Sun Microsystems To Provide Support For OpenOffice

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.

The support, which starts at $US20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com, Mark Herring. "For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support," he said.

OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun's accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.

Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.

Sun's move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week, with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.

Out of that number, Sun estimates that "tens of millions" of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the [openoffice.org] qebsite.

"Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that," he said. "But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum."

Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average, and that download activity in Europe and the US has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.

Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.

Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, "we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis," he said.

Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren't archived with an open standard, according to Herring.

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Mozilla Unveils Plans For A New Web Browser For Mobile Phones

Nancy Gohring

After a couple of experiences dipping a toe into the mobile market, Mozilla said it plans to get serious about developing a mobile browser.

Mozilla has recently hired two new developers to help work on the project and plans to release Mobile Firefox some time in the next year or two.

The iPhone, Apple's popular new mobile phone, in part contributed to the renewed interest in mobile browsing at Mozilla. "The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear," Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla wrote in his blog this week. "If you weren't sure about this before, you should be after the launch of the iPhone."

As Mozilla continues to develop Mozilla2, the second version of the platform on which Firefox is built, it will add mobile devices as a category. That means developers of Mozilla2, which is expected to be complete in early 2009, will keep mobile phones in mind as they build the new platform, Schroepfer wrote.

He didn't get more specific on a release date for the mobile browser other than to say "not before 2008." Schroepfer also said Mozilla hadn't yet decided which mobile phones the browser would work on.

Depending on compatibility, Mozilla could face competition from companies such as Microsoft and Apple that include their own browsers in phones running their operating systems, as well as from third parties such as Opera Software ASA that have been fine-tuning their mobile browsers for years now.

The announcement comes after the release earlier this year of a new version of Minimo, a Mozilla-based mobile browser for Windows Mobile devices. A few months prior to the release, the lead developer of Minimo said he wouldn't be spending much time on the project in the future. This week, Schroepfer said that there are no plans to further develop Minimo.

Mozilla also offers Joey, a project in development that lets users clip and save text, photos, videos and other content while using a PC and then access that content through a browser on a mobile phone.

Mozilla is also involved with a group of companies including Arm and MontaVista Software that is developing an open-source Linux-based platform for devices that are bigger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop. Mozilla is developing a browser for the platform and has already built one for a similar device, the N800, from Nokia.

The new Mozilla hires who will contribute to the mobile Firefox initiative are Christian Sejersen, who recently worked for Openwave Systems, and Brad Lassey, who worked for France Telecom R&D, which has been very active in mobile Linux initiatives.

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Google And IBM Set To Promote Software Development In Universities

Google and IBM have teamed up to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six US universities signing up so far.

The program is designed to help students and researchers get experience working on Internet-scale applications, the companies said. The relatively new form of parallel computing, sometimes called cloud computing, hasn't yet caught on in university settings, said Colleen Haikes, an IBM spokeswoman.

"Right now, although the technique is being used in industry, it's not being taught in universities," she said.

IBM and Google are providing hardware, software and services to add to university resources, the two companies said.

The University of Washington signed up with the program late last year. This year, five more schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Maryland, have joined the program. The two companies expect to expand the program to other universities in the future.

The program focuses on parallel computing techniques that take computational tasks and break them into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across many servers at the same time. The techniques allow Web applications such as search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly, the companies said in a press release.

IBM and Google have dedicated a cluster of several hundred computers, including PCs donated by Google and IBM BladeCenter and other servers, and the companies expect the cluster to grow to more than 1,600 processors.

The companies call these clusters "cloud" computing. A cloud is a collection of machines that can serve as a host for a variety of applications, including interactive Web 2.0 applications. Clouds support a broader set of applications than do traditional computing grids, because they allow various kinds of middleware to be hosted on virtual machines distributed across the cloud, Haikes said.

IBM and Google have created several resources for the program, including the following:

* A cluster of processors running an open-source version of Google's published computing infrastructure, including MapReduce and GFS from Apache's Hadoop project, a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.

* A Creative Commons-licensed curriculum on parallel computing developed by Google and the University of Washington.

* Open-source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open-source development platform.

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Open Source Software To Reduce Australia's $21 Billion ICT Deficit

Rodney Gedda

Australia's $21 billion ICT trade deficit could be dramatically reduced if the local industry played to its strengths and exported services using open source software, according to industry analyst Jeff Waugh.

Speaking at an open source industry roadshow in conjunction with National ICT Australia (NICTA), the flamboyant Waugh, a director of consulting firm Waugh Partners, said open source is "great" for Australia because it provides a "huge opportunity" to export services.

With ICT equipment making up the bulk of the deficit, followed by software and services, Waugh said simply taking the cost out of software imports will not have as great an effect on the imbalance of trade but leveraging Australia's large open source skills base could.

"Using open source would not yield the most savings so unfortunately that will stick around for a while," Waugh said. "But we have a huge amount of open source skills and five years ago we were the number one contributor to open source per capita."

Waugh said Europe's mass adoption of open source has changed that ratio, but Australia's pool of open source talent can be exported to the world via implementation and support services.

Waugh Partners is conducting a census on the proliferation of open source to gauge the level of adoption among local enterprises and to help businesses become more aware of its relevance.

"We think open source is good for the IT industry and innovation," Waugh said. "It has ignited competition with companies using open source to enter the industry and create new business models. It has raised the value point over just the software product itself - you have to have great integration, service and support to succeed. And it lowers the barrier to entry as you can create products built on open source to provide grander solutions."

