Market Buzz
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Sun Microsystems announced today that it is acquiring the assets of SavaJe Technologies and will reveal further details at its JavaOne conference next month. SavaJe's claim to fame is its Java-based embedded operating system, which was shown running in a mobile phone at JavaOne last May.
SavaJe touts its Java-based mobile phone OS as being built from the kernel up for Java, but not "Java on bare metal," since a small multi-tasking, multi-threaded kernel manages the hardware resources and sits below the JVM. The deal could potentially place Sun -- whose Java technology resides in hundreds of millions of mobile phones already -- squarely in competition with the major mobile phone OS players: Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux.
April 15, 2007
Several months after parting ways, the leaders of the two leading 3D compositing Linux desktop projects, Compiz and Beryl, have agreed to come back together. Quinn Storm, one of Beryl's creators, wrote last September that "it at least 'feels' as though development is rather closed, with any possibility of getting code into the main source tree being at best a procedural headache."
This brings current membership of the foundation—which has the goal of providing services that are useful to the community and industry, as well as protect, promote and continue to standardize the Linux platform— to around 86.
The specific problem, according to the Open Software Wiki, that led to "the fork was communication problems between the Compiz insider developer community at Novell and the community of users on the Compiz mailing list. Patches submitted to Compiz were not felt to be applied in a desired way, so in the summer of 2006, work began on a development fork for community contributions." Frustrated by this inability to have their say in the Compiz project, Storm and others launched the Beryl fork to Compiz on Sept. 18.
In response, David Reveman, a Novell developer and the Compiz maintainer, wrote on the Freedesktop Compiz list, "I take seriously the feedback from the community that they would like to see more open communication from me about the Compiz road map and what I'm working on. I'll do my best to improve this in the future, and I'm always open to discussion about where Compiz should go!" As time went on, the Beryl leadership began to question just how wise their move had been.
April 15, 2007
The Linux Foundation, which was created in January 2007 out of the merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, has signed up three new members: Marvell, Nokia and VirtualLogix.
This brings current membership of the foundation—which has the goal of providing services that are useful to the community and industry, as well as protect, promote and continue to standardize the Linux platform— to around 86.
These newest members are expected to help deepen the foundation's understanding of the issues and opportunities for Linux in multiple environments, and help the membership to push the envelope even further, Jim Zemlin, the Foundation's executive director, said.
The announcement of the creation of the Linux Foundation came just six weeks after the OSDL announced that it had laid off a number of its engineering staff and was changing focus.
April 15, 2007
If you need your data to be available in all your offices -- even if the central office goes up in smoke one day -- Radiant Data's new PeerFS 4.0, which now supports multiple 64-bit Linuxes, might be just what you need.
Available since 2003 for 32-bit Linux systems, PeerFS uses a multiple-sources and multiple-targets replicating file system to try to deliver seamless, consistent access to data. PeerFS enables simultaneous transactions on multiple servers in multiple locations, with separate but identical data stores that are continuously synchronized using a peer-to-peer approach.
To maintain quick response, READ operations are performed locally, without tying up network bandwidth. Only the changed bytes within a file are sent over the network as WRITE operations keep the file systems in sync. In the event of a storage failure, PeerFS maintains high availability (HA), by providing a seamless failover to alternative data stores.
To make sure someone isn't copying your data, PeerFS 4.0 provides 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encrypted connections. The AES link is configurable for each endpoint.
Radiant Data claims that in addition to adding support for 64-bit platforms -- including RHEL 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SLES 10 (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server), Ubuntu 6.10, and Fedora Core 6 -- this new version's file system performance has been improved by 40 percent. According to the company, this means that users will see the same performance they're used to seeing with commonly used file systems that don't provide the benefits of real-time, continuous data replication. Additionally, NFS (Network File System) interoperability has been enhanced to be more seamless and foolproof.
