve the building blocks of
innovation, and startups should be a part of that communal effort.

Certainly startups should focus on their own “secret sauce”, but they can also participate in the larger free software ecosystem. For example, there’s no long-term competitive advantage to a startup if they make improvements to Apache, or MongoDB, or other “plumbing” aspects of the Linux stack. Any such improvements can — and, in my opinion, should! — be shared upstream to benefit everyone.

In a similar vein, though, if there’s some home-grown technology that helps your startup but isn’t fundamental to its success, why not release it in order to leverage the global body of free software developers? Facebook releases free software. LinkedIn releases free software. Google releases free software. All of these releases are obviously used internally, but they’re not fundamental to the success of the company. I think there’s a lot to learn from the big players in this respect.

As Ubuntu‘s Technical Architect Allison Randal said, “Free Software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software.” Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation‘s Executive Director, says, “Free your technology and see it spread and do things you never even imagined were possible.”

Another lesson that startups can learn from Linux: when you disrupt the status quo you attract enemies. When Linux was gaining traction through the 90s, it was the target of intense attack from established industry players. Many of those early detractors are now contributing to the Linux kernel, as well as many other free software projects.

Zemlin points to Facebook as a shining example of what “the Linux community has been practicing for years: first – don’t do it for the money, second maintain the hacker way. And, the money follows.” He goes on to observe that there “is no coincidence that one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the last decade is deeply rooted in one of the greatest technology innovations of the last two decades: Linux and open development.”

Every time I write about Ubuntu and its (not-so) new Unity interface, I see lots and lots of comments decrying it as useless, an abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to computers, etc. Personally, I’m not so flummoxed by it, but there’s no denying that Unity has been a divisive addition to Canonical’s flagship Linux distribution. The choice to move application menus up to the global bar at the top of the screen has been frustrating to many, and a lot of power users find Unity too mouse-intensive. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, yesterday unveiled the next step in the Unity evolution: the Head-Up Display.

According to Shuttleworth, their testing revealed that “users spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, navigating the menus of their applications, either to learn about the capabilities of the app, or to take a specific action.” The goal of the new Head-Up display is to — eventually — replace menus altogether. Instead of clicking through menus, users type the command they require in a search box. It may sound a bit counter-intuitive at first blush, but take a look at this video for a few examples:

Certainly typing “undo” is not a particularly good example of efficiency, but it’s important to remember that not everyone can commit “CTRL+Z” to memory. If you know what you want to do, typing it into an assisted search box may well be faster than navigating nested menus or memorizing arcance key combinations. As Shuttleworth notes, “Hotkeys are a sort of mental gymnastics, the HUD is a continuation of mental flow.” And for power users who railed against the importance of the mouse in Unity to date, the HUD should be a welcome first step toward a better all-keyboard experience.

Shuttleworth also mentions that the long-term goals of the HUD include full voice integration, allowing you to simply say the word “undo” rather than type it.

Before you start casting aspersions, do read Shuttleworth’s blog post about the HUD. It’s worth a couple minutes of your time.

The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

While nearly 80% of respondents expect an increase in the number of Linux deployments in their organizations over the next five years, only 21.7% of those surveyed expect an increase in the number of Windows servers during the same time frame.

Perceived technical barriers to enterprise Linux adoption have dropped significantly, too. Only 12.2% of respondents cited technical issues as an impediment to success, down from 20.3% from the last survey. That says a lot about the overall value proposition for Linux installations.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this was an invitation-only survey. I’m sure a similar survey from Microsoft would yield results more pleasing to Redmond. Nonetheless, Linux is clearly at the vanguard of technical innovation, both for the traditional enterprise data center as well as for nascent cloud computing solutions.

figshare, originally launched in January 2011, is re-launching today with some new features. figshare aims to be a repository for scientific figures, raw datasets, videos and more. The retooled service offers AWS storage, version control, and unlimited public storage capacity. All uploaded data is made available with easy-to-use citation links (and a QR code) and is licensed under CreativeCommons terms to encourage re-use. In addition to faster uploads and an easier-to-navigate interface, figshare is also working on desktop clients.

According to their FAQ, “We are a data sharing platform where you can add figures that might otherwise go unpublished – complete with the raw data tables.” All data is organized by categorgy and tags and is readily searchable, making it easy for researchers to find the data they need. Visitors can comment on the works, too.

One of the goals of figshare is to get researchers to share even negative results from their works, in order to reduce duplication of effort, as well as to encourage citations. Publicly available data leads to more citations. According to figshare, unless “we as scientists publish all of our data, we will never achieve access to the sum of all scientific knowledge.” By sharing unpublished negative results, researchers can accrue citations for their efforts from other researchers who build upon the work.

You can also follow figshare on Twitter, if that’s your thing.

CES is upon us, and is no doubt chock full of the usual suspects of consumer electronics OEMs, ODMs, and more. One interesting new attendee this year is Canonical, the folks behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. Canonical is making a big push to get Ubuntu onto more than just desktops and laptops, and have been busy building relationships with CE companies to get it onto tablets, phones, and automobile in-vehicle infotainment displays. We’ll see Ubuntu make appearances at several booths to demo this work. Canonical will also be announcing Ubuntu TV.

Tablets, phones, IVI systems and Ubuntu TV are a far cry from Ubuntu’s humble beginnings as an easy to use Linux desktop. “Linux for human beings” has always been Ubuntu’s tagline, not “Linux for human being’s portable electronic devices.” So one might be forgiven for asking “WTF, Canonical?” I posed a slightly more polite version of that question to Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

According to her, CES 2012 will be the first glimpse of an expansion of Ubuntu’s reach across a spectrum of consumer devices. Canonical has a broad multi-screen strategy, and much of their work on the Unity interface to date has been laying the foundation for that strategy. Moreover, the work on Unity is just one example of Canonical’s efforts to move beyond being simply an integrator of components for a functional desktop Linux experience. Their Software Center is another example, as an effort to reward application devlopers. They’ve been working with OEMs to assist in product development. There’s also UbuntuOne, their cloud storage and synchronization service. And Canonical has been working hard to develop touch interface support in the Linux world, as well as driving better ARM support.

Ubuntu TV is to be the first proof point of this new strategy. Silber says that you’ll be able to watch your own media files, streaming media, or broadcast media. The goal is to combine all of these media sources without radically changing user behavior. Specifically, Ubuntu TV is not simply a Linux desktop on your TV. Canonical, says Silber, does not believe in the “browser on your TV” experience. “Browsers belong on secondary devices — tablets, phones, etc,” Silber told me.

