LiMo’s Lino announced on 18 phones

THE LiMo Foundation, an open source consortium that has developed a Linux-based platform for mobile devices, has announced 18 mobiles phones from leading manufacturers that use its platform.

Announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Foundation said the announcement was just the first wave of handsets that will use the LiMo Platform.

The initial LiMo handsets confirmed at MWC are from by industry leaders including LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung.

“The breadth of the initial wave of LiMo handsets—18 models from 7 vendors—consolidates LiMo’s role as the unifying force within Mobile Linux and highlights the strong momentum established in the 12 months since LiMo was launched,” Limo Foundation executive director Morgan Gillis said.

The LiMo Platform leverages standards and other open-source projects, and is a modular, hardware-independent architecture built around the Linux operating system. It offers a secure run-time environment for support of downloaded applications.

Launched in January 2007, LiMo Foundation is open to all vendors and service providers in the mobile communications marketplace, including device manufacturers, operators, chipset manufacturers, independent software vendors, integrators and third-party developers.

“We look forward to the continued, rapid rollout of LiMo handsets, further expanding LiMo’s market reach and unifying the Mobile Linux ecosystem,” said LiMo Foundation chairman, Kiyohito Nagata of NTT DoCoMo.

“The mobile industry is embracing Linux and openness as the key enablers of lower device development costs, increased flexibility and quicker time to market for innovative services of all kinds. LiMo Foundation is driving these trends.”

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Sun acquires MySQL US$1b

SUN Microsystems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Swedish open source database pioneer MySQL for US$1 billion (A$1.1 billion).

Sun said the acquisition gives the company a leg-up in the enterprise IT market, including the US$15 billion enterprise database market.

The announcement also reaffirms Sun’s position as one of the largest commercial open source contributors in the web economy.

“Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from internet media titans to the world's largest traditional enterprises,” Sun chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz said in a statement.

“This announcement boosts our investments into the communities at the heart of innovation on the internet and of enterprises that rely on technology as a competitive weapon,” Mr Schwartz said.

MySQL corporate deployments include Facebook, Google, Nokia, Baidu and China Mobile. The acquisition will bring synergies to Sun that will change the landscape of the software industry by driving new adoption of MySQL's open source database in more traditional applications and enterprises.

The integration with Sun will greatly extend the commercial appeal of MySQL's offerings and should also improve its value proposition with the addition of Sun's global services organisation.

“Sun's culture and business model complements MySQL's own by sharing the same ideals that we have had since our foundation – software freedom, online innovation and community and partner participation,” said MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos.

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Broadcom targets open source VoIP

COMMUNICATIONS chip-maker Broadcom and open source developer Trolltech have entered a partnership that aims to create a multimedia VoIP development platform based on Linux.

The companies say they will create a platform for original equipment manufacturers wanting to produce next-generation multimedia VoIP products.

The partnership will combine Broadcom’s VoIP technology with Trolltech’s upcoming Qtopia software, which lets broadband devices offer a “feature-rich” graphical user experience with exceptional voice and video quality.

The companies said the VoIP platform gives OEMs integrated software that will allow for faster time-to-market for next generation IP phones.

Broadcom and Trolltech say the partnership will provide the technology platform that will ultimately support tens of millions of phone users.

“Our Qtopia software is the foundation for 10 million plus consumer electronic devices worldwide so this partnership with Broadcom will enable their customers to build customised next generation IP and mobile devices with robust voice, video, web and multimedia features,” Trolltech chief executive Haavard Nord said.

Qtopia is a software application platform and user interface for embedded Linux devices that has been optimised for Broadcom’s BCM1103 VoIP processors and its VideoCore II multimedia co-processor.

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Mozilla appoints new CEO

OPEN source luminary Mitchell Baker has stepped down as chief executive of Mozilla Corporation, effective immediately, but says she will continue as both chairman and an employee of the company.

Ms Baker is a much-loved personality in the open source community and has helped steer efforts toward the creation of open source browsers to compete with Microsoft Internet Explorer since the early days of Netscape.

Mozilla Corporation is best known for its open source Firefox browser, which had a spectacularly successful 2007 and now boasts more than 125 million users worldwide.

Ms Baker said she was handing the CEO role to John Lilly, Mozilla’s current chief operating officer.

“John Lilly is the right person to guide the maturation of Mozilla,” Ms Baker said. “John has been instrumental in developing an organisation that is both embedded in Mozilla and open-source DNA and that can function at the extremely high degree of effectiveness that our setting requires.”

As CEO, Mr Lilly would focus on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla, while Ms Mitchell would focus on bringing Mozilla goals and mindshare to affect change in related aspects of internet development – such as standards and interoperability, treatment of data, and use of market mechanisms to support public benefit organisations.

