The continuing shortage of Internet bandwidth which drives the network neutrality debate has always puzzled me. (An OpenBTS development kit, from the project’s Sourceforge site.)

Reason being there is no real shortage. The bottleneck has always been in the “last mile,” the on-ramp of your cell phone or your PC, or the router connection your home network uses to reach the outside world.

This is an artificial shortage, the product of a proprietary mindset.

Phone and cable companies own these on-ramps, and the right to create new ones. They use this control to create the idea of a shortage everywhere, to keep prices high, and to threaten content owners with new charges for “premium access” to “their” customers.

In theory they are easy to bypass through the air. But because frequencies are “sold,” meaning rights to use them are offered at auction by the government, the same phone and cable companies wind up controlling the air as well.

We can, if we want, have a virtually unlimited number of on-ramps, wherever we need them, at minimal cost. Proof, again, is being delivered to the Burning Man festival in Nevada this week.

OpenBTS provides the answer. It’s a simple, open source framework that can create a GSM cellular network at one-tenth current costs. It’s licensed under the AGPL.

This year’s set-up uses a third less equipment and half the power of last year’s, but with twice the capacity. With a single LMR-900 tower and a weatherproof travel rack, Range Networks will be able to give all 50,000 participants free cellular calls during the festival, then take the whole thing down when the show is over.

OpenBTS is not the only solution to this problem. OpenBSC also offers a “GSM network in a box,” which can also deliver service on-demand.

With licensed frequencies, an entire urban network must be built-out at once and constantly maintained by one company, which is why cellular bandwidth costs so much. With open source, anyone can add capacity as needed.

If systems like OpenBTS didn’t have to say “mother may I” with licensed carriers in order to serve demand, then demand could be served, defined by hardware instead of property, and the bandwidth shortage would quickly disappear.

We know that’s true because WiFi, whose frequency allocation hasn’t increased in over a decade, can now deliver efficient 100 Mbps networks to hospitals and corporate campuses, which move critical imaging files without interference.

Carriers like AT&T encourage customers to use WiFi whenever possible, claiming they just don’t have the capacity to deliver, even though they own more frequency than WiFi occupies in most areas.

The problem is that we have a regulatory regime which assumes scarcity, which creates bottlenecks, and which rewards monopolists with money coerced through a political process rather than earned through the market.

What’s hilarious is how defenders of this system call it “free enterprise,” and call open source “socialism.”  Open source creates vast markets with lots of players. The current system is government-enforced monopoly.

An open source, and open frequency, mindset in Washington can change that. Something to think about this Labor Day weekend.

Asia Dent (right) must be the most famous face in Poughkeepsie today.

She was photographed by IBM PR recently putting a probe to a new 5.2 GHz chip that is at the heart of the company’s new zEnterprise mainframe, shipping next week.

Florian Mueller calls this the most dangerous product announcement of the century. That’s because zEnterprise could let IBM create a cloud monopoly among large enterprises, assimilating Linux under its mainframe patents.

All this goes back to the Turbo Hercules case, he writes.

You may recall that Turbo Hercules is an IBM mainframe emulator that works on PC-type hardware. When it was a labor of love IBM had no problem with it. When its maker tried to productize it, in the way other open source projects are productized, IBM’s lawyers were on him in a flash.

Hercules founder Roger Bowler then filed a complaint with the EC’s antitrust authorities, saying IBM was illegally tying its mainframe software to hardware.

The new chip makes those chains less burdensome to customers. They’ve got the fastest chip in the world on their side. And if you’re processing bank or credit card transactions (or health claims) that’s a very big deal.

This kind of transaction processing continues to grow rapidly. IBM has driven everyone out of the old mainframe business. Nearly everyone in the space — all the biggest global trade enterprises — have their key functions riding on IBM mainframes.

They’re thrilled with the new IBM mainframes.

Which means that if any scaled enterprise is going into the cloud, it’s taking its mainframe with it. IBM has kindly allowed this new mainframe to assimilate what Linux and Unix can do, without offering any way back.

It’s precisely what critics were accusing Microsoft Sharepoint of doing, but under complete patent protection and control.

In this way, IBM hopes to embrace and extend the cloud into its mainframe monopoly, and keep filing patents on the technology so as to make it an eternal lock on the top end of the business, Mueller writes.

Who is going to rewrite their core processing systems in order to gain the price benefits of true cloud technology?