Playing on the Ubuntu tagline, Silber claims Ubuntu TV is “TV for human beings. It just works.” As you can see from the images, Ubuntu TV will have a similar interface to the current Ubuntu desktop, with the launcher on the side, but there will be fundamental differences. The goal is to make Ubuntu TV the “OS for your television”, and not necessarily a set-top box. In that regard, Canonical is working with hardware partners to execute Ubuntu TV. It should be clear at this point that while Canonical has made great strides with it, Ubuntu TV it is not, yet, a finished product. They’ll be demoing working code at CES, but we shouldn’t expect working hardware for a little while yet.

I pointed out to Silber that there is a large, vocal body of people who despise the Unity interface, and asked whether it was really a good idea to extend that for media consumption purposes. Silber, like most poeple at Canonical, remained firm that their user testing bore out the merits of Unity. “Judge us by our actions, but also by our results,” she said. As you might recall, the first version of Ubuntu to ship Unity was also the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu TV will be open source, and we should expect an application development framework from Canonical. I asked Silber about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and how Canonical was working with content producers and distributors. I specifically wanted to know whether Canonical was drawing any lines in the sand with respect to the kinds of content that would be playable on Ubuntu TV. She said that they’re making an effort to reduce the proliferation of DRM, but they recognize that they’re late to this party and have a lot of work ahead of them. Silber acknowledged that Canonical is involved with UltraViolet, stating that “it helps simplify things from our perspective” with respect to encodings and DRM.

According to Silber, the biggest hurdle for Ubuntu TV is breaking down all the walled gardens that content producers and rightsholders have erected. Every studio wants you to watch their content on their website, with their widgets, and their advertising — all under their control. Canonical believes that there should be a single, elegant interface for consuming media, regardless of the content source. Silber believes that Canonical and Ubuntu represent a reasonable middle ground as a relatively vendor-neutral solution to this problem. Canonical isn’t in the media production business, nor are they in the hardware manufacturing business: they just want to be the OS for your TV (for now).

That notion of “reasonable middle ground” extends beyond just Ubuntu TV. As Canonical pushes to get Ubuntu onto more devices, Silber says that many CE manufacturers are looking for a third option to the iOS / Android hegemony. Again Silber admits that Canonical is late to this game, but this does allow them to learn from the mistakes of the trailblazers, as well as to identify under-served markets. Device manufacturers want a platform for innovation that supports post-sale service revenues in ways that Apple and Google aren’t satisfying. They’re also increasingly aware that upgrades are fundamentally important to the successful longevity of their products. Canonical, according to Silber, is a smaller, easier to work with partner that has a proven rhythm for releasing major updates.

While Ubuntu TV is still a developing product, it’s a positive sign of things to come from Canonical. Silber assured me that we should expect additional news throughout the year that demonstrates the viability of Ubuntu as a platform across multiple consumer devices. With UbuntuOne as a data synchronization service to connect Ubuntu-powered devices, I think we can expect interesting things in the way of converged user experiences from Canonical in 2012.

VMware, whose core products specialize in virtualizing Windows and Linux workloads, is making some interesting maneuvers in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space with their Cloud Foundry offering.

a href=”http://www.cloudfoundry.com”>CloudFoundry.com is a hosted PaaS solution, in which people can deploy and run their web apps without ever mucking around with the underlying OS or application stack. There’s also the Micro Cloud Foundry, which is a virtual machine image you can deploy on your own hardware to set up your own Cloud Foundry PaaS. Going even further, the software that powers Cloud Foundry is open source and available on GitHub under an Apache Software License, so anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of PaaS can check it out.

It’s extremely interesting to me that VMware, a company that makes gobs of money by selling complex proprietary software, has so boldly embraced the free software development model for their PaaS offering. It’s also worth noting that the other major Linux PaaS offering, Red Hat’s OpenShift, is not yet open source.

While OpenShift is an all-Linux PaaS, and Microsoft’s Azure is an all-Windows PaaS, Cloud Foundry extends VMware’s overall OS agnosticism. The default offering is Linux, but recent additions to their product have added .NET support.

The long-term value of .NET in Cloud Foundry remains to be seen, since you still need to provide your own legal licenses for Microsoft Windows for each instance (in the parlance of Cloud Foundry: an execution agent or “DEA”) you might deploy; but I think it’s an impressive testament to VMware’s Cloud Foundry design. Because Cloud Foundry runs on Linux but manages Windows-based DEAs the same as any other DEA, developers will have a common model for deploying and scaling both Java and .NET applications, as well the newer frameworks supported by Cloud Foundry.

If you’re a heterogeneous environment, Cloud Foundry offers a one-stop shop for handling diverse workloads.

Today Red Hat announces the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, the latest iteration of their flagship Linux distribution. I don’t usually cover every point release of every Linux distribution, but since I’ve covered recent releases from Canonical and SUSE I thought I’d give Red Hat some coverage, too.

RHEL 6.2 is in some ways a remarkable release, and in other ways completely uninteresting. It’s uninteresting in that there are no real surprises: this is a regularly scheduled update to the RHEL 6 product line, and it was released right on time. Red Hat customers have driven most of what’s included in this release, in the form of bug reports and feature requests.

RHEL 6.2 is uninteresting, too, because Red Hat’s promise to their enterprise customers is API and ABI compatibility for the life of the product. But this is also a reason why this release is so interesting.

Maintaining API and ABI compatibility on a complex suite of inter-related free software projects is no small task even on a short term basis. To manage it over a couple of years requires careful planning, attention to detail, and impressive staff talent. After all, companies are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the expectation that their servers will work exactly the same way for nearly a decade.

But the technology driving Linux development doesn’t stay the same for that same period of time. In addition to continuous kernel improvements, there’s whole swathes of new technologies rapidly evolving — KVM and Xen virtualization, filesystem advancements, and more — as well as the regular feature updates to the ecosystem of free software that go into a modern distribution: web servers, programming languages, support libraries, and more. Red Hat’s customers want to use these whiz-bang new features, but still enjoy long-term support offerings. It’s a delicate balancing act, and in that regard the release of RHEL 6.2 is utterly fascinating.

According to Tim Burke, VP of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, more changes (updates, bug fixes, etc) went into RHEL 6.2 than the entirety of what went into Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4, which was released in February, 2005. The list of RHEL 6.2 enhancements (PDF) is impressive, and includes a host of physical and virtual guest performance enhancements, improved management controls, and more. Also included are a variety technology previews of essentially beta software that people want to play with and that Red Hat wants to evaluate, like Parallel NFS and Linux containers.

