Back when Bill Gates ran Microsoft like an old-style Indian Maharajah, we would say that its bluster against open source was “bad Bill” and its moves of accomodation were “good Bill.”

There’s a new man on the throne, but the game remains the same. So today was a “good Steve” day. (That’s new CEO ”good Steve” Ballmer on the right, as Gates’ two-year transition into retirementwas announced, almost two years ago now.)

In addition to its interoperability promises regarding Microsoft HealthVault, made in response to market demands, Microsoft has made a bunch of similar promises regarding its main product line, which our own Mary Jo Foley has treated with all the skepticism of a veteran Microsoft watcher.

Basically, Microsoft is opening up Windows’ APIs and protocols and promising to be more open in the future, especially when it comes to letting people move data in-and-out of its formats.  

As Bloomberg notes, this was in response to pressure from European regulators, whose antitrust work has been far more rigorous than that of the U.S. throughout this decade.

It might also be in response to the ongoing struggle Microsoft has undertaken to get the formats for Office approved as an ISO standard, which always create comment here when mentioned.

Which begs the question. Is this an honest change of policy, or is this just a bow to political pressure, pressure which lobbying and campaign contributions might some day remove?

I can’t answer that definitively. The problem is, neither can anyone else. Microsoft has been playing good cop-bad cop for so long, its every move regarding open source leads to mistrust.

If Australia’s government can win forgiveness by apologizing to its aboriginal people then CEO Ballmer can hold a press conference, lay out Microsoft’s technical and legal policy in straight English, take questions, and stand by his statements.

That wouldn’t completely settle the matter, but clear statements which don’t require a Kremlinologist’s interpretation to parse are a mandatory first step in any company’s open source process.

Earlier this week I got a little jokey about Sun’s open source efforts.

Turns out they have a serious problem. They have moved to licenses at  the bottom of the open source incline, but their corporate attitude puts them at the top of the open source development incline.

That’s an unstable position that can easily lead to a hard fall.

At issue is the status of the OpenSolaris community. Sun wants to control the development of OpenSolaris through its control of the trademark. This upset Roy Fielding, a key member of the governing board, so much he quit in a huff.

Fielding’s letter, which is still on the OpenSolaris Web site, says Sun broke its promises on making OpenSolaris an open development project, and claimed it has made a habit of breaking promises.

Sun responded in the form of a prepared statement from Terri Molini, a Sun PR person who emphasized Fielding’s role as a consultant while giving her own title as “OpenSolaris advocacy contributor.”

That’s worse than a non-denial denial. It’s a confirmation of Fielding’s basic charge, that despite claims to the contrary OpenSolaris is still Sun’s property, and will be treated as such by Sun.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but why should I work free so you can profit? Especially when there are plenty of alternative projects to work on which don’t have that problem?

Given Sun’s need for community contributions, which motivated the decision to make OpenSolaris open source in the first place, the company has some explaining to do.

And words won’t do the job. Action is needed, or Sun’s goals for OpenSolaris, in terms of community contributions, just won’t be met.

To see just how big a buzzword open source has become, look to the troubled bond insurers MBIA and AMBAC.

These two companies started off insuring municipal bonds against default, then got in trouble with the complex mortgage instruments known as the Big Shitpile.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wants to take the companies apart, saving the municipal bond business and letting the rest go bankrupt.

He’s not alone in this. Warren Buffett offered to do this a few weeks ago, and the state’s insurance regulator has suggested a split-up makes sense.

So why are you reading about this here? Because Ackman put his analysis of the companies online and called it an open source model.

Is it? Certainly it’s an exercise in transparency. Ackman found out a lot about what’s insured by the companies, and made estimates of the losses he expects. (He figures about $12 billion on MBIA alone.) You can download his figures yourself and make your own estimate.

But this assumes he’s got the right figures. MBIA calls it “half truths, innuendo and faulty analysis” aimed at giving him a “profit from his short positions.” But they’re not releasing financial code in response.

Which, again, is why Ackman called this an “open source model.” It’s aimed as much at giving him the political high ground as anything else. Here are my numbers, run them yourself, where are yours?

But, again, is this open source? I sure don’t see it in the OSI definitions. Can we expect a nastygram from Michael Tiemann on the group’s blog? Or would that be stepping in it?

WikiLeaks has not been shut down. It’s more available than ever.

I had not intended on commenting about this story. I have seen it and seen it, ever since the Web was spun. Local government tries to suppress something, data gets routed offshore.

