People

Microsoft, apparently, is not for everyone. Dick Hardt, the founder and former CEO of Sxip Identity and ActiveState, and a recognized expert on digital identity, is on his way out of Microsoft just 12 short months after going there.

When he left for Microsoft, Hardt argued that he "was recruited to Microsoft because (he is) an independent thinker."

That independence may have collided with Microsoft's company culture. Hardt doesn't go into much detail as to why he left, but describes his year with Microsoft as "the Year of Darkness," presumably referring to his lack … Read more

Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has taken its share of criticism for not being innovative enough for some in the Linux community. In 2010, however, Canonical's focus on design and packaging will come to be seen as a seriously shrewd strategy as it helps to take Linux to the masses.

The reason? The innovation that pays is changing, and UI matters more and more.

When we think of innovation, we normally think of traditional research and development (R&D), complete with a white-coated scientist or pizza-gobbling engineer.

As Apple, Google, and other highly successful software companies … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See John Mark Walker's bio below.

Quick, what were you doing on December 9, 1999? If you actually remember, then there's a good chance that you're an old-school Linux type. If you don't have any idea, then read on, and you'll discover what you missed.

I'll never forget where I was--at ground zero of the apex of dot-com ridiculousness. While I and all of my co-workers were in the office that day, about the only thing we accomplished was writing 15 gazillion Perl-based variations on the theme … Read more

Most businesses would die without centralized marketing and operations. The Linux kernel, however, thrives under this model.

The closest thing to a CEO in Linux land is Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. While Zemlin doesn't steer the Linux ship, he does a great deal to corral its competing interests--vendors, developers, customers--to guide Linux to the impressive market position it holds today.

I caught up with Zemlin late last week to get a pulse on the state of Linux in the market. As ever, Zemlin didn't disappoint.

Q: Nearly a whole decade has gone by since the original tech bubble burst, and Linux has done quite well. How does the current recession compare to the hit that tech took ten years ago and how does it position Linux for the next decade? Zemlin: IDC says the largest increase in Linux adoption took place in 2001/2002 during that bust. Since then, it has become mainstream and is being used everywhere.

Today's recession is quite different than the bubble and bust we experienced nearly a decade ago, since it has reached every corner of every market around the world. IDC already restated their growth forecast upwards for Linux due to the recession and I would expect analyst research to surface an even greater growth spurt for Linux over the last couple years as they get better at accounting for unpaid Linux and open source use.

Linux provides better value than Windows, and in tough times this difference makes all the difference.

But the recession isn't what's positioning Linux for growth in the coming decade. With or without the current economic climate, Linux is the only operating system (OS) that can help OEMs achieve any margin at all from devices that will soon be free.

The PC industry is moving towards a services business, much like the one we see in telecom. The OS must be free or nearly free or OEMs can't compete. This is why Microsoft is investing so much in search and other initiatives; it knows the business model for its former cash cow, Windows, is slowly dying.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the market. For example VMWare's Springsource acquisition and now the E.U. is saying they are concerned about Oracle's acquisition of Sun because of MySQL. Is this good for open source?… Read more

Open source is now mainstream and routinely used in mission-critical applications. For 99.999 percent of the people reading that statement, it's so obvious as to induce global yawning. But for Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE's Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, it's apparently heresy.

Gyorgy is quoted by eWeek as follows:

I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things, but if it's running vital mission critical applications--networks running on open source for example--then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation....

We are not here to be … Read more

Open-source communities are founded on trust. It's therefore disappointing but not surprising, to see the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, rip into former Eclipse Foundation director of community Bjorn Freeman-Benson and tell him to take his "steady acid drip of negativity" and "go away."

Milinkovich, a steelie, hockey-playing executive, didn't mince words in a blog post:

Your former colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation have tolerated your public abuse quietly because we are professionals, and we honestly thought that you would tire of it. Apparently we were wrong. But the time has come … Read more

Last week at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Calif., developers partnered with Google, Yahoo, NASA, and the World Bank to exchange ideas and work on solutions for responding to natural disasters and other emergencies.

Random Hacks of Kindness is the first in a series of planned events that seek to use technology to solve real world problems related to crisis and disaster relief. By first working with governments and non-governmental organizations to better understand the immediate needs of rescuers and communities following a critical emergency, these programmers are work directly to solve communication issues and to better facilitate the … Read more

Former IBM employee Bruce Buckelew has made it his mission to eliminate the digital divide in Oakland, Calif. By refurbishing donated computers and giving low-income families access to technology, the Oakland Technology Exchange (OTX) is providing access to the educational, health care, and employment resources available on the Internet that so many people take for granted.

In addition to providing computers, OTX provides training and technical support to the community, teaching basic computer skills to parents and children, giving them access to the technological knowledge and skills and a path toward self-sufficiency.

As cloud computing edges its way into the enterprise, the open-source Apache Hadoop project may well prove to be the poster child of the movement. Hadoop effectively gives enterprises the power of Google or Yahoo Web indexing for free, or for the cost of a CloudEra subscription if you want to involve Hadoop's core developers in your rollout. Credit card giant Visa is an early corporate adopter of Hadoop, and points to a bright future for the open-source project.

I caught up with Visa's Joe Cunningham, head of the technology strategy and innovation group, to talk about the … Read more