“Red Hat is the leading innovator in Linux development,” claimed Burke. Certainly Red Hat is doing something right, as they’ve enjoyed 38 sequential quarters of successful growth all the while making predictable, sustainable releases for their customers.

When I earned my PADI open water diver certification, I had every intention of making scuba diving a regular hobby. Then I got a baby and everything changed. I haven’t been able to dive since, but I still have my logbook and keep looking for opportunities to get back into a wetsuit. The next time I do, I’ll be sure to log my dive at Diveboard, a new online dive logbook.

Diveboard lets you manually enter dives, or you can automatically upload output from one of several supported dive computers. (Extra props to Diveboard for supporting Linux!). You can share your dives, including linking to any pictures you might have taken while underwater, as well as see other users’ dives and pictures. You can also track the number and kinds of fish you’ve spotted, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Diveboard is taking things a couple of extra steps by sharing their collected data with safety and scientific organizations. Users can elect to not share anything, share their data anonymously, or be identified as the owner of their data. Medical information will be shared with the Divers Alert Network (with whom less than 5% of divers regularly share their dive data). Water temperature information will be shared with divers4oceanography.org/; and species occurrence data will be shared with the Ocean Biographic Information System. If you’re a diver just looking to log your dives, you can also help out these other organizations just by logging your dives on Diveboard. Good stuff.

According to Diveboard’s Alex Casassovici, the intent is to keep the site free to use for divers. As he says, “diving is expensive enough already.” The team specifically wants to keep the site fun and useful for divers. Casassovici recognizes that most social networks (Facebook, Google+, etc) can’t adequately cater to the needs of niche groups, and he wants to see Diveboard be meaningful to and successful with the niche population of divers.

If you’re a diver, why not take Diveboard for a spin?

openSUSE, the community developed Linux distribution sponsored by SUSE, has released version 12.1 today. At first glance, openSUSE 12.1 is pretty much in line with recent releases from Fedora and Ubuntu: GNOME 3.2, systemd, etc. But a closer look starts to reveal some real divergence between the various Linux offerings today. For example, while Fedora 16 allows you to choose btrfs for your filesystem, openSUSE 12.1 uses btrfs by default. There’s a number of other interesting advancements packed in this release, too.

The filesystem features provided by btrfs are enhanced on openSUSE 12.1 with Snapper, a user-space utility to take, compare, and revert snapshots of files. This has huge potential to make life better for users. It certainly won’t eliminate the need for backups, but it’s a strong step in the right direction. Similarly, openSUSE 12.1 includes support for ownCloud, “slim yet powerful private cloud software”. Again, this isn’t going to eliminate Dropbox or similar services, but it’s a step in the right direction toward self-sufficiency for regular end users in the Free Software space.

For power users looking to stay current with the state of the art in Free Software, openSUSE 12.1 includes Tumbleweed, a rolling update of tested, stable software. This replaces the rigid periodic release of a complete, complex system. Instead of upgrading all the software in your entire system every six or twelve months, Tumbleweed will upgrade individual components as new stable releases are made available.

As Zonker opined on G+, there’s a lot to differentiate one Linux distribution from another right now. It used to mostly be Red Hat-like versus Debian-like, but now each distribution has its own stable of compelling features.

Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.

I spoke with Issac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master (a groovy title, if ever there was one) and Jason Anderson, from Red Hat’s middleware team, about the announcement. According to Roth, OpenShift has always aimed to support those technologies used by open source developers — usually the “P” in the LAMP stack, as well as Ruby. But Red Hat also wants to support enterprise developers, and wants to help enterprise developers get working on cloud solutions using their preferred language. They’re doing that in a couple of ways, with today’s announcement.

First, OpenShift is getting integration into JBoss Tools, their Eclipse-based Java development environment, “allowing developers to easily push their code to the cloud from the leading Java IDE. Future integration is also planned for JBoss Developer Studio.” I asked Roth about OpenShift integration with other IDEs, and he assured me that work was underway. Indeed, Cloud IDE should work with OpenShift right now.

The ability to push an app to a platform from your IDE isn’t the only new feature being announced. Red Hat is also working to minimize the pain of building Java apps. OpenShift is adding support for Maven to help streamline the dependency resolution process, and Jenkins to provide “build as a service” functionality.

According to Roth, this is a push to allow Java developers to do everything “in the cloud”: code, build, and scale. Java app developers can focus on their apps, and not worry about the infrastructure. The addition of Maven allows developers to get away from manually wrangling library dependency installations for their apps, and in some cases may avoid the use of Ant scripts altogether. Jenkins support helps developers iterate quickly, and the existing OpenShift platform handles scalability.

When I think of Java apps, I usually think of monolithic corporate apps that communicate with corporate databases and directory services. I don’t think of cloud apps. So I asked Roth and Anderson who was driving this push at OpenShift. Specifically, what customers were saying to Red Hat “Gosh, I wish we could build our Java apps in the cloud!” They declined to discuss customer specifics, but did share that Red Hat is eating its own dogfood by deploying several content portals and mobile app backends with Java on OpenShift.

It’s not entirely surprising that Red Hat is driving Java in the cloud. After all, they own JBoss, one of the major Java middleware offerings in use today. While OpenShift’s Java support is currently limited to JBoss AS, the community-driven version (like Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux), we can probably expect to see JBoss EAP support in the not-too-distant future. Moreover, there are few PaaS offerings on the market today, save maybe for Microsoft Azure. Most folks seem to be focusing on infrastructure as a service, so the move toward PaaS opens up some interesting new opportunities.

OpenShift is currently free to use, with some modest limits on application size and scalability. If you’re a developer, why not take it for a spin?

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, starting today in Florida, is a gathering of Canonical employees, industry partners and Ubuntu community members to “define the focus and plans for [the] up-coming version of Ubuntu”. That version, 12.04 codenamed “Precise Pangolin”, will be released in April of 2012 and will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of the distribution. The changes scheduled for 12.04 are interesting, and simultaneously represent the current state of the art of the Ubuntu distribution as well as represent the foundation on which future developments will be built. I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Benevolent Dictator For Life, about what to expect in Ubuntu 12.04 and beyond.

First and foremost, Shuttleworth pointed out that the support schedule for 12.04 has been extended from three to five years on the desktop. Ubuntu LTS releases have historically provided three years of support on the desktop (five on the server), with new LTS versions coming out every two years. With 12.04, desktop users will enjoy support through 2017, which is a pretty long time to offer support for a desktop operating system.