Which may be why IBM doesn’t want to step up to the plate and be an open source hero.

It is common currency in open source to say that patents are an American problem.

That’s not true. Software patents, or patents on what is expressed in software, are a global problem.

(Picture from our Apple Core blog, co-starring Jason O’Grady and David Morganstern. Always filled with Apple-flavored bloggy goodness.)

This is especially true in the case of Apple, which has sued HTC (and by extension Google) for violating its claimed rights to multitouch technology.

As Florian Mueller explained recently, Apple filed international patent applications for how it operates its touchscreen display in early 2007, and how you unlock the device with gestures on the locked image, in late 2006. It applied for patents on its touch screen interface late last year.

From this it’s clear Apple thinks it has a worldwide monopoly on how the iPhone works, one that could last until late in the next decade. The questions courts must ask are:

1. Does this cover any portable touch screen system, as Apple contends, or just this particular system?
2. Should the patents be considered valid, since Google asserts it was working on its own Android system before the iPhone patents were filed.

There is another important question. Does it respect and reward innovation to give Apple control of all portable touch screen devices, for as long as touch screens may be an interface of choice? Would society have benefited if Microsoft had to wait until the 21st century to deliver Windows, or something like it?

Patent suits are most commonly filed in the U.S., Mueller writes, because this is still the largest technology market, because lawyers are comfortable with the legal system here and because victory usually leads to quick negotiations on global rights.

This leads me to two further questions:

1. If China creates a reasonable patent law framework, will its market eventually draw patent litigation there?
2. If U.S. legislators do return to patent reform, how will that impact technology markets worldwide?

Discuss.

Before Israel was founded in 1948 it made sense to conclude a Passover seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem.” With Israel a reality the arguments over the phrase have changed. Yet they endure.

Desktop Linux is the same sort of deal. Linux believers always assume that next year will be the year of desktop Linux. Windows followers often chide those who seek Linux with that belief, both here and elsewhere.

Before anyone starts thinking this Catholic boy has changed his stripes, my point is simply that, in the case of desktop Linux, Jerusalem is here.

This is the year.

This is also the year where the definition of a desktop has changed. Apple changed it with the iPhone and, now, the iPad. Microsoft has failed to deliver in both these key areas. Linux has not.

Google gets the credit for that. As I noted yesterday Google Android has soaked up the excess demand for Internet hand-held devices that the iPhone left on the floor. My guess is that, once Chromium comes out, you’ll have the same experience there.

Linux has broken through because Google has the size to go toe-to-toe with either Microsoft or Apple, and push product through distribution. (Remember, there is a price lower than free.)

It’s the compatibility between Chromium and Android, based on Linux, which I think gives the old mouse-and-keyboard upright posture desktop Linux yet-another chance.

Linux Mint and Ubuntu are building the kind of simple-then-power relationship that will exist between Android and Chromium, and which existed in the past between Windows and Windows NT.

Mint offers simplicity and a full application suite. It abstracts all the complexity of the command line, much as Android and Chromium do. Even our own Jason Perlow likes it (and he is hard to please).

What’s still missing is the financial wherewithal to push this through the distribution channel. But with the success of Google as a patron for hand-held Linux, are Microsoft followers certain one can’t be found for the old-fashioned desktop?

My larger point is it doesn’t matter. Either Mint and Ubuntu will gain desktop traction or Google will simply bypass them.

A friend had trouble with their iPhone yesterday and enlisted me in a trip to the Apple Store.

(The Apple store in Lenox Square Mall, Atlanta, from Apple.com.)

Three hours later I realized that Apple is back in the same box Steve Jobs put it in over 25 years ago.

To continue the morning’s baseball theme, It was deja vu all over again.

My friend’s WiFi was on the fritz. The battery was losing power faster than a politician under indictment. No problem, he said. I have an appointment.

The store was tightly packed with people, even though it was Monday afternoon. We were called at 3:18 for an appointment scheduled for 3. After examining the unit our hyper-friendly Apple geek suggested a reboot. No good. Sadly he suggested reloading the operating system. Some 15 minutes later, still no good.

OK, he said, we can fix it, but it will take time because it’s a hardware problem. Wait, my friend said, that’s my home phone. Can’t I just buy another?

Sure, the geek replied. Just get in this line here. How long is this line here, my friend asked. About an hour-and-a-half to two hours, came the reply from the line monitor.

