Dana Blankenhorn

Political Lines Harden Between Open Source and FOSS

There has always been a political divide in open source between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocates and pure open source advocates.

It's reflected in the personalities of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. Stallman's politics are leftist, Raymond's are conservative. This is reflected in the nature of the licenses they support. Stallman's “fourth freedom,” embodied in the GPL, is that you are free to get code improvements. Raymond's, embodied in BSD-like licenses of all types, is that you're free to make money from code.

You can think of Stallman as Catholic and Raymond as Protestant if you want, but their divide goes beyond mere licensing, into the nature of the open source process itself.

Apache's assertion of OpenOffice as an Apache podlink  illustrates the problem, one I think Oracle CEO Larry Ellison set up deliberately in his treatment of the code. True code believers had long ago set up The Document Foundation under the banner of LibreOffice, which has an LGPL license. But Apache has agreed to use its own BSD-like Apache license for its version of the code, and asserts that it has money, and talent, needed to drive the code forward.

Occupy Wall Street is Good for Business

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There's a headline no one else is running. But it's true.

For all the bleeting about demonstrators being scary or anti-capitalist coming from some in the right, and despite the (sometimes failed) attempts by liberal politicians to co-opt it, Occupy Wall Street is a very healthy sign for business and even for Wall Street.

People like Jesse LaGreca (right), who blogs at DailyKos (from which the photo is taken) as MinistryofTruth, are calling for no more reform than progressives did early in the 20^th century. In fact they are calling for the same reforms. A progressive tax system, honest control of capitalism's natural excesses, a fair deal for working people.

Every American crisis recapitulates, in some ways, crises that came before it. There were echoes of the first Civil War in the 1960s, echoes of Andrew Jackson in FDR's time. The current crisis echoes the 1890s in the same way.

Here's what LaGreca wrote after speaking on ABC News yesterday:

The wealthiest 1% in America and around the world need us more than we need them. Without working people to farm their food the wealthy would have only money to eat. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep.

That's not a call to tear down Wall Street, or the capitalist system. It's a call for reform.

Diminishing Patent Returns in Age of Software

Florian Mueller feels like he's in his glory.

Lawyers from Apple have been on a global winning streak against Samsung's Galaxy tablet. The latest win came in Australia, where a judge stopped the product's import over a patent personally filed by the late Steve Jobs. 

To Florian this is a really big deal.

After today's decision, I believe no company in the industry be able to launch any new Android-based touchscreen product in Australia anytime soon without incurring a high risk of another interim injunction. The two patents on which today's ruling is based aren't Galaxy Tab 10.1-specific at all. They will affect all Android-based smartphones and tablet computers, across all vendors.

If Apple wins the Australian case at the end of the main proceeding, all Android-based products will effectively be shut out of the Australian market forever, unless Google or its device maker partners settle with Apple.

Bunk.

The Importance of Google Dart

Google is making its Dart system open source.

This is very important, not just for open source.

Dart is a structured language for web programming. That means you can actually build a web site as you would write a little Javascript. In fact, Dart can be run on a Java Virtual Machine, or compiled into Javascript.

As I've written here many times, there is no Moore's Law of Software. That is, programming improves arithmetically, while hardware improves geometrically. We have far more in the way of hardware resources than we can possibly use right now, because we can't build stuff fast enough to use them.

Dart isn't a cure  for this problem, but it's a help. Having a big company like Google supporting it, pushing it, and teaching it is going to help a lot, too. Learn more about all this at dartlang.org.

But I hear you have a question. Why?

More Good News in Solar Energy

While Republicans are going after the Obama Administration over Solyndra, proving they're enemies of a growing industry (not a good political position to be in ), real progress continues to be made out of sight.

Some of the bad news is actually good news. The failure of Stirling Energy pretty much takes solar thermal off the table. With that question dealt with investments in solar photovoltaics can be redoubled.

Fact is we are on track for cost parity with fossil fuels. If we remain stuck in the past our economy will suffer.

And while most pessimists focus on the raw efficiency of cells, there are many, many dimensions of improvement coming on-stream.