Chinese people can still (if they are careful) learn about Falun Gong, and Tienanmien, and Taiwan. French people can still learn about Nazis. Germans can get the “good news” about Scientology. And Americans can get the bad.

Censorship just makes the news bigger, and making it harder to get makes it more attractive. Successful censorship isolates entire countries, economy and all.

The real news here is that an increasing number of journalists understand this, although there remain many who are clueless.

David Gallagher of The New York Times is among the clued-in. Same with Techtree, which prints the site’s IP address. Reason’s headline is Read the Website a Judge “Shut Down.”

Digital Trends notes that the site is just shut down in the U.S. Mediapost writes the site has got the last laugh, and then notes the documents in question are available via BitTorrent. Techdirt wonders what the fuss is about.  

It would take a worldwide agency, using a treaty which has not been negotiated, to begin to shut down any Web site. Even then, torrents and caches would still spread the word far and wide, while the controversy would assure an audience for that word.

Julius Baer, the bank which tried to keep its secrets, and Judge Jeffrey S. White, the Bush appointee who tried to help it do so, are going to learn the hard way what the rest of us have known for over a decade.

While the year-old Wikileaks has just made its bones.

In some ways Dot Bomb 2.0 has already begun.

Google is down 27% since the start of the year. Once solid niches like consumer health are starting to falter.

As Time-Warner set off Dot Bomb 1.0 by acquiring AOL, putting a cap on potential Internet values, Microsoft may have set off the second through its bid for Yahoo, which seems to have shown that a premium on current prices isn’t there.

For the last few years the words “open source” have been what “e-commerce” was in the last decade, a secret sauce or code phrase which led greedy investors to the trough.

But real profits have been tough to come by, just as they were in e-commerce back in the day. Look at a chart for, say, Red Hat, and you wonder if the big bucks will ever arrive.

With the full cost of the Big Shitpile still unclear, fear is rapidly replacing greed on Wall Street. Even companies like Applied Materials are having trouble getting traction, despite talk that they’re a solar energy play.

(Full disclosure demands I mention my brother-in-law has worked at Applied for many years, and I have some AMAT in my retirement account. He’s due to retire this month.)

When markets roll over it’s those companies with weak profits which are shot first. First individual stocks, then whole sectors. 

I’m not saying it’s time to call mom and tell her you’re moving back in your room. But every market goes through a boom, then a bust, before finding its footing, and the second stage may have just arrived for open source.

Snark alert.

Amanda McPherson, marketing director at the Linux Foundation, has taken apart Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’ arguments for Open Solaris on her blog.

At his company’s Global Summit, Schwartz defended Sun’s open source strategy and said he will be targeting “Web 2.0″ companies in his marketing efforts.

His pitch was that mySQL, Solaris, and the VirtualBox virtualization system make for a pretty compelling package.

McPherson calls that the bunk. “Hey Jonathan: The L in LAMP is Literal,” is her headline.

On the merits she may be right. As I say here, your mileage may vary. I see Schwartz pitching Sun as a unique supplier of parts which glue the worlds of Windows and Linux, closed and open source, together. The essential intermediary.

For enterprises which must live in a mixed-source world, this may appear attractive. Scaled enterprises aren’t just going to download a LAMP stack and roll with it, Schwartz argues. They’re going to need help, especially when it comes time to build enterprise applications mixing Linux and Windows data formats.

But there’s this other, snarkier bit, which I hint at through that picture of Chris Crocker at the top of the page.

It’s better to pick on someone when they’re up than when they’re down. Facing a dragon is always more heroic than kicking a dog.

Sun has been down so long it looks like up. The company has completely reconfigured itself, as an open source advocate, in order to stay relevant.

So give Jonathan his props. He’s trying to do the right thing, while also delivering for his employees and shareholders.

If that means letting him get in some digs at Linux, maybe we should turn the other cheek. I know Linus Torvalds has issues with Sun, but the company has changed. It’s trying hard to become Anne Hathaway. Maybe it’s just gotten to Lindsay Lohan.

For now, leave Jonathan Schwartz alone.

Two news stories this week indicate a real change to the patent law may be in the works, eliminating key legal roadblocks to open source and Internet innovation.

First, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy tapped out a column in The Washington Times, alongside his Republican counterpart, Orrin Hatch.