Some 45 minutes later, while my friend frantically used his AT&T data minutes to try and order a new phone online while standing in the Apple phone ordering line, his girlfriend arrived like cavalry to the rescue. She wasn’t under Apple’s spell. She pulled us out and said my friend could buy something later.

Suddenly, in the mall parking lot, a miracle occurred. There, right across the street, was an AT&T store. A company-owned store, its happy little death star sparkling in the sunlight.

Eureka, my friend said. They sell iPhones. So we went over.

It was night-and-day. By which I mean the AT&T store was nearly empty. The help was not overwhelmed. They were waiting for us. We were taken to a man named Scott, who engaged my friend in earnest conversation while I perused the inventory.

Look, I said, this Samsung CaptivaCaptivate costs just what the iPhone would. It’s an Android phone designed to look just like the iPhone, and it seems to have all the same features as the iPhone. Hint, hint. (Thanks to ITGuy08 for catching the misspelling.)

Well, Scott replied, we don’t have any iPhones in stock, but I can get you into a Captiva right now. A half-hour or so later my friend was a happy Android user, asking me if I wanted an iBrick.

There are some important lessons here:

1. Apple claims to be unworried because it is selling iPhones as fast as it can make them. Even faster.
2. Apple is not scaled to meet demand for its product, and certainly not for its retail services.
3. Alternatives with the same look-and-feel are available now.

Back in the 1980s, PC users had to live through 6 years of FUD, waiting for Microsoft or IBM to get their act together and deliver a graphical user interface similar to the Apple Mac, introduced in 1984. Apple had 5 years to own the market, yet its insistence on complete control meant it couldn’t meet demand. Microsoft won.

It’s happening again, Steve. Only it didn’t take Microsoft 6 years to match you. Open source did it in two. And that’s why Android phones now out-sell the iPhone. They’re not better, they’re just available, and you don’t have to go into the 7th circle of Apple Hell to get one.

Over at his other job, our David Gewirtz suggests that, with the absorption of Sun into Oracle, open source badly needs an open source patron and that IBM should apply.

I previously suggested Dell for this role, saying it would be in their business interest to commit to this course. The problem with IBM is somewhat different. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

IBM has learned over the last two decades that it can succeed while avoiding the trips and dramas, the strum and drang, which pass the news cycles in the computer press. Sometimes no news is indeed good news, especially in computing, because it’s not about you but the customer.

But David has a point. All of open source benefited from having important projects in safe hands. With those projects no longer in safe hands a pall has settled, threatening to become a malaise.

IBM is in a unique position to fight that. It has invested heavily in Java and Linux. It passed its Symphony suite over to OpenOffice.org years ago, and now sells support while offering it for download there.

IBM has also benefited from open source through Eclipse and other projects. No other company has earned as much money from open source as IBM. No one else does a better job of giving the lie to the idea that open source is a money loser than IBM.

IBM has become the Stan Musial of open source. (That’s The Man himself, on Wikipedia, during 2008’s Stan Musial Day in St. Louis.)

It’s an open source Hall of Famer, with an excellent reputation, but few people outside its home base know the story, just as Musial is little known outside his hometown and certain retirement homes. (His SI cover this summer was, believe it or not, his first as a solo, although he was the magazine’s Sportsman of the Year for 1957.)

Now, if I can extricate myself from my own childhood we’ll go on.

Despite the nonsense of our Supreme Court (they also think tomatoes are vegetables) companies are not people. They can be immortal, renewing themselves with every generation, adapting constantly, changing with the times.

IBM has proven this. The Watsons are dead. Lou Gerstner is long gone. Elvis has left the building. Yet IBM goes on, its market cap still bigger than Google’s or Oracle’s. If open source needs a hero to step up, IBM is best positioned for the job.

One might even argue that IBM owes this to open source. Having benefited from open source for over a decade, unifying its product lines under Linux, sharing development costs with rivals, and making a ton of money, IBM really should give back.

This is something open source teaches all of us. You benefit more from open source when you give than when you just take. In fact the more you give the more you benefit.

I’m not asking IBM to do something against its interests here. Quite the contrary. It is very much in IBM’s own interest that it step up and lead the open source movement. That’s something IBM representatives have been telling their customers and business partners for some time, that you give in order to get.

OpenBravo recently released an upgraded open source ERP solution aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

QuickStart 2 features more than 12 business process flows including Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, and Bank Statement to Bank Reconciliation.

