The Open Road

Tim O'Reilly: 'Whole Web' is the OS of the future

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SAN FRANCISCO--Open-source developers and businesses are focused on the wrong opportunity, according to industry luminary Tim O'Reilly. The future isn't programming for Linux or MySQL. The future is programming for the "whole Web."

And it threatens to be controlled by open-source savvy, data-rich companies like Google.

On Wednesday in San Francisco, O'Reilly closed the first day of the Open Source Business Conference by shaking up some comfortable assumptions of the open-source commercial ecosystem, which has tended to focus on commoditizing established markets with low-cost, high-value distribution, all driven by open-source licensing.

This is nice, according … Read more

Red Hat CEO: Open-source economics key to innovation

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At the inaugural Open Source Business Conference in 2004, the discussion centered on how to fund open source's survival. Just six years later, the OSBC conversation has taken a 180-degree shift to focus on whether proprietary software's shelf life is nearing its end as open-source software economics increasingly drive technology innovation.

What happened?

In a nutshell, the cost benefits of high-quality, free software came to outweigh the industry's former concerns about risks associated with "rebel code."

This trend, not visible in 2004, started with early adopters like Google. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst highlighted … Read more

If the desktop is dying, mobile sync is king

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Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.

That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open Web.

Traditionally, sync has been that thing you do between your desktop and your one mobile device to ensure that calendars, address books, and even browser bookmarks are current between the two islands of computing. But in … Read more

Filling the digital landfills of our lives

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Clay Shirky believes we're biased both to share and to like sharing digital information. Given the rate at which we create, share, and then discard digital goods, he may be right. The problem is that we're now wading through digital debris, and there may be hard costs associated with our wastefulness.

No, I'm not talking about Nick Carr's "Google makes us stupid" argument, though I think he raises a host of valid points.

Rather, I'm talking about the hard and soft costs associated with massive "landfills" of digital information which never … Read more

'Cloud' vs. 'source' in the battle of bland corporate names

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The technology industry has many virtues. creativity in naming is not always one of them.

Some of the industry's biggest brands are also the blandest. "Microsoft" is just "microcomputer" and "software" squished together. Intel? "INTegrated ELectronics."

And even when we do come up with somewhat creative names, like Google, they're a mistake.

So perhaps it's not surprising that two of the biggest trends in computing--open-source software and cloud computing--have been accompanied by some of the most staid company naming conventions ever.

For open source, it became de rigueur to … Read more

Why Google Android is winning

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The global smartphone market is still RIM's to lose, with Apple in the pole position to profit from its mistakes. But new ComScore data on the U.S. smartphone market suggest that both should be worried by what they see in their rear-view mirrors:

While Android still claims only 7.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." This certainly seems to be the case with Google, which added 4.3 percentage points of market share in just four months. And while Android's user base may … Read more

What Apple's and Microsoft's patent threats mean for start-ups

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Perhaps retirement doesn't suit former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Just weeks into his post-Sun life, Schwartz offers some delicious anecdotes in a blog post, summarizing Apple's and Microsoft's threats to sue Sun for patent infringement as more about bluster than substance.

But that's not the lesson I learn from Schwartz's commentary.

Instead, what is immediately obvious to me is that a) the technology industry is a morass of conflicting patent claims, b) since there's really no way to completely avoid others' patents the best defense is to have a hefty counterbalancing patent portfolio … Read more

Is ad blocking the problem?

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Ars Technica's Ken Fisher recently wrote an impassioned plea to turn off ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus to save the online publishing industry. His attempt to turn back the clock on digitization, however, would likely accomplish the opposite.

Fisher has a good point: ad-blocking software almost certainly does hurt sites like CNET by denying them revenue. As he points out, "[m]ost [large] sites...are paid on a per view basis," not a click-through basis, which means that ad-blocking software very literally takes money out of the pockets of publishers, leading consumers to "devastat[e]...the … Read more

If Novell gets bought, will Red Hat follow?

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Elliott's proposed acquisition of Novell promises to shake up the software industry, which has grown a bit staid in the past year or two. But what will it mean for Red Hat, and for the broader open-source software industry?

In particular, Novell's acquisition might well spur a mergers and acquisitions revival, as Barron's notes. But will it create overwhelming pressure for Red Hat to sell, too?

Red Hat has been the subject of buyout rumors for well over a decade, but has never been particularly close to indulging the temptation, according to sources close to the company. … Read more