• Reduce the silicon in a panel and you cut its production cost in half. That's the business of Astrowatt, which is offering substrates and back contacts that have the added advantage of making silicon cells as flexible as thin film.

• ArrayPower is promising to reduce the cost of converting the DC power of solar panels into AC power for use in the grid.  The key is pulse amplitude modulation, a technique borrowed from Ethernet and LED lighting.

• Roseicollis Technologies offers the SunSaluter, a $10 panel tracker that replaces $600 tilting motors with simple bamboo and recycled metal, that tilts the panel to face the Sun constantly and increases the amount of power it generates up to 40%. The inventor is a 19-year old Ivy League drop-out. (Stop me if you've heard that one before .)

• Arizona State has a new technology that separates sunlight into its constituent colors to dramatically increase solar efficiency. The new cells are also fabricated in one step – another huge improvement.

Overall, venture funds going to green technology were up 23% in the third quarter from the same quarter last year.

The Secret of Juergen Klinsmann's Smile

There is a mystery afoot in US Soccer.

One I've solved.

After winning a scrappy game against Honduras last night, 1-0, announcers seemed almost disappointed, anxious to get back to their “fire Klinsy” chant should he fail to “get a result” against Ecuador.

What Eric Wynalda, Alexi Lalas, Jimmy Conrad and others had to say mystified me, until I remembered where and how they had played their international soccer.

They were all part of the team built by Bruce Arena, a fine coach, a good man, America's best in many ways. And they feel threatened by what Juergen Klinsmann is trying to do.

The Hard Jobs Before Us

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I outlived Steve Jobs. And maybe you did too.

By that I mean I was born a few months before Jobs, also in 1955, and I'm still around while he is no more.

We were both born at the height of the Baby Boom. It peaked that year for boys, and two years later for girls. We've always been acutely aware of what that means. The culture of the boom was made by others, and we have lived feeling some responsibility for it, in a world not of our making.

We are 70s people, not 60s folks. We did some things in our youth, but most of us pulled away in time, and taught our children fearsome tales that have kept them from drawing outside the lines. Many of us – Steve included – have thus spent our lives in rebellions against ourselves, and our contemporaries.

Better than Beating the Aggies

I've never understood the obsession among Texas colleges over winning football games.

I read Sports Illustrated's profile of TCU coach Gary Patterson with interest and, in the end, with revulsion. Not because Patterson's a bad guy. He's a great guy, a real ambassador for the sport. It was the article's description of all the money pouring into his program – for facilities, for salaries, for amenities. TCU is not a school with an enormous endowment, yet it's spending millions of dollars turning kids into billboards (I liked the uniforms they had that were given a look like scales), and thinking that's a good use of education money.

It's not. It's just a bid for political influence. It's influence peddling.

I went to Rice, and when I went there we played in the old Southwest Conference. That conference disappeared in a welter of corruption and greed in 1994, and the school now plays in something called Conference USA. We lose $10 million a year. I wish we didn't, but I also know the only way to reduce the loss is to kill the program. So I keep my mouth shut.

Still, like most Rice alums, I'm a lot happier about news like this than I ever could be about beating Texas A&M. It's a paper in the journal Physical Letters by Prof. Rui-Rui Du (left, above) and his graduate student, Ivan Knez (right, above), describing a "quantum spin Hall topological insulator." This is a device needed to create a quantum computer, a gate for a device that would operate on a sub-atomic level. Instead of using “bits” of on-and-off, it would use base four, the spins possible in a particle.

Nothing to say about Steve Jobs here today but RIP and you were loved. More soon at Seeking Alpha.

The Big Story of October 4

It was not the iPhone.

It was Red Hat's purchase of Gluster. 

Why should a $136 million corporate purchase mean more to the world than the latest and greatest phone, the first Apple product to be introduced in the post-Jobs era? Because Red Hat has just stuck a fork in the biggest obstacle to mass use of the cloud, the cost of data storage.

As Glusters CEO Ben Golub explained it to me in an interview after the announcement “Customer data storage needs are growing 40-50% per year, but the cost of proprietary data storage clusters are dropping only 15% per year. Meanwhile, at Fry's, the cost of a 1 terabyte drive is down 90%.”