The Barcelona-based developer also offers subscription-based pricing as well as cloud deployment for SMBs that want automation and optimization of accounting, sales order processing, inventory, and procurement processes without deploying on-premise.

Version 2 also provides Advanced Payable and Receivables anagement module and a revised payment system that makes data and cash flow mopre transparent to users.

The Great Google is wearing sackcloth and ashes this week, whipping up public resentment against legal rival Oracle by staying away from JavaOne, and quietly encouraging sales of James Gosling’s nifty anti-Oracle t-shirts. (Picture from Cafepress.)

But in publicly portraying itself as the Luke Skywalker of open source (and Larry Ellison as Darth Vader) Google is taking a risk. That’s right, someone might find out Oracle is its father. That would be a real disturbance in the force.

The problem, as Bruce Perens makes clear at his blog, is that this lawsuit isn’t really about open source. Google deliberately violated the patent freedom grant given by Sun, using a user interface toolkit not found in Java ME or Java SE.

Java on the web doesn’t seem to have the problems that Google built into Android, its users can stay within the patent grant without trouble.

Oops. Instead, Android implements the Dalvik Virtual Machine, recompiling  the Harmony class libraries on Apache’s version of Java SE. It then targets the new version at the same markets Oracle has identified.

Or, as Charles Nutter notes in his excellent summation of the issues, “Dalvik is not a JVM…it just plays one on TV.” Google made Java better, which is technically a good thing. But it did so in a legally questionable way.

One point even the fiercest open source advocates will insist on is that your rights to change code are not unlimited. They are defined by a license. If Google tweaked a proprietary version of Java it may lack the commercial rights to what it has done.

In other words, as painful as it may be admit this, Oracle may indeed have a case even Richard Stallman is bound to respect.

Google, who’s your daddy?

Dell is making nice-nice with open source as it seeks a way to compete with a headless HP.

It seems a wise choice. (How did Rabbi Moshe Feinstein get from Wikipedia to here? All will be explained.)

The media focus is currently on 3Par, for which HP has bid $30/share. Dell, which had an offer accepted at $27/share, says it is considering its next move. ($31, anyone, asks our Larry Dignan.)

Analysts say the bidding has reached Crazytown, that it’s now all about corporate ego. (Can a headless company have an ego? Apparently so.) My advice would be to let HP overpay. There is more than one way to skin a server farm.

The issue with 3Par is that both Dell and HP long ago hit upon similar strategies, high-end hardware tied to services. They have been on a collision course ever since Dell overpaid for Perot Systems to match HP’s EDS buy.

But Dell has a second strategy, maybe a better one. Dell is chasing HP out the back end of the “s” curve, looking to offer bargain prices with narrow margins, which pricing theory says is the way to go in a mature market.

Thus Dell is looking for the lowest-cost manufacturing environment it can find, whether in western China or even in India. The idea is if it’s about raw cost Dell is determined to win. (Cheap money is another element in the strategy.) It’s a long way from its old strategy of build-to-order, but it’s a different world.

The Dell Streak fits well into this world. It’s an Android tablet, run under the GPL, which apparently Dell has run afoul of. Rather than argue the point, Dell promises to comply with the license.

Critics are dumping on the Android strategy, but a better play might be to double-down.

Small and medium sized businesses would love to save with open source, but many remain suspicious about support. What they need is not a big bill, but an arm around the shoulder, what we New Yorkers call a rabbi.

A rabbi in this case doesn’t have to be a Jewish teacher. He doesn’t have to be Jewish. He doesn’t even have to be a he. A rabbi in this case means a friend, a trusted adviser, someone who will guide you and sponsor you.

That’s what a lot of medium-sized businesses need if they are to make a true commitment to open source, a rabbi, a friend, an adviser. Someone who knows and will tell them the truth.

By expanding its commitment to open source communities and software, by becoming knowledgeable and offering that knowledge, by sponsoring its customers to the open source world, answering questions, Dell could win a lot of customers at very low cost.

Rabbi Michael?

The MPEG Licensing Association will no longer charge royalties for use of its H.264 codec, when it’s put online for free.

Since the group already had a moratorium on such fees until 2015 the practical impact of this is minimal.

But the business impact could be large, if it decreases interest in WebM.

H.264 is now free as in beer, as opposed to WebM’s open format aimed at HTML5. (Free Beer from Denmark has a royalty-free recipe, and was enjoyed at the 2008 FSCONS launch party. Image from Digital-Rights.net.)

