Open Source: Opinions

Google's decision to build a PC operating system could be a master stroke or a colossal blunder, depending on whether the company has the resources that such an ambitious and long-term undertaking will require.

With Linux having gained traction in business, certifications of Linux expertise are becoming more popular, similar to how Novell or Microsoft systems certifications became important for those platforms. But some in the Linux community say the emergence of certifications is by no means a golden ticket for admins, and perhaps just a waste of time and money.

Is Microsoft a friend or foe of open source? Going by the company's actions, Microsoft can't seem to decide whether to make love or war. But if it's war, Microsoft appears to lack the legal weaponry to defeat or even disturb its adversaries.

Nokia has announced its Symbian mobile operating system will join the likes of Android and will become an open source operating system. The announcement was made Tuesday at the Smartphone Show in London and is seen as a bid to maintain and possibly grow its developer base. This move comes at the same time Google makes its Android source code available to developers. The Nokia news contradicts previous reports on Nokia adopting Android OS.

Service-oriented architectures are helping companies do everything from automate business processes to increase agility, but implementing the technology is not necessarily forthright.

The recent introduction of the Google Chrome browser wildly succeeded in setting the Web abuzz. Web digest after Web digest regurgitates the main points about the obvious user interface features and the cute corroborating comic, but is there more? The answer is yes, a bit of which — like it's foundation and some user-facing features — has already been around the browser world for quite awhile. But others, like several network-focused measures, will serve to be notable advances.

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

I was all set to give this week's column over to a new register-direct implementation of a JavaScript interpreter that's many times faster than all currently available implementations. It's not exactly growing hair on a billiard ball, but a nitro-boosted JavaScript will put a shine on AJAX and keep my most beloved language on track to becoming the gold standard for dynamic languages.

I couldn't make it to OSCON last week, but I have read the announcements that Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, made at this open-source software show. They were the friendliest things I've ever seen come out of Microsoft towards open source.

Zimbra has long been one of my favorite open source products. I remember getting a first demo of Zimbra from CEO Satish Dharmaraj at the Red Hat conference about three years ago, while they were still in stealth mode. Satish, Scott Dietzen and the rest of the crew weren't setting out to build a me-too mail client. They were attacking a much larger problem.