Radiant Data VP and general manager Robert Peverley stated, "Our customers have been steadily migrating to 64-bit environments and have wanted to bring PeerFS along with them. We wanted to deliver on this need, of course, but also to deliver a more robust, no compromise solution in the process -- for both 64-bit and 32-bit environments. Continuous data availability is what PeerFS has always been about. Now PeerFS users will achieve the automated replication benefits they require without compromising file system performance."
The CEO of Seattle-based polarPhase.com, a Web-hosting company "with a reputation for providing robust services to demanding clients," Bryan Rodriquez, added that "PeerFS has delivered the ultra-high availability and data integrity we need with a bare minimum of administrative overhead. Moreover, Radiant Data has continuously improved the product to meet our stringent requirements. With this new release we expect to be expanding our use of PeerFS from half of our Web servers to virtually all of them."
April 15, 2007
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Business & Technology Trends
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By 2010, Linux will overtake Symbian in the market for advanced mobile phone OSes. Linux currently claims 30+ percent of the market, while Symbian has less than half of the market and remaining with Microsoft.
SavaJe touts its Java-based mobile phone OS as being built from the kernel up for Java, but not "Java on bare metal," since a small multi-tasking, multi-threaded kernel manages the hardware resources and sits below the JVM. The deal could potentially place Sun -- whose Java technology resides in hundreds of millions of mobile phones already -- squarely in competition with the major mobile phone OS players: Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux.
Symbian is currently ahead of Linux and Linux over Windows on mobile phones, even if phone-enabled PDAs are counted.
2007 will see the beginning of Symbian's decline in share, as the combined market penetration of Windows, Linux, and native Java begin to erode developer and vendor support for Symbian.
April 15, 2007
The embedded market overall has continued to explode this quarter as was the case during past few years. New technologies, alliances, and market trends have combined to push the pace of innovation to fever pitch. Topping the list of hot embedded areas has to be mobile phones.
Replacement business defines mobile competition according to low cost and/or feature differentiation, both arguably areas where Linux shines. Linux has fared especially well in high-end "smartphones," where it claimed 30 percent of the market.
April 15, 2007
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Cutting Edge
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Google is sponsoring an artificial-intelligence research group's work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition.
The open source project, called Ocropus, has several goals, including developing a high-level, easy-to-use handwriting recognition system that can convert handwritten documents to computer text, assisting in the creation of electronic libraries, analysing historical documents and helping vision-impaired people access information. The "ocr" in Ocropus stands for optimal character recognition.
The project is headquartered at the Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (IUPR) research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. DFKI professor Thomas Breuel is leading the project.
Google is sponsoring an artificial-intelligence research group's work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition. DFKI professor Thomas Breuel is leading the project. Breuel made the announcement through a post on the Google Code blog. In addition to Google's sponsorship, Ocropus is getting funds from several German government agencies and other public and private entities.
The Ocropus team expects the project to last three years and it will support three PhD students. IUPR is basing the software primarily on two research projects: one, a handwriting recognition system developed in the mid-1990s for use by the US Census Bureau; and two, newer layout analysis methods for character recognition.
Other resources include Tesseract, a decades-old engine for optimal character recognition originally developed by HP Labs and rereleased by Google last year as an open source system.
A preview of the Ocropus system is available on the project's website under an Apache licence, and the IUPR is soliciting open source contributions in order to complete a number of goals. These include creating a desktop application for the system, adding third-party tools and adapting Ocropus to a variety of languages. It's currently English-only.
April 16, 2007
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Company Watch
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Hot Research
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Mobile application and software markets have seen tremendous changes in past decade. The mobile software market has grown into a landscape of hundreds of vendors with complex functionality, lines of partnership and competition across software products. The world of handset operating systems though a bit slow to take off has changed dramatically in last couple of years emerging as a new competitive landscape of handset operating systems, user interface frameworks and application execution environments.