I asked Shuttleworth what the motivation was for extending the 12.04 support offering on the desktop and he immediately responded “corporate deployments.” There are a number of companies standardizing on Ubuntu for their desktop computing needs, and the three year support from prior LTS releases was proving inadequate. Large corporations don’t adopt the latest and greatest technologies quickly, and they often have long QA processes to ensure that new desktop operating systems will properly function with their fleet of legacy applications. (Just look at how many companies are still in the transition process from Windows XP to Windows 7!)

Shuttleworth pointed out that there’s a growing change in attitude toward corporate computing. As more and more applications move “to the cloud”, IT departments are seeing that there’s less and less need for expensive desktop lock-in. Something like Ubuntu provides sufficient computing resources for a great many environments, and is free from licensing fees.

Ubuntu 12.04 will be the conclusion of the current two year LTS cycle, which will include four total releases: Maverick Meerkat (10.10), Natty Narwhal (11.04), Oneiric Ocelot (11.10). After the release of Precise Panglon, Shuttleworth and Canonical plan to get cracking on 14.04, the next LTS version (not yet codenamed). The work building up to 14.04 will, according to Shuttleworth, challenge the Ubuntu community and Canonical’s partners to exceed the status quo.

In the meantime, the conversations at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week will be the beginning of public conversations around the notion of “Ubuntu on devices”. There’s already been a lot of internal conversation on this subject, and some engagement with industry partners (witness the recently launched Ubuntu webbook in South Africa), but UDS will really open these conversations up for community participation.

Shuttleworth reminded me that the Ubuntu tagline has always been “Linux for human beings.” He went on to note, though, that human beings computing — and will continue to compute — using a lot more than the legacy PC. Webbooks are just one small subset of devices on which Shuttleworth has his eye. There’s also phones, tablets, and “smart screens” — intelligent devices with limited input mechanisms like televisions, in-dash automotive displays, and more.

Unity, the user interface rolled out in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and officially adopted as the default desktop interface in Ubuntu 11.04, lays the foundation for future development of Ubuntu on devices. One of the major thrusts of Unity was to embrace alternate computing form factors while still presenting a reasonably consistent user interface. Unity was refined in Ubuntu 11.10, and will continue to be refined in 12.04 and beyond. The lens framework will grow, and presumably third-party lens contributions will make the Unity experience smoother for all Ubuntu users.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Unity without hearing some vocal body of people complain about it. As a long-time Ubuntu user, I admit I found the transition a little challenging and I still experience some frustrations with it today. I asked Shuttleworth about this, specifically looking to learn what Canonical might know about user feedback that doesn’t get heavy publicity.

Shuttleworth was obviously prepared for this kind of question because he started his response by saying “We don’t know exactly how many people are using Ubuntu, but we have a pretty good estimate based on download numbers and watching browser user agent strings. I can tell you that Ubuntu 11.04, the first to offer Unity, was the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu to date.” Whether this was simply a natural growth in the Ubuntu user base, or people being curious about the new interface, is hard to tell.

Shuttleworth went on to describe the user testing that Canonical performs on each version of Ubuntu. They do real-world performance testing using randomly selected focus groups: people who may or may not be comfortable doing any number of computing tasks. Canonical asks these folks to perform a variety of real-world things (get photos off a digital camera and posted to Facebook, for example) and watches their performance. With each successive iteration of Ubuntu, they’re able to document how much easier these tasks are (or are not) and adjust their development priorities accordingly.

All key design issues are evaluated in the context of these tests. According to Shuttleworth, “people get much more done, from scratch, when presented with 11.10 versus 11.04 or any prior release of Ubuntu.” The obvious goal is to continue that trend into 12.04 and beyond.

“Ease of use is not incompatible with power users,” he went on, noting that some of the most vocal complaints against Unity come from the most technical of users: people who consider “computing” to be having a dozen terminal windows open across multiple virtual desktops. Shuttleworth acknowledged that Unity in its current form might not be ideal for those kinds of users, but noted that it’s not impossible to reconcile the two. As an example, he pointed out that a great many Linux developers are today using Macs running OSX. Clearly OSX has staked its livelihood on “ease of use”, and has been remarkably successful. And yet power users are using it more and more. Shuttleworth is sure that the Linux desktop can strike a similar balance. Expect to hear more about this from UDS this week.

One of the big features introduced in 11.10 was the Ubuntu Software Center. Of particular interest with this is the proliferation of proprietary, closed source software. I asked Shuttleworth about this. “We celebrate freedom!” was his immediate response. Users are free to get stuff done, and free to get it done using the software they want to run. According to Shuttleworth, it is not Canonical’s place to enforce their software morality onto their users. Sure, they’d love to see everyone being successful with exclusively free software, but on the whole they’re pragmatic enough to know that their users may want — indeed, demand — something else. According to Shuttleworth this stance is the result of many heated discussions inside Canonical, and not everyone is happy with it. Nonetheless, Shuttleworth is very proud of the fact that many commercial developers are working to run their software atop Ubuntu, and Canonical wants to support them as much as possible, with the Software Center and the developer.ubuntu.com portal.

After talking about desktops for a bit, I shifted the conversation to servers, virtualization and cloud computing. I noted that Ubuntu and Canonical don’t seem to be as aggressively pursuing virtualization as Red Hat, who is making a big push with their Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product and the oVirt project. Shuttleworth pointed out that Ubuntu was the first major distribution to make KVM a core part of their distribution. With that said, however, he acknowledged that they’re largely favoring cloud over virtualization.

Shuttleworth observed that Ubuntu is the most popular guest OS across all public cloud environments. Canonical wants to extend that to be the most popular base OS for cloud servers as well. HP’s recent decision to use Ubuntu as their preferred host distribution is one small step toward that goal.

He identifies Amazon Web Services as the de facto standard for cloud solutions: anyone looking to deploy a cloud offering today must be API compatible with Amazon. AWS controls much of the conversation simply by enjoying “first mover” status. Despite much effort by other proprietary companies like Oracle and VMware, Shuttleworth doesn’t think any of these others have any chance of significantly influencing the cloud conversation.

Canonical is pushing “cloud by default” by providing all the necessary features to run a cloud infrastructure with their core server offering. Canonical has thrown their weight behind OpenStack, which Shuttleworth identifies as the clear leader in open source cloud solutions. OpenStack was distributed as a component of Ubuntu 11.10 and according to Shuttleworth you should be able to deploy an N-node cloud in 15 minutes using just the core Ubuntu Server download.

Cloud is just a flattening of infrastructure, says Shuttleworth: “it’s just compute, storage, network and credentials.” In his mind, “building 50 servers is pretty much the same as building a 50-node cloud.” That is to say, it’s not really hard — or all that time consuming — today to provision 50 physical servers. Rolling out a cloud infrastructure should be as easy. He expects to see this made even easier with Ubuntu 12.04.