It’s not free for everyone. Those who charge for their video, whether it’s a service like Hulu, a Blu-Ray disc company, or Apple’s iTunes, which wants to charge 99 cents to see shows from free TV, will still pay. (If you’re charging for free beer it’s no longer free to you, is the idea.)

Feh, replied Mozilla, and Google too said feh. Free as in beer is not the issue anyway. Free as in freedom is the issue.

And there, MPEG LA is still spreading the FUD, claiming members of its association hold patents that would cover Google’s VP8, the heart of WebM, and any other video codec programmers might seek to create.

The issue of free as in freedom, in other words, remains, subject to litigation. Whether MPEG LA holds patents on some specific mousetrap designs, or the whole idea of catching a mouse, has yet to be determined.

It is within this cone of uncertainty that videographers now walk. The H.264 codec has been around for a long time, and while WebM offers freedom, that’s merely a declaration that has yet to be tested on a courtroom battlefield.

There is one other issue that bears notice here, namely HTML5. MPEG LA’s royalty scheme has long made it inappropriate for use as a Web standard, which by its nature wants to be royalty free. But now H.264 is royalty free, and defended by a moat of lawyers.

The current HTML5 standards document includes support code for H.264, MPEG 4 and Theora. It does not specify a format, although the group wants to specify one. WebM was created as a project that could be specified, being complete and free as in freedom.

Will free as in beer trump it?

Red Hat announced a strategy for its cloud stack, now called Cloud Foundations Edition One.

It’s about portability and interoperability. In other words it’s about standards. In line with that, Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform as a potential standard for interoperability.

At the heart of the cloud movement was always this idea that you would abstract the complexity of operating systems through virtualization, thus it wouldn’t matter on what specific piece of hardware your data and programs actually lived.

Of course that’s not how computer rivalries work. There are multiple hypervisors, multiple routes to virtualization, multiple ways to manage clouds, and multiple cloud stacks.

When seen in comparison to the ideal of a fully interoperable environment open source has a distinct advantage. When you can see the code, you can link to it more easily than if you can’t. (Try it at home. Wire up your computer with your eyes open, then do it with your eyes shut.)

The cloud strategy puts Red Hat on a collision course with Microsoft, whose Azure cloud says you should trust its portability, and trust its interoperability. Just to turn things up another notch, Red Hat said it would support its business software a full 10 years, as opposed to Microsoft’s five.

Logically Red Hat’s cloud strategy should work. Red Hat is seeking to be the center of the cloud world, while larger vendors swirl around it, and when all the rushing around is done the center is where you want to be.

But the real world is not the ideal plane. Red Hat marketing is indeed Switzerland, if you want to compare the Swiss army to that of, say, Russia. Yes it’s neutral, but if it comes to a fight I’m betting on the bear. Can Red Hat succeed without being, say, bought by IBM?

That’s the risk. It will take more than winning the Dreamworks account to assure a happy ending.

When I wrote disparagingly of Illumos yesterday, I got some well-deserved pushback.

So it may be useful to discuss what Illumos is, and is not.

Illumos is a fork of Open Solaris, but it’s a fork of a special type.

A normal fork takes today’s code and goes off in a new direction with it. Gradually the forked program and the root diverge.

Illumos isn’t going to be like that. It will expand on and support what Oracle offers under the CDDL as “OpenSolaris,” but if Oracle did a complete rewrite over the next few years, rendering what Illumos does in the meantime irrelevant, then Illumos will adapt to the new version.

It’s more of a redneck fork, a fork whose family tree doesn’t branch.

Nexenta is doing all this to push NexentaStor, which depends on some OpenSolaris capabilities. It’s working with two other OpenSolaris distros, BeleniX and Schilli. It’s a semi-independent operation, a software archipelago.

Illumos is sort of a cut-out for disgruntled Solaris customers who don’t want to do business directly with Oracle but still depend on capabilities of the old OpenSolaris for their business models. As Nextenta does.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it doesn’t make OpenSolaris truly open. Contributions to Illumos are subject to being cut off at the knees by the next Oracle release. Illumos will play no part in the Oracle development roadmap.

If you like that and need that, Illumos offers a welcome home for you. But if you like and need true open source software, to which you can contribute and have an equal relationship with, look elsewhere.

