But Wait, There's More

OSDL's Patent Commons Ready for Grazing

Open Source Development Labs, one of the main stewards of Linux and related open source systems software, this week announced the Patent Commons Project, an online patent commons reference library with over 500 patents in a searchable database. The patents have been donated by IBM, Computer Associates, Intel, Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems.

While the relevancy to Linux of many of the patents have been called into question, the idea is nonetheless sound and the Linux community is not in a legal position to not accept any patent donations offered by vendors or promises that violations of patents by Linux by certain vendors will not be pursued. In fact, a precise list of patents that vendors won't sue to protect would be a very, very useful thing--albeit a very tough thing to build--and would go a long way toward making those who are nervous about the legal issues surrounding open source products. This is a good start.

Vendors Establish Open Invention Network to Acquire Patents

While having a patent commons like the one established by Open Source Development Labs in the story above is important, it is perhaps more important for the open source community to actually be an acquirer of patents to protect the products that get built in the open source way. I am cynical about the law-- particularly patent law, since I find it completely illogical that a company own the rights to a particular configuration of DNA--the fact is, having a big portfolio of patents is what keeps many IT companies from suing each other out of existence and cross-licensing agreements are what often allow innovation to proceed in a relatively orderly fashion.

That's why IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Philips, and Sony have thrown some cash into a new initiative to actually acquire patents called the Open Invention Network. Novell, which secured some B2B commerce patents from the failed CommerceOne B2B startup, donated these patents to the cause, which it got by buying the carcass of CommerceOne late last year for $15.5 million. The vendors behind OIN won't say how much funding they will supply to license or acquire patents relating to open source software, so it is hard to say how useful it will be.

Many people think that software should not be patentable, and there are very good reasons for this, including the fact that copyright protections ought to be sufficient to protect software developers. But the fact remains that the Patent Office in the United States has granted patents on software, and the courts have upheld these patents, so this is not an issue that will go away. Any open source project can be put into very tough circumstances by a commercial institution hell-bent on using its patents and the threat or reality of a lawsuit to drive open source developers out of a market. There are no easy answers, and even buying thousands and thousands of patents will not stop this potential threat. Licensing patents that could be used to attack Linux is probably a good idea, but to do so usually requires developers who have created a product (the bits of the Linux platform are really a collection of thousands of programs) to get patents of their own. Any way you look at this, acquiring patents, applying for patents, and cross-licensing requires lot of money and lots of lawyers.

Who is going to pay for this?

SUSE Co-Founder and Kernel Maintainer Quits Novell

In a bit of airing of the laundry in public, SUSE co-founder Hubert Mantel, who founded the German commercial Linux distributor in 1992 with Roland Dreyoff, Buchard Steinbild, and Thomas Fehr, turned in his resignation last week at Novell, just after the company decided to axe 600 employees from the payroll. Mantel, who has been the maintainer of the SUSE variant of the Linux kernel for the past decade, resigned in a huff and threw in what appears to be some biting sarcasm. In an email he broadcast to the Linux community and to members of the press, Mantel said that he was "very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly," adding that, "after all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division."

He did not elaborate in what that meant, but standing on the outside of Novell's walls, I would guess that Mantel lost some unknown argument with Novell's upper management and he was sarcastically suggesting that Novell might not have an easy time replacing him, even with all of the smart techies in the Ximian unit that was acquired by Novell a few months before Novell ate SUSE in November 2003. Much noise is being made about a brain drain at Novell, since Richard Seibt, SUSE's former CEO and once president of Novell Europe, left earlier this year, followed by other top executives in Europe. As far as anyone knows, Juergen Geck, the chief technology officer for the SUSE product line who was appointed in April 2003, is still at Novell.

The real question is what Mantel will do now. With the openSUSE project in full swing, there is a possibility that a disgruntled former founder might just think he can re-create the SUSE he used to love. And that would be a very dangerous thing to Novell, indeed.

Mandriva Hosts Global Install Party for 2006 Edition

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva put out its Mandriva 2006 release a month ago, software that merged in elements of the Lycoris desktop and Conectiva desktop and server environments with its former MandrakeSoft Linuxes for desktop and laptops. And now it wants to make a little public relations and marketing noise, and to that end, the company is hosting a global "install party" this coming Saturday. Mandriva is getting the assistance of Linux user groups around the world, and is hosting free community-assisted installations for Linux beginners in 65 cites. If you are an expert Linux user, and you want to help out, you can get more information here and volunteer your services. If you are installing software on your laptop or desktop, you will have to pay for it, but Mandriva says it will be handing out some goodies to make it worth your while--above and beyond the free tech support.