Their column shows that consensus seems to have emerged on some important patent issues, namely an end to forum shopping and the question of a review procedure to make sure bogus patents don’t clog the courts.

The column does not take a position regarding more contentious issues, especially those dividing the medical and software industries, but concludes with a determination to see a compromise enacted this year.

When the senior Senators on a project deliver a column like this, it often means a deal is imminent. So S. 1145 , the Patent Reform Act, may be heading into law.

The other bit of news comes from the courts, and is reported upon expertly by Dennis Crouch at the Patent Law blog.

This may be even more important than what is happening in Congress.

It’s the case of In re Bilski, due to be heard soon by a full panel of the Federal Circuit.

Crouch writes that the court is asking some basic questions, including whether the State Street decision, which allowed business methods patents, should be overturned. That case is also used to justify software patents.

Just as important, the court is asking whether the decision in AT&T Corp. vs. Excel Communications should be re-examined as well. This case is also used to justify current treatment of software patents.

Crouch writes that Bilski’s position on controlling a way to use commodity trading against weather risks “looks problematic because of serious obviousness problems and lack of specificity in the claims.”

Patent lawyers have written a brief defending software and business method patents, while the US. Patent & Trademark Office believes the Bilski patent should be invalidated, he writes.

All this could be knocked into a cocked hat, however, by a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, Labcorp vs. Metabolite, which involves just what can be patented. (Correction: The Supremes later decided not to take this case.)

Bottom line, we may be moving toward sanity regarding what can be patented and how broad such patent claims may be.

If patents on business methods and software are invalidated as a class, the SCO case disappears and U.S. patent law starts to look a lot more like European law, in which copyright is software’s primary protection.

Fingers crossed.

The newly minted Mozilla e-mail subsidiary has moved out of stealth mode and is targeting the release of the next generation of Thunderbird for late 2008.

The open source Thunderbird 3, now under development, will feature integrated calendaring, better search, easier configuration, significant user interface improvements and better extensibility, said Mozilla Messaging Inc, the newly named subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.

The plan is to incorporate into Thunderbird 3 the existing open source “Lightning” calendar, which is currently offered an add-on extension to the 10-month-old Thunderbird 2. Sun Microsystems is a major contributor to the Lightning project.

Of course, there’s really nothing new or surprising here. Tehy’re shotting for release by the end of the year but acknowledge it could slip into 2009 depending on developer input. The biggest news today is the official re-launch of the Mozilla Foundation’s open source e-mail project, which to date has failed to garner as much momentum as its star sibling, the open source Firefox browser.

In September, the foundation announced that it would spin off the e-mail project as part of its Internet Mail and Communications Initiative and create a new subsidiary and management team to lead the re-launch.

As noted today, Mozilla Messaging Inc named to its board of directors David Ascher, a former development lead at (open source IDE firm) ActiveState and Mozilla Messaging’s new CEO, Chris Beard, a Mozilla veteran product manager and VP and General Manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB (and user of Thunderbird since 2004).

Mozilla Messaging now has the funding, management and developer support it needs to catapult Thunderbird to the top. And while the days of being overshadowed by Firefox may be over, Thunderbird has a tough race ahead trying to steal the spotlight away from top seeded e-mail rivals.

Microsoft’s Outlook and Google Mail are – and will continue to be — dominant players in the web e-mail client area. And there are several other open source e-mail efforts – including Qualcomm’s forthcoming Eudora open source e-mail add-on for Thunderbird, a joint project between Qualcomm and Mozilla!

Nevertheless, Mozilla Messaging execs are exuding confidence about Thunderbird’s prospects going forward – based on the upcoming Thunderbird 3 and core architectural features of Firefox that can be parlayed for the e-mail masses. Mozilla Messaging, for example, plans to use the Firefox extensibility engine to build a big add-on development comunity around T-Bird.

In his blog today, Ascher notes that Thunderbird has a robust web stack that can integrate powerfully with web sites and web services, making it ideal as a collaboration platform for integrating IM, IRC, VoIP, blogging, social networking and other web 2.0 communications experiences.

“In parallel, we’re going to be starting a multi-year process of improving the back-end architecture of Thunderbird,” Ascher wrote. “Over the years, Thunderbird hasn’t had the resources devoted to it that Firefox has, and it’s time to catch up, so that we can implement many of the features we have planned, and so that we can take advantage of the improvements to the Mozilla platform that were built for Firefox, but which we can leverage as well.”