This raises some questions, though, as to how Canonical will reconcile the rapid advancements in cloud technologies with the five year support cycle of Ubuntu 12.04. LTS versions of Ubuntu get support for the software distributed with it, but don’t usually get new feature additions. As cloud technologies advance, 12.04 users may be left behind. Shuttleworth observed two possible solutions. The first is that folks interested in more closely tracking cloud (or other technology) advances could easily switch to the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu, updated every six months. Another possible solution would be to make available accelerated cloud feature additions to 12.04 users via an optional software repository. There’s some precedent for this within Ubuntu for other fast-moving infrastructure components, so this might well be something to expect with Ubuntu 12.04.

Ubuntu has been a remarkably successful Linux distribution. It started out exclusively as an easy-to-use desktop distribution, but has since added advanced server functionality, pioneering cloud computing integration, and sponsored an awful lot of terrific open source software development. This week’s UDS will likely produce some interesting developments.

Mark Shuttleworth, as Benevolent Dictator For Life of Ubuntu, told me “change is a fact of life, usually for the better.” Keep an eye on Canonical and the Ubuntu community to see how they aim to make Ubuntu better.

There’s been some hubbub lately about Secure Boot, a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that aims to improve the overall security of computers. Part of the UEFI specification which is slated to replace the aging BIOS with which many of us are familiar, Secure Boot can forbid the loading and execution of unsigned operating systems. Microsoft is requiring that Secure Boot be activated and enforced for any OEM systems that want to use the “Designed for Windows 8″ logo. The nature of the technology, and Microsoft’s recommended implementation of it, could remove control of the overall system from the end user, and in this configuration Secure Boot may prevent Free Software operating systems from loading.

After some initial hysteria on Slashdot (where else?), calmer minds have prevailed, and have reviewed the UEFI Secure Boot specification in some detail. It’s a pretty marked change from the old BIOS: the use of public key cryptography makes the whole thing considerably more complex. But there’s nothing about Secure Boot, prima facie, that specifically locks out Free Software operating systems.

The Linux Foundation has released a paper titled “Making UEFI Secure Boot Work With Open Platforms” written by Technical Advisory Board members James Bottomley, CTO, Server Virtualization at Parallels and Jonathan Corbet, Editor at LWN.net. Concurrently, Bottomley has collaborated with Canonical’s Technical Architect, Jeremy Kerr, and Red Hat’s Senior Software Engineer, Matthew Garret, to develop another paper titled “UEFI Secure Boot Impact on Linux“.

The former document is a pretty high level analysis of the situation (only four pages), with some overall recommendations on how OEMs can ship hardware that will work with both proprietary and Free Software operating systems. The latter document is a little more technical (eight pages!), with some slightly more specific recommendations for OEMs.

The whole thing can be a little confusing if you’re not already familiar with some of the basics of public key cryptography. Platform Keys, Key Exchange Keys, signature databases. Is this all more trouble than it’s worth? I fired off a few questions to the Linux Foundation for clarification, and James Bottomley responded.

TechCrunch: First and foremost, what’s the real-world effect to end users? If SecureBoot is as complicated at the document makes me feel it is, won’t many people just decide to leave their systems in “Setup” mode and avoid the whole thing?

James Bottomley: Leaving the system in setup mode is equivalent to the current state (no secure boot). However, we know from the microsoft blog that Users who accept the Windows 8 preinstallation won’t be given the option and their systems will be locked down. The idea for users who wish to install open source is that they will be given the option of moving to the more secure user mode or remaining where they are. The point of shipping in setup mode is that handling the complexity of this choice becomes the job of the operating system install or ignition system, which we believe to be the best place for this. We anticipate that the problems potentially caused by first ship of secure boot will be resolved over time and the benefits of booting securely will outweigh the initial teething troubles.

TC: Propping up a full public key infrastructure is a great idea, but well beyond the technical prowess of many hardware manufacturers. It’s not their core competency, so who is to say they’ll do it right?

JB: It wouldn’t be done by the Hardware Manufacturers, and indeed given the security implications, it should be outsourced to an entity for whom it is a core competency. The current effect of the Microsoft Windows 8 logo proposals is that the OEMs are required to manage a list of key exchange keys, which is also not their core competency, so offloading key management to an entity whose core business it is should make the whole process less error prone.

TC: We know that Certificate Authorities are not beyond compromise, as the DigitNotar business has recently pointed out. If a security-lax hardware manufacturer gets compromised, what’s the result to end users?

JB: So this is a problem. The UEFI system contains a mechanism for revoking certificates (which is the same mechanism used in the internet to remedy the DigiNotar intrusion). However, a system which relied on a revoked key in the path of trust would refuse to boot and would either have to be switched out of secure mode or have its UFI updated to remedy the situation. However, such a compromise isn’t really any more likely (and is possibly less likely since it would be a core business interest of the CA) than an OEM key being compromised, so the problem is the same or less troublesome than the situation where there’s no CA.

The promise of “initial teething troubles” doesn’t sound particularly fun, but as with any new technology adoption it’s largely unavoidable. I do look forward to seeing Secure Boot prove successful.

The Linux Foundation is rocking out in Prague this week and they’ve got some interesting news to share. In addition to adding five new European members and the one year anniversary of the Foundation’s Yocto Project, they’re announcing their “Long Term Support Initiative” to foster a stable kernel release suitable for use in consumer electronic devices. It aims to provide “both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.” The list of companies involved in the LTSI is a list of household CE names: Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba.

From the press release:

This new initiative is crucial because device makers are doing significant backporting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. Through collaboration in this initiative, these CE vendors will reduce the duplication of effort currently prevalent in the consumer electronics industry.

This is a terrific example of the power of open source software development. Stop screwing around maintaining your own custom kernel tree and driver set because that stuff doesn’t really provide you much competitive advantage in the market. Instead, collaborate with others on the “plumbing” so that everyone gets the best kernel available, and differentiate your product offering with a better user experience, or features unique to your product.

The goal is to reduce the number of private trees currently in use in the CE industry and encourage more collaboration and sharing of development resources.

The Linux Foundation has been extremely aggressive lately in shepherding this kind of collaborative development. The Yocto Project is another good example of this, as is the recently announced Linux Automotive Summit. The inexorable march of Linux into more of our every day devices in an interesting thing to watch, and I’m eager to see the Long Term Support Initiative bear fruit.