Also speaking at the event, NICTA chief operating officer Phil Robertson said there is a growing awareness within the research community of the importance of open source.

"In quite a lot of our research work it is a critical part," Robertson said. "Open Kernel Labs built a business model around open source so we are looking at business models that can be built around open source to capture the benefits into the national economy."

NICTA is now looking to understand the uses of open source to see what is likely to happen in the future.

The census, dubbed Stand Up And Be Counted is online at http://waughpartners.com.au/research/census2007. The report will be freely available in February 2008.

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Open-Source Softwares Violate Patents Says Microsoft

Aaron Ricadela

Microsoft Corp. has for the first time said it believes 235 of its patents are being violated by the free- and open-source software, or FOSS, movement. The Redmond, Wash., software company said the system infringed on 42 patents; its graphical user interface violated 65. The Open Office suite infringed on 45, email programs another 15 and other assorted free and open-source software amounted to 68 patent violations. Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, and Horacio Gutierrez, head of intellectual property and licensing, revealed the figures in an interview with Fortune magazine. Microsoft is trying to steer users toward versions of open-source software provided by Novell Inc., a networking company with patents that it struck a deal with last year. Fortune reported that Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable.

Now that the computer industry has its first accounting of how many patents Microsoft says are violated by open-source software, the question for many tech vendors is how aggressively the software giant will begin enforcement. And judging from the reaction in the blogosphere, the new disclosures inspire fear.

Microsoft has already begun collecting payments and gaining access to the patent portfolios of companies that use the open-source Linux operating system in their products. The list includes Novell (NOVL), Fuji Xerox, and Samsung Electronics.
License to Code

Microsoft sees those agreements as templates for future cross-licensing deals, and it's rattling a legal saber to gain an edge. When it comes to compensating Microsoft for its intellectual property, discussion is less painful than litigation, according to Horatio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice-president of intellectual property and licensing. "The alternatives to licensing are alternatives that aren't very attractive for anyone," he says.

Microsoft contends that the Linux operating system and other open-source software programs violate 235 of its patents. The company plans to use that intellectual property to collect royalties from companies that make, distribute, and use Linux. Microsoft's plans were disclosed in a May 14 article in Fortune.

Linux and other open-source software are covered by the General Public License (GPL), which lets users modify programs' source code so long as they redistribute their changes to other users. Microsoft says the Linux kernel, which controls the software's most basic functions, as well as other elements of Linux and open-source productivity and e-mail software infringe on its patents, Fortune reported.
Let's Make a Deal

Now, the question is how will Microsoft collect. The GPL prohibits companies that sell or use Linux from paying royalties for technology embedded in its code. But a licensing deal Microsoft struck on Nov. 2, 2006, with Novell, distributor of the Suse version of Linux, appeared to circumvent that restriction by enacting a pledge by the companies not to sue each other's customers for potential patent infringements (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/3/06, "Linux Linkup for Microsoft, Novell").

As part of the deal, Novell agreed to pay Microsoft a portion of its Linux revenue worth at least $40 million. But Joe LaSala, senior vice-president and general counsel at Novell, says none of his company's software violated Microsoft's patents, and that the agreement was about technical compatibility between the companies' products. "We're quite explicit about that," he says. "We've heard their arguments."

Nevertheless, Microsoft has pursued deals that incorporate similar legal principles. Among these are licensing deals Microsoft struck on Mar. 22 with Fuji Xerox, a joint venture between Fujifilm Holdings (FUJI) and Xerox (XRX); and on Apr. 18 with Samsung. Gutierrez says the arrangements resemble aspects of the Novell agreement. Those companies received licenses from Microsoft for technologies used in Linux and other open-source software contained in products they sell. "Nobody thought it was possible to build a bridge between the worlds of commercial and open-source software," Gutierrez says. Microsoft is also considering other means of compensation for its Linux-related Internet protocol, he adds.

But a new version of the GPL due in July could prohibit Linux distributors from entering such deals. The current draft of the license's third version would add restrictions against patent-protection deals like the one Microsoft entered with Novell. That could close avenues for those companies that include Linux in their products to make patent peace with Microsoft. The issues could come to the fore again when Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and former chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation, which controls the GPL, gives a speech at an open-source software conference May 22 in San Francisco.
Bloggers Demand Details

On the blog front, the new revelations from Redmond sparked calls for the company to disclose just which of its patents it thinks Linux violates.

Ex-Microsoft employee Robert Scoble wrote in his Scobleizer blog that "Microsoft has more than 800 lawyers and it looks like they are going to make sure that they remain relevant through legal action." Its actions could affect Google (GOOG) and other companies that make heavy use of Linux, Scoble notes.

Larry Augustin, an angel investor and former CEO of onetime stock market superstar VA Linux, wrote in his Weblog that Microsoft is bullying other companies by making vague threats. "If Microsoft believes that free and open-source software violates any of their patents, let them put those patents forward now, in the light of day," he wrote.

Mary Jo Foley said in her ZDNet blog that Microsoft has "ended any illusion that it planned to try to build bridges with the open-source community." The company's decision to go public with the number of patents it thinks Linux violates "shows Microsoft must think the GPL v3 has teeth," she wrote.

And Matt Asay, vice-president of business development at Alfresco, a Britain-based open-source software company, wrote in InfoWorld's Open Sources blog that Microsoft "wants to kill open source through whisper campaigns." He added, "It's hard to get excited about paying Microsoft's poll tax when Microsoft refuses to substantiate its claims."

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