I screwed up yesterday. (Picture from Boycott Novell.)

After re-reading my piece, your comments, and the terms of both GPL licenses carefully, it’s clear to me I underestimated how easy it is for enterprises to violate its terms.

But it’s not impossible. Far from it. I do think the folks at GPL Violations are going to need some help in their work.

We joke about the “viral” nature of GPL code but all software is becoming a bit like DNA, more so all the time. Code fragments and functions intermingle.

Remember all that excitement a few years ago when Black Duck and Palamida first started claiming you needed an “audit” to check your enterprise for open source code? Well, it goes the other way, too, and round and round as well.

Everyone wants to test open source projects for the introduction of proprietary code. Try it the other way and you get the same result.

In a world where smaller-and-smaller code fragments are patented, licensed or copyrighted, it’s getting harder-and-harder to write anything which doesn’t infringe on someone’s rights, somewhere.

In enterprises of all sizes it is going to get harder still. Use enough GPL code in your shop and some of it is going to leak out in what you share with partners, customers or suppliers.

That was my point. I wrote it poorly.

The best solution I can think of would be a big PR campaign, a mass market effort to explain the issues and show companies how they can avoid trouble. Carrots instead of sticks. Turn Tux into Bugs Bunny.

Unfortunately, partly due to the nature of the business model, open source enterprises lack the money to create their own version of the BSA or the SIIA. I doubt if the Linux Foundation could pay Microsoft’s coffee bill.

So what can we do? Go viral, as in video.

Let me propose a contest.Come up with a video that explains the issues, and entertains at the same time. Or a Java applet. Or an Open Office presentation. A cartoon. Whatever floats your boat.

We seek a sponsor and a suitable prize. Lunch with Linus, or you can be Bruce Perens’ Eben Moglen’s law clerk for a day. DVD Jon could come code at your school. Maybe Harald Welte can take you to a Bundesliga match, or you can get a lock of Jonathan Schwartz’ hair. (Or Bruce Perens’ hair. Or Richard Stallman’s beard. Or my fedora hat from the 1990s.)

I’m spitballing here. We’ll get something nice.  

More important, you win “the people’s ovation and fame forever,” in that we’ll point everyone to your video, or applet, or presentation, as the definitive word.

Who’s up for it?

Cleversafe’s “storage Internet,” a dispersed storage system where data is sliced to bits and placed on many servers around the globe, is rolling along toward a second quarter launch.

Chairman and CTO CEO Chris Gladwin told ZDNet last week “general availability” is scheduled for March 31, but also emphasized the slow, steady build necessary to make the system happen. (Gladwin is shown playing poker at Crain’s Chicago Business.)

“It’s not like graphic software, where you announce and ship. Building a dispersed storage network is like building an Internet. A sequence of partners must provide service. We’ve been testing for years.”

Partly because its development is like watching paint dry, releases like the one Cleversafe put out February 19, announcing delivery of its first commercial products, aren’t getting a lot of play.

Instead, Gladwin and his team are ”focusing on getting initial customers to have a positive experience.” A few large clients, storing 1-5 Petabytes of data each, should drive word of mouth and a slow build of profitable sales.

Gladwin likened the 19th’s announcement to ”the equivalent of Cisco and Juniper’s product.” As with those companies Cleversafe is delivering dispersed data routers which provide management and features for the larger data service offering.

“We’ve been developing an open source protocol for dispersed storage for years. Other companies will integrate it and sell it through re-sellers,” he said of the company’s business model.

“You can buy these products and build your own dispersed storage network. You can hire someone to build a private dispersed storage network. A lot of people had these early with the Internet. There are hosting companies who are our partners and will do  that. The third option is you can buy dispersed storage as a service.

“It’s all the same to us, because we’re the equipment provider. In each case we sell a family of appliances. One is a slice store Slicestor which stores slices, and an accessor which is a gateway that lets you reach the dispersed network. We’re supporting iSCSI today and a block interface. It looks to you like a hard drive. The third product is a manager box you can run the network on.”

Where is the open source story?  “The core protocol is open source. The ability to build a basic dispersed network is part of the open source release. There are additional features, like management, that are only in the commercial product.”

And what does the commercial product look like?

“If you opened a slice store Slicestor you would see Barracuda 700 Gig drives and a low end server CPU. Part of why we’re selling as appliances is it’s a tuned configuration and it makes support and delivery easier. It’s the box our developers have used, it’s the box everyone is trained on.”