Zend Studio 5 Ships with Commercial PHP 5

Zend Technologies, the commercial support company that is behind the open source PHP language and runtime engine, announced this week that the long-awaited commercial implementation of PHP 5, which is called Zend Studio 5, is ready for public consumption. The new PHP 5 has better integration with databases, including IBM DB2 and Cloudscape, Oracle 9i and 10g, Microsoft SQL Server, as well as PostgreSQL, Derby, and SQLite. (Oddly, MySQL was not mentioned in the announcement, but PHP 5 clearly supports the MySQL database and this is the most popular database behind PHP.) Zend Studio also does FTP over SSL, has integrated support for the Subversion version control system.

Zend Studio Standard Edition, which is aimed at single developers and which includes an internal Internet Explorer browser, costs $99. (I am a bit mystified about how IE is running on a Linux or Unix box, but once we figure out how to get it installed on our SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 development server, I'll let you know what the deal is.) The Professional Edition, which adds the Subversion integration, costs $299, and the Enterprise Edition, which adds a code quality control and test environment, costs $1,495 for a perpetual license or $499 for an annual license. All versions include one year of tech support. Zend Studio 5 runs on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Gupta, Wind River Chairman, Joins Red Hat Board

A few weeks ago, Bob Young, the founder of commercial Linux distributor Red Hat, who took the company public and acquired the companies that eventually gave Red Hat its current management and a lot of its add-on technologies for Linux, departed the company to devote his energies to on-demand book publishing. This left a hole in the Red Hat board of directors, and the company lost little time replacing Young with Narendra Gupta, vice chairman of Wind River Systems, a supplier of real-time operating systems (including Linux variants) for embedded markets. Gupta got his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1969, a master's degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1970, and a PhD from Stanford University in 1974; in 1980, he founded Integrated Systems, a specialist in embedded software platforms that went public in 1990 and which merged with Wind River in 2000.

Aberdeen Report Pegs Growth in Midmarket ERP

Now that they have gone through an extended belt-tightening exercise, medium-sized enterprises are beginning to focus their attention on building revenue and are willing to turn to technology to accomplish these goals. That's what the latest research from Aberdeen Group reveals anyway. According to "ERP in the Mid-Market Enterprise: The 2005 Benchmark Report," a significant portion of the mid-market is relying on core business applications to provide competitive advantages.

For the purposes of this research, Aberdeen Group surveyed primarily manufacturers that assemble components from parts and distribute those products. Epicor Software, a company that specializes in customer relationship management, supply chain, and financial accounting technologies sponsored the report. Aberdeen also conducted a similar report in 2004, which provides a basis for comparison in its trend analysis.

Based on its survey results, Aberdeen concludes that 77 percent of mid-market firms have made revenue growth their top priority. Lowering costs, which one year ago was gaining the most attention, remains a major factor in these shops, but only slightly more than half of the respondents rated it as their major concern.

Expanding the revenue and customer base have become the most powerful drivers for many medium-sized companies, where an emphasis on customer satisfaction, staying competitive, and controlling costs continue to dominate conversations between IT and business executives. Katherine Jones, author of the report, says these firms are ready for a technology overhaul, which could include newly installed software, hosted solutions, or outsourced services.

"The mid-market is beginning to invest in technology to get ahead. Prime examples of that investment in the next 12 months are in supplier relationship management, customer acquisition and retention tools, and technology to help companies hire better talent--and then retain that talent," Jones says. "Chief technology directions are toward implementing ERP suites, integrating existing business applications where they aren't already, and moving toward enterprise-wide consolidation on applications and infrastructure."

One of the indicators identified by this survey is that ROI on current ERP systems is less than 50 percent. This leads to two conclusions: Either companies are not taking full advantage of what they have or the solutions aren't providing it.

Rather than refuting the idea that technology is the answer, the analysis reveals flaws in many existing systems. To begin with, companies are faced with integrating fragmented business applications. Only 26 percent of those surveyed have suitably integrated applications, while 60 percent say they are ready to make it happen this year. Slightly more than 10 percent indicate they will be replacing existing solutions in order to achieve this goal.

The report also points a finger at companies that cling to solutions as long as they provide adequate use. Many have grown and applications have not kept pace. This is particularly true with financial applications. When firms rely on old applications, bottlenecks occur due to increased volume, heavier transaction loads, and higher performance requirements.

Although many situations show signs of IT development falling behind overall company growth, Aberdeen identifies the roll-your-own applications as often being particularly expensive to maintain. It also notes that companies that have traditionally done much of their own application development complain about off-the-shelf not meeting unique needs. Aberdeen claims that much of this criticism is unwarranted.

Much of the blame, according to the report, relates to the length of time ERP applications have been deployed. The survey shows that 21 percent of those responding have applications older than five years and 29 percent have applications that are three to five years old.

Jones recommends companies answer these questions about their existing ERP systems:

• Is the solution adequate?
• Does it work?
• Are there performance and uptime issues?
• Are other business requirements unmet because application features have not kept up with needs?
• Are costs in line with results?
• Are support and maintenance costs in line?
• Will hardware and network costs increase due to upgrade requirements?
• Is excessive data entry required because of disparate applications?

Click here for a complimentary copy the complete report.