“I will remain an active and integral part of MoCo (Mozilla Corp),” Ms Baker wrote on her blog.

“I've been involved in shipping Mozilla products since the dawn of time, and have no intention of distancing myself from our products or MoCo. I'll remain both as the Chairman of the Board and as an employee,” she said.

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Dutch govt adopts open source plan

THE Dutch Government has directed its agencies to start using open source software, setting a deadline of April next year to implement the policy, The Associated Press is reporting.

The Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Government agencies were still allowed to use proprietary applications and formats, but would need to justify it under the new open source policy regime, the agency reported.

The Dutch policy states government organisations at the national level must be ready to use the Open Document Format to save documents by April, while state and local authorities must be ready by 2009.

The policy includes document formats, applications and platforms. Though cost savings are seen as an important, document formats are critical given archiving issues.

The new policy is seen as a move to relieve Dutch authorities from a reliance on Microsoft products and formats.

Though many cities and municipalities through Europe have implemented open source procurement strategies, this is the first national Government to dictate such a police.

AP quotes Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry spokesman Edwin van Scherrenburg saying the plan was approved unanimously at a meeting of two parliamentary commissions on Wednesday.

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Asus EeePC spurs competition

THE spectacular sales success of the tiny, low-cost Eee PC notebook from Asus has prompted the sincerest form of flattery from its competitors – imitation.

Research group Gartner says rival companies are already developing products that compete with Eee PC at the low-cost end of the market.

Asus launched the Eee PC in Australia less than a month ago. Selling through Myer as exclusive retailer, the product has already sold out. It is the same in other markets like the US and UK.

The appeal of the Eee PC is that it is small (less than a kilo) and cheap (less than $500). But Gartner says in its Semiconductor DQ Monday Report this week that the Eee PC has attracted the attention of vendors who want to produce low-cost notebooks with better functionality – and steal Asus’ market.

Gartner said China’s Hasee Computer plans to launch a low-cost notebook soon, with a bigger display than the Eee PC, a more powerful processor and more storage.

The Hasee Q540X notebook will run an Intel Celeron 540 processor, an 80Gb hard drive, weighing 2.2 kilos and priced at about US$400 (A$450) .

The Eee PC has built in wireless connectivity and uses the Linux open source operating system.

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IBM unveils Cloud computing plans

COMPUTING giant IBM has announced plans to develop commercial “cloud computing” services based on its expertise in building massively scalable infrastructure using open standards and open source software.

Called “Blue Cloud”, the initiative was demonstrated at an unveiling in Shanghai last week. It aims to deliver infrastructure that lets corporate users operate more like the internet using “a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.”

The Blue Cloud offering is a like commercially saleable version of the Google, or EBay-like environments – massive infrastructure built on commodity hardware, open source software and designed from the ground up to cope with widely variable fluctuations in demand.

The systems deliver compute power at low-cost per-transaction cost.

IBM said that its Blue Cloud development is supported by more than 200 IBM internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

The company said its first Cloud systems would be offered to customers by mid 2008.

At the event in Shanghai, IBM demonstrated how cloud computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software can dynamically provision and allocate resources as application workloads fluctuate.

The company will also offer a System z “mainframe” cloud environment in 2008, taking advantage of very large number of virtual machines supported by System z. IBM also plans to offer a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters.

“Blue Cloud will help our customers quickly establish a cloud computing environment to test and prototype Web 2.0 applications within their enterprise environment,” said for IBM Systems & Technology Group senior vice-president for development and manufacturing, Rod Adkins.

“Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate.”

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Google offers US$10m Android prize

SEARCH giant Google has offered a US$10 million prize for the developers who build mobile applications for its new Android mobile phone operating system.

The company said the Android Developer Challenge was designed to support the developer community and to spark innovation on the platform. Cash prizes ranging from US$25,000 to $275,000 will be awarded to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

“We've built some interesting applications for Android but the best applications are not here yet and that's because they're going to be written by developers,” said Google co-founder and technology president Sergey Brin.

“We'd like to reward these developers and recognise them as much as possible.”

Google director of mobile platforms Andy Rubin said the company was challenging developers “to stretch their imaginations and skills” to leverage the full capabilities of this new platform and to create something amazing.

Google announced Android a week ago through the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies backing the Android open source platform.

The OHA includes Google, China Mobile, LG Electronics, Intel, eBay, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, and Qualcom.

Last week, the Alliance released an early look at the Android SDK through a developer’s blog.