So in order to deliver a service, Cleversafe hardware has to be in extensive use in the field, so you have something to point the Cleversafe software to. 

While the company sells hardware, it does not give itself an exclusive. While the basic client software is open source, the company’s real business is its commercial management software, which Gladwin added continues to advance.

“When we previously spoke with you we had a fixed grid width. Now it’s fully configurable,” he said. 

“We’ve added the iSCSI interface, so the network appears as a drive, and every application can use it out of the box. We’ve also made it 500 times faster. So now it runs at the speed of a hard drive.”

The storage Internet is coming, in other words. In business, as in poker, Gladwin doesn’t bluff. It’s just not made for TV.

UPDATE: A new post on the same topic is above.

To date the work of GPLViolations has been fairly non-controversial.

By going after vendors who violate the GPL by incorporating enhanced code into non-GPL products, Harold Welte & Co. have won a ton of goodwill within the open source community.

But there’s another type of GPL Violation, one hinted at in the group’s workshops and implied with the growth of tools like Hewlett Packard’s Fossology.

This is the user violation.

You download GPL code, you tweak it for your own operation, you maintain the tweak solely for your own use, but you don’t share the tweak, either for a market advantage, out of ignorance, or from pure laziness.

How do we enforce the GPL against users without causing a backlash?

The old Software Publishers Association and the Business Software Alliance made this mistake back in the late 20th century.

They moved from going after commercial software pirates in the 1980s to auditing corporate software in the 1990s and dragging companies into court for having violated End User License Agreements (EULAs).

The move into user enforcement caused a backlash which continues to this day.

I believe much of the controversy over open source software audits stems from the fear that GPL Violations might emulate the old BSA tactics.

There is a real problem here. Combining GPL software with other open source products, or merely tweaking GPL software for your own use, obligates you to contribute those code enhancements back to the community.

But finding such small tweaks, then enforcing the GPL against the tweakers, risks a backlash unless it is done carefully.

Another important point. Many companies, perhaps most, now support open source internally. As Dave Rosenberg noted last week, this can lead to all sorts of stupid marketing tricks.

So the question for this President’s Day is, how can the GPL Violations folks avoid becoming the BSA of the 21st century? How do we expand the enforcement of the GPL without angering a whole lot of powerful people?

Microsoft can shuffle the deck chairs all it wants.

It can buy Yahoo or YooHoo. It can trot out Steve Ballmer in Spandex and a cape.

Microsoft’s problem in competing with Google is far more basic.

It’s organizational.

A little more than a decade ago Microsoft was Google. Microsoft was able to draw the best-and-brightest from every computer school on the planet to Redmond.

It wasn’t just to partake of stock options. It was because these people thought they would do important work, that they would count for something.

Instead Microsoft bound them with bureaucracy. The anti-trust struggle was partly to blame. Mainly, Microsoft saw any new product as a big risk, and so they developed a process where it was easiest to say no.

It was a proprietary mindset.

I once participated in such a process, years ago. I wrote some research reports. I traveled to Redmond, and I was thanked for helping them say no. Almost made a big mistake there, I was told. You saved us a ton of money.

That’s not the way Google works. Google offers this vast server farm and ginormous data infrastructure to its new hires and says “do something.”

Some of its moves are great. Some of its moves stink. Those who draw big traffic move up, those who don’t stay down.

The point is that Google is designed, organizationally, to say yes. Throw it online, put a “beta” tag on it, and see what develops. That’s the real essence of open source. That’s a key Internet value.

Thus every Googler is empowered, as though they were open source programmers working in their parents’ basements instead of highly-paid corporate soldiers with masseuses at the ready.

It’s not about the money. It’s not about the fame. It’s not about the name on the door. It’s not about becoming an executive.

It’s about the work. It’s about doing something over the course of just a few months and then seeing it online. It’s about trying, and sometimes failing, then trying again.

If Microsoft wants to really beat Google it needs to get its mid-level managers to yes instead of no. It needs to be ruthless in hiring those who will try new things, and get rid of those whose dreams it has ruined.

So far I’ve seen no evidence this is going to happen. I think Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is proof of that. Once the deal goes down, all those smart Yahoo-ers will be free to leave. The dumb ones will be left, waiting for orders from Redmond.

If Microsoft really wants to beat Google, it must become Google. Or Googlicious. It must find some Googlosity. It must unleash its people to try things, to fail, and let the market sort it out.