A new research report from R4B, The Future of Next Generation Mobile Operating Systems, covers in detail this highly technical area providing future trends and size of the market as well as bursts some of the common longstanding mis-perceptions. According to the report the demand for handset operating system and platforms is consolidating, while there is an increase in the complexity with not only manufacturers, but also enterprises and mobile operators making a choice of platform.
The mobile operating system market which was dominated by Symbian exclusively till 2003, with minuscule share of Microsoft Windows and even smaller or negligible share of Linux, is all set to see shuffle at the top by end of 2007. R4B as per their new research report The Future of Next Generation Mobile Operating Systems, believes that Symbian which is currently ahead of Linux and Linux over Windows on mobile phones, even if phone-enabled PDAs are counted will see the beginning of decline in share, as the combined market penetration of Windows, Linux, and native Java begin to erode developer and vendor support for Symbian. R4B believe that 2006 was a turning point in the history of Linux as a mobile phone platform, not only due to Motorola's recent commitment, but also the wealth of products and support services from a growing commercial community.
The research further forecasts that in longer term, Linux-based platforms will prevail over many of today's credible contestants and by 2010, Linux will overtake Symbian in the market for advanced mobile phone operating system. Linux currently claims 30+ percent of the market, while Symbian has less than half of the market and remaining with Microsoft. The Future of Next Generation Mobile Operating Systems also examines the myth and reality behind Linux for mobile phones, including the false start and continued efforts around J2ME, suggesting that it is a flexible OS and not an open OS, which the industry really requires and Linux is capable of providing.
This new research report from R4B presents mobile phone operating system value chain, investigates active players and elaborate upon the techno-commercial trends and aspects of this cutting edge technology segment. Report also discuss in detail key layers of the handset operating system software stack while it explains the importance of application execution environments (AEEs) and UI frameworks, which several specialist vendors are producing as standalone products. R4B predicts that mobile operating system market will see a lot of dynamism leading to segmentation of market into various niche markets by 2014.
The Future of Next Generation Mobile Operating Systems reviews various software vendors and products( for example Access Linux Platform, Adobe Flash Lite, GTK+, MiniGUI, Mizi Prizm, MontaVista Mobilinux, Nokia S60, Obigo Suite, Openwave MIDAS, Qualcomm BREW, SavaJe, Symbian OS, Trolltech Qtopia and Windows Mobile) which R4B believe to be major players in these respective neiche mobile operating system market, including those offering full end-to-end operating systems to providers of UI frameworks, AEEs and OS kernels. Reviews provide product background, positioning, technology and summaries the company's strategy moving forward.
R4B see several trends emerging within the mobile software market in next seven years, key among them are Software flexibility versus that openness will be critical for successful operating systems, as the value moves towards middleware and upper software layers, so the core OS technology may get commoditize, technology verticalization is gradually taking place, with vendors merging or partnering to offer out-of-the-box pre-integrated software stacks.
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Editorial
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Open source produces better code. Period. End of statement.
2004 was the year that open source started to become computing's mainstream but the growth which is happening will grow many fold in next five years. Linux's overall revenue for desktops, servers and packaged software running on Linux will exceed $36 billion by 2008 and $100 billion by 2015.
Today not just HP and Linux companies like Red Hat and Novell that are greeting Linux with open arms but also IBM, Intel and Oracle have embraced Linux. None of these companies are doing it because they get warm fuzzies from neo-hippie, socialist dreams of open software and free love, as some hyperventilating critics have claimed. They're doing it because Linux makes good, hard business sense.
Why?
Open source produces better code. Period. End of statement.
These trends will just keep getting hotter and hotter in next few years as the Linux desktop is going to continue to move into offices, with Linux thin-clients powered by Novell Linux and Wyse, are going to do especially well in that niche.
Having said that, Linux would not become the dominant desktop anytime soon. Despite the best efforts of companies like Novell, Red Hat and Xandros it will not be before 2010 when Linux will attain same level in desktop computing as it enjoys in server arena today.
Open Source MarketHawk, April 2007 Issue
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