A statement from Microsoft’s general manager of interoperability and XML architecture, Jean Paoli (right), has the snark knives out this morning.

What he said was, “We love open source.” (Picture from Microsoft.com.)

What’s next, cats and dogs living together?

Why, yes.

Microsoft loves open source for the same reason IBM loves it, for what it can do for Microsoft.

Microsoft has used its patents, just as IBM did, to bully its way into the space, it has created open source licenses the suit its needs, and it can use open source as a glue to hold customers to its products with their cash flow. It can now afford to be magnanimous.

What’s not to love?

Once more we have to explain to our fellow typists the difference between open source and FOSS. Open source is a practical means for doing business. FOSS is an ideal.

Open source does not mean you wear a hair shirt and abjure filthy lucre — just the opposite. (As if FOSS ever did. There are far more long-haired rednecks out there with Bush-Cheney 2004 stickers on their trucks than hippies. This is 2010.)

Of course just because Microsoft loves open source that doesn’t mean it does what the open source movement wants it to do as opposed to what Microsoft wants to do. Microsoft loves open source because it has found a way to twist it in the direction of its own self-interest.

It is also in Microsoft’s self-interest to appear benign toward open source right now. Oracle has gleefully taken up the mantle of open source villain, and Microsoft’s new public stance may help it take some business away from its rival.

In the age of cloud computing, a completely proprietary stance makes no logical sense anyway. Where the software comes from does not matter to the cloud user. All they care is that it rains applications. Profitable ones.

Now there may come a time when it will be in Microsoft’s best interest to hate open source. And the fact that it loves open source doesn’t mean it won’t compete fiercely against open source, and try to take business away from open source companies.

It’s not love as in “I will always be true to you.” It’s not a marriage. It’s a relationship, a guy thing. More like, “I love you, man,” and punching open source in the shoulder after a few extra beers on a Friday night.

We are talking about the love Pete Townsend sang about in “Behind Blue Eyes.” “If I shiver please give me a blanket, keep me warm, let me wear your coat.” That’s a groovy kind of love, too. But I won’t get fooled again by it.

Don’t you be, either.

(UPDATE: More on this topic from our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at Hardware 2.0.)

The Mozilla team released the fourth beta of Firefox 4 today but don’t expect feature freeze code until September.

According to meeting notes posted today, the team aims to release beta 5 this Friday and is aiming to post the feature-frozen beta 6 on September 10.

The project — which held its weekly meeting here today — will consider adding new features until August 27 but the intent is to wrap up work on the three core elements for Firefox 4: delivering high performance, a compelling user experience to drive upgrades and JetPack SDK, which is the SDK that allows developers to use advanced web technologies to create Firefox add-ons.

Those three priorities have been addressed but some of the other code developed since 3.6 may be moved to 4.1 or 4.5 to enable a speedy delivery of version 4.

“Beyond those three things, nothing can make us delay Firefox 4 any longer than we have to,” said one lead Mozilla developer on the call, who added that there are tons of new features in Firefox 4 that will make it a strong rival to forthcoming competitors IE9 and Chrome 5. “It’ll be a huge step for us.”

Hardware acceleration is expected to be on by default by beta 5.

Red Hat is taking good care of its customers — and that’s one of the intended benefit of open source software.

The Linux giant recently announced that it would offer an optional subscription to extend the life cycle support to 10 years for its enterprise Linux.

The current life cycle is seven years. But with the Extended Life Cycle Support, customers can get limited software maintenance and technical support for three more years.

The extended support option is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and RHEL 4 and will soon be available for RHEL 5. (RHEL 6 is now in beta testing).

It’s a wise move in this economic climate. There are a number of Red Hat customers who deployed Enterprise Linux 3 seven years ago and were facing an end-of-life date of October 2010.

Now, if they buy the add-on subscription, they can hold off on the upgrade cycle until 2013.

This is one of the key benefits of open source. Red Hat does not own or control Linux and knows that customers can fairly easily defect to another Linux brand if they feel pushed around.

It also gives Red Hat some revenue boost to offset the longer upgrade cycles of Enterprises.

Red Hat claims this extended support option is the best in the Linux industry.

Microsoft’s mainstream life cycle support for its business software is five years. The company does offer extended support for an additional five years but it covers only security updates. Technical support and hotfix support is paid only. \

there is no free technical support

The s-curve is, as I’ve written here many times, is the key to understanding business evolution and pricing.