The US$10 million total in the Android Developer Challenge will be distributed equally between the Android Developer Challenge I and II. Submissions for Challenge I will be accepted from the beginning of January to March 3, 2008, and the 50 most promising entries will be recognised by end of March, with each receiving US$25,000 awards to fund further development.

These 50 entries will be eligible for more funding with a further ten awards worth $275,000 each, and another ten worth $100,000 each.

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Tiny Wikia to take on Google

WIKIPEDIA founder Jimmy Wales has moved to challenge traditional search giants like Google with an open source model that returns the balance power in the industry to the publisher.

Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) conference in the US, Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years.

Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at grub.org

Wales said the project had already received huge support from business.

“The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses,” Mr Wales said.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” he said.

“Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system.

By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.

“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said LookSmart senior vice-president and CTO Michael Grubb.

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Thunderbird 2.0 roars out of Mozilla

THE popular open source development community Mozilla has released its Thunderbird 2.0 free and open email client, adding new features that include email tagging.

The organization says the free email client has better features – a main one being email tagging – improved security and better privacy provisions. From its first day of release, it is available in 30 different languages.

Mozilla chief executive Mitchell Baker, who is a keynote speaker at the CeBIT Keynote Series on May 1 at the Darling Harbour convention and exhibition centre in Sydney, says the new Mozilla Thunderbird is “personalisable” and customisable than the previous version.

“Thunderbird 2 has powerful new features and proven security, delivering an improved email experience to users worldwide,” said Thunderbird’s lead engineer at Mozilla Scott MacGregor.

“In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to email. Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organize online information so users could easily find desired content, MacGregor says in a statement about the release.

The software is available for Windows, Mac and Linux clients.

Mozilla said the messaging tagging feature would make it much easier for users to track and search email. The user can create their own tag (like From Mum, or This Weekend) or use default tags like Important, or To Do.

Another strong new features is the message history navigation that is similar to the web browsing history. Users can move backwards or forwards through their messages and easily browse through their message history.

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Palm to launch Linux smartphone

AFTER broadening its product line to include a Windows-based Treo smart phone last year, mobile specialist Palm says it will also release a device based on the Linux platform.

Speaking to analysts in New York this week, Palm chief executive Ed Colligan said the company had been developing the new Linux platform in the background for several years.

Mr Colligan said the Linux OS would be released later this year, and would run existing Palm applications.

Analysts reacted positively to the announcement saying the company had been hamstrung in recent years because it did not control the PalmOS operating system.

Palm spun off its OS operations as a separate company and recently paid US$44 million for a permanent license to use the software. PalmOS is now called Garnet.

The new Linux platform held the promise of allowing the company to get new product to market faster while lowering costs.

Mr Colligan told the analysts the mobile computing market was about to experience the next wave of growth as it moved into the mass market and that its new platforms – including Linux – positioned Palm to capitalise on that growth.

It is not clear how the announcement affects the immediate takeover rumours that have persisted about Palm. Wall Street has been buzzing in recent weeks with talk that Palm may be acquired, either by a device company or a private equity firm.

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Apache Foundation goes to war with Sun

A DISPUTE over licensing conditions imposed by Sun Microsystems for the Java technology compatibility kit needed for an Apache project has intensified, and spilled into the public.

The Apache Software Foundation has accused Sun of breaking promises to the free and open software community over IP licensing condition it has applied to the JCK needed for the Apache Harmony project.

IN an open letter to Sun published on the ASF website, the foundation’s Java community process vice-president Geir Magnusson said the IP rights restrictions being put forward by Sun were “totally unacceptable”.

Harmony is the Apache open source implementation of Java Standard Edition 5.

“The JCK license Sun is offering imposes IP rights restrictions through limits on the ‘field of use’ available to users of our software,” Mr Magnusson said in the letter.

“These restrictions are contrary to the terms of the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) – the governing rules of the JCP – to which Sun is contractually bound to comply as a signatory,” he said.

The ASF says Sun’s JCK license protects parts of Sun’s commercial Java business at the expense of ASF’s open software by preventing its users from using Apache software in certain fields of use.

“Such implicit or explicit threats of IP-based aggression give one actor overwhelming commercial advantages over the other participants in the ecosystem,” Mr Magnusson said.

Besides holding back Harmony development, Mr Magnusson said the Sun licensing restrictions threatened to harm the reputation of Java as an open technology, and to harm the “cooperative nature” of the relationship between the Apache foundation and Sun.

“The situation we are facing is grossly in conflict with the basic IP philosophy of the JCP, the concept of Java as an open standards-based ecosystem, Sun's public promises to the free and open source communities, and Sun's contractual obligations as a specification lead under the JSPA,” he said.

The open letter calls on Sun to offer an acceptable and JSPA-compliant license within 30 days.