Don’t just empower someone. Empower a lot of someones. Empower everyone.

The iPhone and the Google Android platform, which was finally shown-off (sort of) in Barcelona this week, aren’t mobile telephones.

They are Internet clients.

Internet clients use exponentially more data bandwidth than ordinary digital phones, which use thin streams of compressed data. Maybe several exponentials.

Operators are thinking of expanding their networks into homes and offices to handle the extra load.

The Android clients shown in Barcelona aren’t much. What they mainly prove is that the specification can be built and deployed quickly.

While the Apple iPhone roll-out has gone at a predictable pace, with one vendor delivering specified numbers to a handful of networks, the Android roll-out will be far more helter-skelter.

That’s because the Android is designed to work anywhere, first on any GSM network and then, with a little tinkering, anywhere else.

This makes it hard for operators to predict where and how demand will come from.

While Internet routing and fiber trunks have always been scaled well ahead of demand, mobile networks will have to route a ton more data on-and-off the fiber for the new clients. Equipment will have to be bought without an assurance of a quick return.

Yet thanks to the iPhone network operators have no choice. In the U.S. Verizon and Sprint are seeing their best customers jump en masse to AT&T, because of the iPhone. They have to compete.

While the Google Android specification may (or may not) allow effective competition on the handset end, Verizon must guess that it will, anticipate that demand, and start investing now.

It’s a gamble, in some ways bigger than the spectrum auction was.

First of all it’s not $100 million.

It’s up to $100 million. Anyone who has ever signed a cellular data contract or owned a cable modem knows what “up to” means. 

It means not likely. It means “in your dreams, pal.”

What is the money paying for? My guess, legal bills. David Boies is a well-connected lawyer. He doesn’t like working for free. And he especially doesn’t like clients who play bankruptcy games which look aimed at getting out of paying.  No lawyer does.

So David Boies & Co. will be paid for their work on the SCO case.

But none of this will resurrect the legal case against IBM. SCO has never been able to point out infringing code. The judge has narrowed the scope of the case so as to render any judgement in SCO’s favor meaningless.

Now is there stuff in the SCO portfolio that might be worth some money? Maybe. It wasn’t all about the IBM suit. So if Nichols and his Arab moneymen find anything profitable in the bottom of the sack they can have it.

But you can’t raise a bad suit from the dead with the wave of a wallet. No matter how big.

Now what if I’m wrong? What if an Arab-backed consortium were able to declare Linux to be its property, enabling it to tax every innovation of the last decade and ship the money to Riyadh?

Does anyone doubt patent reform would follow immediately? Or that an American flag wouldn’t be wrapped around Linus Torvalds like he just won an Olympic dash?

Just imagine the rhetoric, and the political momentum, behind patent reform if an Arab-led consortium were able to tax open source innovation!

So don’t worry. Be happy.

Rather than join in the high dudgeon over SCO getting a lifeline of up to $100 million to go private let’s talk a little about the man who put the deal together.

His name is Stephen L. Norris. (Picture from The Epoch Times.)

Norris’ biography takes great pride in his being a co-founder and chief strategist for the Carlyle Group. (It was, he says, the ride of a lifetime.)

Let’s let his Web page explain:

He also served on the boards of directors of major Carlyle portfolio companies. He was actively involved in recruiting all of Carlyle’s current senior partners and played a major role in recruiting President George W. Bush to serve as a director of one of its portfolio companies and in enlisting former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci to be senior partners of Carlyle.

Please don’t think this is a Republican hack. Nuh-uh-uh. His COO comes from George Soros and who’s that over on the left of the org chart — why it’s our old friend (and former Democratic Presidential candidate) Gen. Wesley Clark!

Now you’re going to hear he’s been linked with Saudi Arabian interests. Well, he did do that. But, look, he’s maxed-out for Hillary Clinton, he gives dance tickets to poor people, and he’s helped capitalize Hollywood Pictures!

Oh, and this isn’t his only tech investment. Far from it.

Jim Zemlin of The Linux Foundation insists he’s not afraid:

“There is always margins to be had from the ruins of a wrecked company. Clearly, Norris Capital see some value in SCO’s future business model, but that value will only be realize outside and apart from any litigation. The SCO litigation has been like a bad horror flick and about as believable. This case has been going through the courts too long, and the facts remain the same. We hope that SCO’s new investment is focused on the future and not rooted in the shock value of an old scary movie.”