Vodafone and Canonical today announced the Vodacom “Webbook”, the fruit of a joint effort to develop a low-cost mobile computing solution for South Africa. Most of the specs are about what you’d expect for such a device, with one extremely interesting twist: it’s powered by a Freescale IMX 51 processor (Cortex A8) CPU in order to lower cost and power consumption. This represents the first mainstream consumer Linux distribution built for the ARM platform.

I spoke with Chris Kenyon, VP of Canonical’s OEM Services Group, about the device. Kenyon’s group of about 130 people work with original equipment manufacturers, like Vodafone, to develop and nurture Ubuntu-powered solutions. For the Webbook, Kenyon told me that Vodafone had a specific product concept in mind and they approached Canonical to help flesh out the details. This included building and rigorously testing a complete Ubuntu 11.10 installation for ARM.

The Ubuntu installation on the Webbook is a pretty standard one: there wasn’t much tweaking required to get it working correctly. The biggest addition Canonical made to the Webbook was to pre-load it with lots of links and content relevant to the local market.

According to Kenyon, emerging markets like South Africa not only represent huge potential sales volumes, but also introduce some interesting technology leaps. For example, wired networking is a rarity, while wireless networking has long been ubiquitous. Similarly, developing markets don’t have nearly the same kinds of legacy software baggage. These factors allow something like the Webbook to have a real chance at success in ways that simply don’t materialize in most of the developed world.

While we sip lattes and gaze at our sundry tablets, much of the rest of the world is still struggling to get access to any computing platform. It might be tempting to dismiss the Webbook in the same way we regularly dismiss netbooks here on TechCrunch, but “clamshell devices will remain a vital part of computing for years to come,” said Kenyon.

From the Vodafone press release: “With the Vodafone Webbook, Vodacom customers will be able to enjoy a portable internet experience with the Ubuntu operating system with various software applications, 24 months warranty and free software updates.”

The Canonical press release notes that Ubuntu is known in “the developing world as a legal, full-featured and flexible technology that offers manufacturers and purchasers a real alternative that embraces an operating system, a compelling application stack and access to the cloud.” The legal aspect is an interesting one to keep in mind.

Ubuntu’s core mission is to make computing available to everyone. As Kenyon observed, this means “more than just software” and the Webbook is just one of many examples of this. Canonical is expecting to ship on more than 10 million devices from name brands like Lenovo, Acer, and others. I expect we’ll see more market-specific devices like the Webbook next year.

Doxie, the cute but functional document scanner, last made waves with its ability to send scanned items to Evernote, Dropbox, or your iPhone. That functionality was handy, but you still needed to dig out your Doxie scanner, attach it your PC or Mac, and then perform the scan. Doxie’s cutting the cord today with Doxie Go: a cordless self-contained scanner that saves scans to its internal memory. At your convenience, tether the scanner to your PC or Mac (or iOS device, with optional accessory kit) and transfer your scanned documents to your hard drive. This makes the scanner operate much more like a digital camera.

The internal memory stores about 600 pages of scanned documents. You can also scan directly to USB stick or SD card and completely avoid the need to connect the Doxie Go to an USB port. That’s the kind of innovation we like to see in this post-PC era!

Doxie Go is no speed demon, at about 8 seconds per page, but that’s a small concession for the convenience of quality scanning anywhere you happen to be. Doxie Go will produce a much better image than trying to snap a picture of a document with your iPhone. And the included Doxie 2.0 software now allows you to create searchable PDFs, which might be a handy feature.

Doxie Go packs a Lithium Ion battery good for about 100 scans per charge. It’ll charge over USB (while you’re syncing with your PC) in about two hours, or you can get the optional Doxie GoKit for $20, which includes a wall charger and international power plugs.

The cordless Doxie Go addresses one of the gripes I had when I reviewed the original Doxie scanner: the poor placement of the USB cable with respect to the flow of paper through the device. With Doxie Go, you can scan anywhere that’s convenient and attach the scanner to your PC anywhere that’s convenient because scanning and synchronizing are two separate tasks.

Scanners used to be all the rage, and now we take the task basically for granted due to the proliferation of all-in-one printer/fax/scanner monstrosities. It’s nice to see someone tackling the headaches of just scanning.

Doxie Go will set you back $199. It’s available for pre-order now, with the first units expected to ship mid-November.

The Linux Foundation announced today the first ever Automotive Linux Summit. Taking place in Japan on November 28, 2011, it will be an opportunity to address the growing need for carmakers and Linux developers to collaborate on the future of cars as devices. Nissan and Toyota will both be there, along with Intel, NEC, and a host of other mobile solutions developers.

Dig it: “cars as devices”. The Internet of Things will be upon us sooner than we imagined. Automobiles are becoming increasingly complicated, with computers and computer systems getting more and more integrated into the whole of the vehicle, not to mention connectivity being expected by the driver at the dashboard. No single vendor can provide the breadth of experience required to develop and maintain the kind of software necessary to power all the computing on a car, so the vendor-neutral approach of the Linux stack makes tremendous sense to car makers.

The Automotive Linux Summit is specifically designed for the automotive industry and the growing cross-industry ecosystem for the future of mobility solutions. This premier vendor-neutral business and technical conference will bring together the brightest minds from the automotive industry, the Linux developer community and the mobility ecosystem. Attendees can expect to learn about how to use Linux and open source software in automotive applications ranging from in-vehicle on-board systems to cloud solutions for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

The Automotive Linux Summit currently has an open call for participation, so if you’re into Linux on cars, or cars as devices, consider submitting a presentation proposal.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has come a long way since it’s first release in 2004. It started out as a nicely packaged Linux desktop, built from a specific set of packages cultivated from the nearly thirty thousand packages available in the Debian distribution. Regular six-month releases ensured that Ubuntu would always be close to the cutting edge of Linux and free software development. Every fourth release is a long-term support offering, which gets security and support updates for three years. In the last seven years Canonical, the primary commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has added a server version of Ubuntu, built UbuntuOne, a cross-platform cloud storage solution, and made great strides in cloud computing.

Hewlett Packard has recently announced that they’ve selected Ubuntu to power the HP Public Cloud; and the Indian Supreme Court has recently switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux; but the bread and butter of Ubuntu development remains their desktop offering. Version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot and officially available on Thursday, October 13, is the latest release from Canonical and packs a number of interesting iterations of their work.

Oneiric Ocelot brings the Ubuntu Software Center forward as a first class citizen in the Ubuntu world. The look and feel of the Software Center has been updated to make it consistent with the overall Ubuntu aesthetic. Also updated is the number and variety of applications available, including commercial applications.