Sun responded to the letter in a blog saying the company was “working with as many communities as possible to create an open source implementation of the Java platform under the GPL (GNU General Public License) v2 that mainstream open source communities can work with - this includes TCKs.”

“As you'll note from Apache's letter, this is a dispute over specific terms, not over Sun providing a TCK,” Sun said.

“Java technology has many stakeholders, and we recognise that we will not be able to please everyone as we move through this process.”

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SugarCRM integrates project management

OPEN source customer relationship management software vendor SugarCRM has launched a project management application integrated into its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise products.

The company is also reported to be readying its Sugar 5.0 beta software for launch in April. The company’s last major release was its Sugar 4.5 version in August last year.

SugarCRM co-founder and chief technology officer Jacob Taylor is a keynote speaker at the Open Cebit event that is part of the Cebit Australia conference and exhibition held in Sydney from May 3 – 7.

“As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical,” SugarCRM chief executive John Roberts said.

“Project Management delivers a best-in-class project management application fully integrated with SugarCRM.”

The company quoted a Nucleus Research paper that found while 32 per cent of on-demand customers were currently using on-demand CRM, only 23 per cent were using on-demand project management.

“Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM,” said Nucleus Research vice-president Rebecca Wetteman said.

“Current SugarCRM customers have an opportunity to gain even greater return on investment by using Sugar Projects; others looking for a CRM solution with tight project management integration should investigate the Sugar offering.”

Sugar’s Project Management delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities.

These new capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases.

Because Project Management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.

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Pre-installed penguin mooted for Dell, HP

GLOBAL PC market leaders Dell and HP are considering offering boxes pre-loaded with Linux and other open source software in the face of growing customer demand for the service.

Both companies have been watched the demand grow for years, but have chosen to turn a blind eye.

The complications of licensing arrangement with their powerful software partner – Microsoft – has made any decision to pre-load Linux more complex than it might appear to the casual observer.

But the demands have become more difficult to ignore, particularly for Dell, which has launched a customer-facing web site called Ideastorm that aimed to elicit ideas from its user base.

In less than three weeks, Ideastorm has attracted 110,000 comments from people talking about pre-installed open source Linux – by far the most talked about idea talked about by customers.

And the next most discussed topic was a suggestion – with 72,000 comments – that Dell pre-install OpenOffice, either alongside Microsoft Office or MS Works, or instead of them.

Dell hasn’t officially commented on the response it has received from the Ideastorm, although a spokesman was quoted on US media sites saying the Linux buzz was “being taken into account” and that users should stay tuned.

Hewlett-Packard is also said to be considering offering pre-installed Linux as a product option – but says it is responding more to demand from corporate customers.

CRN magazine in the US quotes HP worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing Doug Small saying a series of massive deals for Linux desktops were “indicators of critical mass … so we are looking at it very hard.”

The company does not sell PCs or notebooks pre-loaded with Linux, but has several systems that are certified for both SUSE and Red Hat. It will pre-load Linux as part of custom orders, usually for large enterprise roll-outs.

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Linux women link to form AussieChix

THE two Australian chapters of LinuxChix, a social networking group for women involved in the open source software community, have united to form AussieChix to promote IT among women.

And the AussieChix group has won $70,000 in federal funding from the Department of Communications, IT and the Arts to support women in the ICT industry and to make the sector more attractive to women.

Now a global network of groups, LinuxChix was set up in 1999 in the US by women frustrated by the attitudes of many other Linix-oriented groups. Since then, the organisation grew dramatically to more than 40 regional LinuxChix chapters around the world.

Until two weeks ago, LinuxChix had chapters in both Sydney and Melbourne. But following discussions at the Linux.Conf.au conference in Sydney in January the groups combined.

AussieChix spokeswoman Donna Benjamin says being a woman in IT can be lonely at times.

“The image created for our conference T-shirts this year showed one woman in a line of men, and the caption was ‘standing out from the crowd’ because it's a bit like that,” Benjamin said. “We're often the only girl-geek in our local communities.”

Benjamin is a director of the Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA), and conference director for Linux.Conf.au 2008. She also runs a services business, Creative Contingencies.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan announced the AussieChix grant on March 8 – International Women’s Day. Senator Coonan has been a long-time supporter of initiatives that aim to get more women involved in ICT.

“Women account for less than 18 per cent of all ICT employees in the Australian ICT sector. The Australian Government is committed to increasing the productivity of Australia’s ICT sector through the improved retention and progression of female ICT professionals,” Senator Coonan said.

“In an environment where the demand for ICT skills is increasing, retaining ICT professionals is crucial for individual businesses and the wider economy.”


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