Whistle a happy tune, Jim!

Now, can Norris really raise the dead? Because that’s what it’s going to take to bring this lawsuit back to life.

Red Hat announced a fully integrated SOA platform combining JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and launched three new open source projects.

Due by the end of February, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a subscription-based offering that incorporates the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB), JBoss BPM (jBPM) and JBoss Rules. The SOA Platform runs on Windows, Linux, Unix

JBoss ESB was previously an open source project and is now a supported platform.

The cetified SOA platform that integrates business applications and web services and provides enterprise application integration, ESB, and business automation needs,
Pierre Fricke, director of product line management at JBoss, said during a webcast today at JBoss World.

“It’s an integrated platform that brings together all constituencies and partners and applications together,” Fricke said, noting that Red Hat saw an opportunity to provide an integrated stack to save customers time and money. “We see a lot of custom ESBs deployed out there and they did it beause the first generation ESBs didn’t do the job.”

Red Hat also announced three new JBoss open source projects related to transaction monitors, SOA management and systems managemet,

Black Tie is designed to help customers migrate away from key legacy systems such as Tuxedo, Red Hat execs said. The legacy-to-java transaction processing integration system supports BEA’s Tuxedo APIs. It will start within 30 days.

The second open source project, JBoss SOA Governance, will give customers comprehensive management and control of their SOA environments. The project is really a series of sub-open source projects dealing with the registry, repository and policy management, and other as-yet-to-be-defined modules, executives said. One of the first projects, JBoss DNA.org, will focus on metadata integration.

The final open source project, dubbed RHQ, is a common systems management platform developed by Red Hat’s JBoss division and Hyperic, an open source management ISV.

A forthcoming Red Hat product based on RHQ, JBoss Operations Network 2.0, will be available in the spring of 2008, executives said.

Most trends in the open source market come down to one word.

Scaling. (The picture is from a Cisco report on scaling VOIP, but the problem is general.)

To stay worthwhile a project must grow. It must attract new developers, new community members, and new money. It must scale in complexity and functionality.

I feel your pain here. The same trends underlying open source also underly blogging, which as a writing activity is just about the same age.

In the beginning blogs were individual projects, just as the great open source projects started with one developer. You might think of Dave Winer, then, as the Linus Torvalds of blogging.

Linus dealt with this problem through a succession of jobs, culminating in his present work for the Linux Foundation. This gives him the resources to keep the kernel growing, although he has written often of the technical challenge in doing just that.

Bloggers haven’t had it so easy. If you look at the Technorati Top 100 most popular blogs, you won’t find Winer’s name there anymore.

Instead you’ll find communities like DailyKos (no. 11), publishing companies like TMZ (no. 12), group efforts like the Huffington Post (no. 4), and important corporate efforts like the official Google blog (no. 17).

This is all due to the problems of scaling. To keep getting great content you need more people. To feed the servers or buy new ones you need a business model.

Blogs aren’t really blogs anymore. They are publishing exercises.

The same problems exist in open source. Projects need people, they need organization, they need users and beta testers. In other words, they need money.

Each of us has the right to fork any project, but as a practical matter that is seldom done. Successful forks require wrenching a large group of people from the sponsor’s direction. It requires that you find new funding sources.

It’s no longer, I’ll take my code and go home. A successful fork is a new business. Programmers who want to spend their time programming, like journalists who just want to report, have to work for someone else who brings in money from their efforts and organizes the work.

This is true no matter what you do. Cooks who start restaurants become businessmen or women. It’s no longer about doing what you do, but finding a way to help other people do what you did.

In this scaled environment, corporate projects have an advantage. Corporations are built to make money, to organize large work — to scale in other words. Individuals aren’t.

Even if you can create a non-profit foundation around your project, as at Mozilla, someone must still find the money. Even a .org has a .com.

So when some journalist says, if you don’t like it fork it, you have a right to be skeptical. A good fork must be organized.

All you want to do is have some fun, as a programmer. All I want to do is have fun, as a writer. ZDNet has given me that freedom. Perhaps your employer has given you that freedom. Quitting gets harder as salaries grow and bills pile up.

But it can be done. Thanks to the Internet you can organize a fork from many places all at once. This is an important check on corporate power over software, as is every customer’s ability to do their own support, or outsource it to a third party.

The modern world of blogging and open source isn’t perfect, but compare it to the old world of newspapers and proprietary software.