Canonical has been working hard to make publishing houses aware of the Software Center, and they’ve attracted some nice titles. They’re working to build an even more impressive selection of titles, and to make it as easy as possible for users to find the apps they want.

Concurrently, Canonical is courting application developers through their developer.ubuntu.com portal, which explains how to build and submit an application to the Software Center. Canonical reports a 5x increase in application submissions in the three weeks since the developer portal was announced. According to Gerry Carr, Director of Communications at Canonical, they’re now approving at least one app per day.

The motivation behind the developer platform, and the updated Software Center, is to improve the quality of apps available to users. There’s also work to monetize apps to the benefit of the developers through Ubuntu Pay. It remains to be seen just how willing Linux users will be to pay for apps, given the long history of “free as in beer” software. While only a single data point, I think the Humble Bundle offers some valuable insight, and I’d wager that there’s money to be made in the Software Center: the average price spent by Linux users for the Humble Bundle offerings always exceeds that of Windows or Mac users. The current Humble Bundle sees Linux users paying twice as much as the average Windows user.

The last release of Ubuntu, version 11.04, featured the addition of Unity, which was an effort to revitalize desktop Linux for modern hardware while simultaneously development meaningful experiences for touch-based interfaces. It was met with some hostility, as its a marked change from the desktop paradigms to which many users have grown accustomed. Ubuntu 11.10 features some refinements to the overall experience, but it’s clear that Unity is here to stay.

I asked Gerry Carr about the substantial shift in paradigm from the traditional GNOME desktop to Unity’s Dash. Carr agreed that it can be a jarring transition, because it breaks with many of the metaphors we’ve grown up using for what feels like forever, but the ways in which we use computers is changing and the interfaces need to adapt. More and more of our use of computers is to access Internet resources, so the interface should facilitate that in ways that make sense. You should be able to access more than just what’s on your system.

Carr pointed out that the lens mechanism supports heterogenous storage, which means you can keep your data where it makes sense to keep it, but still access it through a consistent, easy-to-use interface. “The Ubuntu experience is as much a rich local experience as it is a cloud experience,” said Carr.

An example of this kind of integration is the Dash itself. When searching for applications, the various lenses will find your currently installed apps as well as suggest apps available for installation. This completely sidesteps the old model of stopping what you’re doing, opening something like the Software Center, searching for an app, and finally installing it. By integrating app search directly into the Dash, Ubuntu provides a single interface to reduce the friction a user experiences.

To be fair, this is still an evolving solution. For people set in their ways, the transition to the Unity experience can be frustrating. I think one of Canonical’s big shortcomings thus far has been a real education effort to explain the value of the lens metaphor, and to help people realize the utility of it.

That complaint aside, Canonical has been working to make lenses that make the Ubuntu experience better. There’s a new Music lens that allows users to search for music. The music lens will search the user’s local music files, as well as query the Ubuntu Music Store, allowing a user to quickly identify which albums might be missing from their local collection and to buy that music quickly and easily. This is a pretty nice convergence of the local+Internet search capabilities of the lens system.

All searches — whether for apps, or files, or media, or whatever — support rich context appropriate filtering. When searching for files, you can filter by file type, size, or last modified date. When searching for media, you can filter by decade or genre. Searching for apps allows you to filter by category or rating. None of this is particularly revolutionary, but the ease with which Ubuntu 11.10 integrates the search and filter functions to the lenses is quite impressive.

Lenses don’t have to come from Canonical, either: there’s a rich API for developing your own lenses. A great example of this is the Ask Ubuntu lens. This integrates a search for the StackExchange-powered AskUbuntu.com site right into your desktop, allowing you to search for answers to problems you might be experiencing. You don’t need to open a browser and navigate to a site: you simply
search using the Unity interface in the same way that you search for new apps to install or new music to listen to.

Another neat addition to Ubuntu 11.10 is Deja Dup, a backup application that works like Apple’s Time Machine. Backups can be stored on your computer’s hard drive, an external hard drive, or to your UbuntuOne account. Storing your backups to your UbuntuOne account allows you to restore your system to different hardware, which is a neat feature. It’s also worth noting that Deja Dup is not a Canonical project: the Deja Dup folks built atop the UbuntuOne API to make this work seamlessly for Ubuntu users.

For anyone that’s used Ubuntu in the past, you may be pleased to learn that 11.10 ditches Evolution in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird as the default mail client. When I asked Carr about the motivation for this shift he immediately responded “user demand”. Clearly users are dissatisfied with Evolution. Carr also noted that more developer effort is being applied to Thunderbird, making it an easy choice for installation.

Ubuntu 11.10 is the last release before the next Long Term Support version, so much of what we’ll be seeing on Thursday is laying the foundation for the what will be in the next version. The great thing about free software like Ubuntu is that you can use version 11.10 right now: simply follow these instructions. Similarly, you can install what will be version 12.04 long before its official release, and you can help shape the direction of that release by filing bug reports!

I’ve been upgrading my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu pretty regularly, and I’ve never really been disappointed. The upgrade to 11.04 was a bit disconcerting at first, but the more I use it the less it bothers me. As Canonical works to improve the lens mechanism of Unity, and as third party lenses proliferate, I expect that I’ll enjoy using 11.10 more.

When I first started using Linux, way back in the last century, one of the biggest challenges was the lack of a decent productivity suite of the sort to which every Windows user is accustomed. The only real option was StarOffice, which worked but was unbearably slow to load and cumbersome to use. Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, in 1999 and released the source code to the suite in July 2000. Thus was OpenOffice.org born, with the intention of providing a viable open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Sun got bought by Oracle in 2010 and commercial development of OpenOffice.org was officially terminated shortly thereafter.

For a traditional closed source application, Oracle’s abandonment may well have been the end of the line. But OpenOffice.org had been released under the LGPL, the Lesser GNU Public License. This free software license specifically states:

You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) The modified work must itself be a software library.
b) You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
c) You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
d) …

So when Oracle called it quits, dedicated members of the OpenOffice.org community pooled their resources and set up The Document Foundation to provide structure and leadership to the continued development of the open source code used by OpenOffice.org.

The Document Foundation is an open independent self-governing meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite.

The new product was called LibreOffice. At the time, this was a simple, direct fork of the existing codebase. A simple find-and-replace would have been performed to substitute “LibreOffice” for all instances of “OpenOffice.org”.