Demand for your product will grow slowly at first, so you want to keep your prices high and focus your marketing.

Once demand is satisfied, and most buyers are getting their second version of your product, you want to practice value-pricing, with lower margins, to maximize profit.

It’s in between these low-sale and high-sale states that we have the most fun. Demand grows exponentially, but you have to scale, getting big as fast as the market, if you’re to make the most from your invention.

Flat World Knowledge is about to hit that key inflection point on the s-curve. They face the problem of getting big, fast. This is where the big money comes in, and the key decisions are made, that decide the fate of the whole industry.

Flat World president Eric Frank called last week to say he’s up for the challenge. He was preparing to address a faculty convocation at Houston Community College, which has 25 campuses. It’s one of those big accounts that is going to fall somewhere, soon, as the industry is transformed.

So far, the main way traditional publishers are dealing with the threat of open source textbooks, which can be edited constantly and given away as HTML files, is through rentals.

Rather than have kids buy textbooks at the start of the semester and then find a way to sell them back when they’re done, firms like Barnes & Noble are working with college bookstores to make this transaction automatic. My kids save half on their textbook costs and there is less hassle. It’s a good thing.

But Flat World is growing fast. Some 150,000 students will have access to its free books this year, with 1,300 faculty members on the program. Flat World profits by selling study guides, PDFs, audiobooks, and printed copies. Authors make about as much as they did before.

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on a school of business that is committing its whole program to Flat World. This is just the tip of an iceberg of demand now forming, as three trends hit the industry, Frank said:

1. The bookstore model is under growing pressure. Schools are looking to replace it.
2. Teachers say the print book cost problem is hurting their ability to teach.
3. Teachers will soon be able to customize their textbooks with Flat World.

Another important fact, Frank said, is that textbooks are a long tail business. Just 125 titles represent 55% of the market. Flat World is now moving toward filling all those niches — Frank called it a tipping point.

Cloud computing and tablets like the iPad are just accelerating these trends, Frank said. He is now looking to consolidate his distribution system, knowing that demand is coming, and knowing that larger companies are soon going to be sniffing around his market space.

“We’re great at author acquisition, book development, sales and marketing. We’re looking for a distribution partner.”

Open source textbook publishing, in other words, is no longer a gangly freshman. This year it has to take the MCAT. The pressure is on.

UPDATE: I have another post on Illumos today. Critics on the discussion thread are invited to read it.

I have written here often of the Little Red Hen. (And probably sold some copies of this book at Amazon.com.)

Everyone in corporate open source knows the story. You come to the open source market with a complete project, people download it without even saying thanks, and you want a way of assuring your own future.

When I write here of the 90-10 rule, I am likely to see comments from folks saying it’s more like the 99-1 rule, or the 99.9-.1 rule. Open source users are all take and no give, they say. If you’re not getting significant help open source isn’t worth it.

That theory gets its ultimate test starting today as Oracle officially takes back OpenSolaris. Future versions of the code, dubbed Illumos, will only be released as they are finished by Oracle. Oracle will control the software’s horizontal and its vertical.

The former Open Solaris board did come in for a lot of criticism, and not just from the company that released the code. It was seen as dithering, as ineffective. As the dog, the cat and the duck, in other words.

There is a warning here for users of other open source projects, a warning that should be heeded. A contract is not forever. It is not a guarantee. Open source depends on those who get free code doing something in return, and while many do most don’t.

You don’t have to be a programmer to give back. You can use beta code. You can report bugs. Some popular projects offer t-shirts and coffee mugs. You can write to friends and recommend the program, doing its marketing.

Or you can complain.

The recent legal dust-up between Oracle and Google has me engaging in a little self-criticism.

We were all very ready to condemn either side, even before we understood the issue. Paula and I leapt to the defense of open source. Others leapt to the conclusion that the suit would destroy open source and good riddance.

Neither is the case.

(Maybe nothing is as it appears. This is the logo of a popular southern California food blog. It just spoke to me as a statement about open source, and open source attitudes.)

Now it’s true that legal language is hard and deadlines are constant. When anything happens, we are all under enormous pressure to get something out, now, before someone else grabs our page views. And it’s best that we have a take, because heat is so good for powering the Internet machine.

But it turns out that Google didn’t use the GPL version of Java for Android. They used a proprietary version instead. Then they modified that version and distributed it, again not under the GPL.