Thanks to the problems of scaling we don’t have all the power we’d like. But thanks to the power of the Internet we have a lot more than we did.

And every once in a while we need to exercise it.

You can take the company out of the proprietary software market, but you can’t take the proprietary attitude out of the company.

I think that’s the best way to explain Sun’s purchase of Innotek, the German developer of the open source VirtualBox.

Microsoft now has a virtualizer, following Citrix’ purchase of XenSource. VMWare is just too expensive following its successful IPO — it’s worth twice what Sun itself is worth.

I know a lot is being written, both inside and outside Sun, about the technical merits of the VirtualBox approach. But if the approach has merit, then it will benefit Sun, because VirtualBox is open source, and will remain so.

Yet, as we’ve noted here many times, that’s not how Sun rolls. It may be at the bottom of the open source license incline, but it’s at the top of the development incline. Unless it controls a project it doesn’t want to play.

My question is, what does that control mean, in practical terms? Is it really necessary for a large company to control an open source project’s creator in order for it to gain maximum benefit from that project?

Sun says yes. I think Wall Street generally says yes. I think the success of Eclipse and Linux argue the answer is no.

Moreover, the license terms continue to say no. If you don’t like what Sun does with VirtualBox going forward, you can fork it.

If enough of you choose to follow the fork you’ll essentially take it over, as WordPress took over b2/cafelog. That is if the support for the fork is greater than that for the original creation, the fork wins.

Doubtless Sun believes it can give VirtualBox far more support with its Innotek purchase than anyone else could for a fork. Right now this is true.

But at some point open source leadership is going to be challenged, somewhere. At some point a big company is going to take an open source project in what others see as a proprietary direction and the users are going to revolt.

I think that’s going to be the next step in open source’s evolution. Feel free to disagree.

Now that Democrats have a majority in Congress, they are losing their appetite for direct confrontation with the phone monopolies over network neutrality.

HR 5353, introduced by Rep. Edward Markey, carries no enforcement provision on network neutrality, and even carries the co-sponsorship of a neutrality opponent, Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi.

Pickering has said he plans to leave Congress after this term and is expected to become a lobbyist. Defanging the network neutrality bandwagon will doubtless please his potential corporate employers.

The bill is a fig leaf, offering vague “principles” which would be “guide stars” for future policy.

Violation of the principles carries no penalty. The FCC would merely study the question and then suggest whether rules are necessary later.

In fact this is a shot across the bow, reminding the monopolists that Democrats are favored to win the White House, appointing new FCC commissioners who could act if the monopolists abuse their current position.

If Markey thinks his surrender is going to cause the monopolists to wilt, however, he is mistaken. Bell advocate Scott Cleland has already warned on his Precursor blog that this is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and will be fiercely opposed.

If the Bells are smart they might stick to rhetoric and let the kumbaya continue. Harshing the mellow of the rising party is no way to get what you want.

On the other hand beating the most modest reform while Democrats hold a majority may be the best way to prove to Internet advocates that resistance to the monopoly is futile.

Firefox 3 beta 3 was released as expected on Tuesday with more than 1300 improvements since beta 2.

Most of the changes are improvements and enhancements to the user interface, ease-of-use, performance and security aspects of the browser, the Mozilla foundation announced on Tuesday night.

As promised, beta 3 sports a more Vista-like look-and feel with new icons and themes, and a more native look-and-feel for Mac OSX and Linux as well. For example, Firefox menus now display using Vista’s native theme. Running on Vista, users can access a combined back-forward button and star icon that allows users to add a bookmark with a single click.

Beta 3 also features a new Download Manager that makes it easier to locate files that are downloaded and the source of the download. Additionally, podcasts and videocasts are supported by the media playback tools, according to the Mozilla release.

As part of the Smart Location feature, beta 3 also now features an improved search algorithm that “calculates the recency and frequency” of site visits in order to yield the most relevant search results. Users can now also associate keywords with bookmarks to sort them by topic.

On the security side, beta 3 provides one click site info to determine who owns the site and whether or not the connection is shielded from eavesdropping. The browser also alerts users when they arrive on sites that are known to install malware. Additionally, beta 3 also supports Vista’s parental controls feature. Beta 3 also offers significant performance improvements and 50 improvements to memory use since beta 2 was released late last year.

Firefox 3 is expected to be released in early 2008 but developers have not specified an exact release date.