The Document Foundation quickly set out to differentiate itself from the project governance that had gone before. You see, Sun Microsystems had long been requiring contributors to OpenOffice.org to assign the copyright of their contributions to Sun. In many ways, this makes sense and isn’t really a big deal: it allows a single entity to control and defend the copyright of the entire work. But in many ways, such copyright reassignment is anathema to open source collaboration. Moreover, as sole arbiter of the project’s life, Sun had the power to reject contributions for any reason. As such, The Document Foundation specifically rejected the need for copyright reassignment, opening the doors for all comers, and established a strict meritocratic model for evaluating contributions.

So it’s been a year since the formation of The Document Foundation. Development activity has been strong, with more than 300 developers committing more than 25,000 changes. Major commercial contributors include SuSE, Red Hat and Canonical. Hundreds of individuals developers have contributed, looking to improve a project they value.

The first stable release of LibreOffice was on January 25, 2011. Since then it has been downloaded more than six million times, with 90% of those downloads being used on Windows computers. LibreOffice is now the default productivity suite in most Linux distributions today. The Document Foundation estimates that it’s being used by about 25 million people across Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems.

In light of the exodus of developers from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, Oracle has recently decided to donate the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Software Foundation, so that the ASF can shepherd it as a true open source project. The old OpenOffice.org is now “Apache OpenOffice.org (incubating)“, and is a member of the Apache Incubator.

Except that Oracle didn’t really donate the code, at least not in the usual sense of that word; nor have they transferred any copyrights. According to Ross Gardler, Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation, Oracle “have granted a sufficient license to allow Apache to move forward in a completely unencumbered
fashion. The terms of this license are described in our standard Software Grant Agreement at http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt.”

The Incubator is an Apache program for ensuring that new projects develop the kind of community traction necessary to survive. According to the Incubator website, “[a]ll code donations from external organisations and existing external projects wishing to join Apache enter through the Incubator.” This is why the “(incubating)” suffix is tacked on to the already cumbersome “Apache OpenOffice.org” project name. The OpenOffice.org domain has also been donated to Apache, and will at some point move to Apache hardware. For now, it’s still residing on Oracle hardware.

One important thing to note about Apache projects is that they all use the Apache Software License. This is a permissive license that does not contain the “copyleft” provisions of the GNU licenses. This means that Apache OpenOffice.org is now licensed under the ASL, not the LGPL.

If Sun had not required copyright assignment, then the process of changing licenses would be a nightmare: every individual contributor would retain the copyright on their contributions and would need to give their assent to a license change. It’s almost guaranteed that there would be at least some resistance to a license change, which effectively means that no license change would occur.

The switch was easy to accomplish, though, specifically because Sun had previously required copyright assignment on all contributions: when Oracle bought Sun, they immediately gained complete and unfettered ownership of the copyright to all the code, and the copyright holder is permitted to re-license the work at any time.

Today the Apache OpenOffice.org project is alive and well, though they have not yet released anything. They’re still in the process of refining the build process, and building the requisite infrastructure within Apache. They’re also engaged in IP clearance: finding bits of third-party GPL-licensed code and libraries that may have been bundled with the old OpenOffice.org and replacing it with Apache licensed (or compatible) code and libraries. This is a surprisingly non-trivial task, given the size and complexity of the OOo codebase.

I asked Gardler whether Apache has any plans to try to reclaim the status of default productivity suite in major Linux distributions. He replied that there “is no desire to directly compete with LibreOffice or any other open source project. The Apache OpenOffice.org community are interested in creating the best permissively licensed suite of personal productivity tools we can.”

That clause “permissively licensed” is an important one in the discussion about LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice still uses the LGPL, and while that license is more permissive than the normal GPL, it’s still less permissive than the Apache license. Gardler went on to clarify:

This means Apache licensed code can be reused in any downstream project. It is hoped that there will be opportunities for collaboration on core components that facilitate document exchange between OOo and all other projects seeking to work with ODF documents.

Like The Document Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation is a meritocratic organization, rewarding participants for the quality of their contributions.

Newcomers looking to get involved with Apache OpenOffice.org might want to look at the Help Wanted page on the wiki.

image Flickr‘d

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, is adding three new companies to its membership list: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges. These companies “are important additions to The Linux Foundation membership,” according to The Linux Foundation’s vice president of marketing and developer programs Amanda McPherson. “The enterprise IT environment is growing more complex and Linux is helping users and vendors innovate within it. We are excited to collaborate with these companies to advance that work.”

Eucalyptus Systems — lead by Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL AB — provides self-hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds using commodity Linux servers. Mickos was one of the keynote speakers at the 2011 LinuxCon North America, where he observed that we, the Linux community, must strive to ensure that no one closes that which we have opened. Clearly his company’s involvement with the Linux Foundation is an effort to put his money where his mouth is. “Open source has gone from disrupting the old to innovating the new — and Linux and open source hypervisors form the main building blocks of the cloud,” said Mickos. “As pioneers of infrastructure-as-a-service software, Eucalyptus’ membership in The Linux Foundation will keep us close to technology development that is vital for the advancement of new innovations in cloud computing.”

Nebula is developing a Linux-based hardware appliance for large private cloud computing infrastructures; and Virtual Bridges provide a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution.

As more and more companies strive to develop “cloud” solutions, it’s clear that Linux and free software provide the best building blocks, as Mickos observed. A neutral arbiter like the Linux Foundation is an important element in the longevity of Linux. I’d expect to see even more companies pledging support to Linux and the Linux Foundation in the not-too-distant future.

Canonical, the commercial backer behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, have been hosting a file synchronization service called Ubuntu One for a couple years now. A free account gets you 5GB of storage, and the client side controls have been baked into the last couple of releases of the Ubuntu distribution. It works pretty much like Dropbox or similar services, but has been — until today — Linux-only.

In an announcement late last night, Canonical has revealed that there is now a Windows client for Ubuntu One, allowing you to access all your files from either Linux or Windows computers.

We have long received feedback from Ubuntu users regarding their evolving needs to manage all their content from a single, secure place across multiple platforms and devices. We’ve looked at many use cases, the most common being the Ubuntu user who is using more than one device or OS. Many people have to work in Windows or Mac environments, even if they prefer to use Ubuntu as their home desktop or OS of choice. Another case is enabling more opportunities for sharing across platforms. For example families using different operating systems in one household can use Ubuntu One as their central place to store all their music, documents, photos and share them easily with each other and friends.

Ubuntu One also offers a nifty music streaming service. For $4 per month, you get 20 GB of storage and the ability to stream music files from your account to your mobile device. The Ubuntu One app is available for iOS and Android, and Android devices get the added benefit of a controllable offline cache, allowing you to listen to your cloud-stored music without requiring a network connection. Neat stuff.