So maybe Oracle had a case. Sometimes a commercial dispute is just a commercial dispute. There are no great philosophical issues at stake here, other than the fact that Oracle used patent claims in making its case.

It may be that last which got us all going. The Roberts Innovation Tax is already doing its dirty work. Patent trolls are multiplying like cockroaches. It’s just like the Obama Stimulus, except all it’s stimulating are waste and legal bills.

I am not making a political point here. (Please put those rants against the President away.) I’m saying we all have our own frames, our own assumptions of hero and villain, and our first instinct is always to respond in terms of that frame.

We close our minds, even in open source, and that’s a problem.

It’s easier in coding. Philosophical arguments tend to resolve themselves. Either the code works or not, either it has value or it doesn’t.

But all coders know colleagues who may be annoying, hard to work with, or just in over their heads. Getting around them in order to get the work done can lead to heavy drinking.

Unfortunately, in discussing issues of open source, right or wrong aren’t so clear as they are in code. Would that they were. It’s a lesson we should all remember next time news breaks. While writers might forget it, I hope you readers won’t.

Eric Schmidt made some headlines last week when he predicted people will change their names in order to avoid their online past.

Let’s cut the man some slack. He was working before the Web was spun. Without that slack, it may be the dumbest thing said all year.

Suw Charman-Anderson responded with something almost as stupid. The Web’s not that smart.

Yes it is.

Google me today and you’ll get about 36,100 results. Bing has me 113,000 times. They’re all accurate because, thanks to a quirk of my German-Irish-Polish heritage, I’m the only one of me there is. (Dana’s etymology is Polish.)

My late friend Russell Shaw, by contrast, had his name on a brand-builder, a music composer, and a former football star, among others.

Point is, we’re all Google-able. Changing your name won’t help. Not being found is becoming almost as much a cause for suspicion as finding you said something stupid once upon a time.

And I have. Many times. I have a troll who loves reminding me of one such bit of intemperance. His aim is, simply, to discredit my work, which is what people fear when they say they have lost their privacy to the Web. They fear that one mistake will haunt them forever.

The best advice I ever got in journalism school came in an early lecture, in 1977. Live your life like you’re on TV, I was told. As a journalist you are a public figure. I have not always lived up to that charge well, but I have remembered it, and it has given me some important advice for anyone who must look anyone else in the eye in the age of the Web.

Forgive.

We are all fallible. We all screw up. We all say stupid things, and do stupid things. What matters is what we  are today, what I can do for you today.

In other words, look at the code, not the coder. And understand that just as they’re an open book to you, so you and your company are an open book to them.

Seek to build your credibility, every day, in every way you can. Contribute to good deeds, by coding if you can, by bug collecting or using beta code or by just writing if you can’t. And take that attitude into the world with you.

When we’re young, we’re young. When we’re angry, we act out. When we’re tempted, we may fall. In some jobs we may fail. And the Web never forgets.

But we’re not the Web. That’s our advantage. We can forgive, we can balance our judgments of one another, we can change our minds, we can change. Each day is a new opportunity — sounds corny but I really believe it.

The problem is not the Web’s lack of anonymity. The problem is our attitude toward living as though we’re on TV, because sometimes you’re going to be the windshield, and sometimes the bug.

Living in an open book can be liberating. At least you’re being read.

It is common for market laggards to go open source. It is less common for market leaders to do so.

Thus we need to celebrate the Affero GPL 3.0 version of Urbi, software that powers (among others) the Segway RMP and Lego Mindstorm.

The software runs under Linux, Windows, or real time operating systems. The site has instructions for adapting the software to existing robots that were not designed around it.

The head of the French-based producer of Urbi, Gostai founder Jean-Christophe Baillie, made the announcement back in May at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Anchorage, Alaska, where Gostai was a gold sponsor.

Gostai isn’t putting all its software under the Affero GPL. It also produces a suite of graphical programming tools for robotics called Gostai Studio, an RTC interface for Urbi called GostaiRTC, and the GostaiNet cloud computing architecture for robotics.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is GostaiNet, which allows a number of robots to be controlled remotely from a cloud cluster. All you need are robots equipped with camera, microphone and speaker, and a WiFi router, and you can build your own robot army to take over the living room.

Why go open source? To help create compatibility among robots, simply the creation of programs and behaviors, and to extend Urbi into mainstream computing, in parallel and event-driven applications with multiple agents.