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Ray Ozzie took the stage of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals conference earlier today and made some interesting comments on Microsoft’s open-source ambitions. He says all the right things, but leaves a bit too much unsaid:

Indeed you do, Mr. Ozzie. The secret will be fixing your “downstream” issues. This may mean that you go back to licensing software, and stop fetishizing the underlying patents. No one besides Microsoft is doing this vis-a-vis open source.

If you believe that open source is just another element of your ecosystem (which I’ve been hearing for the past five years from your various representatives), then start treating it as such. The first words out of your mouth shouldn’t be a request that would-be partners pay money to buy an inoculation to your own software patents.

Open source is a reality….We tactically or strategically…will take certain aspects of what we do and we will open-source them where we believe there is a real benefit to the community and to the nature of the growth of that technology in open-sourcing it….The bottom line is we believe very much in the quality of Microsoft products and we are an (intellectual-property) based business. But we live in a world together with open source, and we have to make it possible for you to build solutions, or customers to build solutions, that incorporate aspects of that.

My position toward open source generally is that it’s a part of the environment. It’s very useful for developers to be able to get the source code to certain things, to modify them. Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open-source as people have been using it more and more….

commentary

advance One Web that is free and open
expand the Web’s capability and robustness
extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet

The Web Foundation will seek to foster collaboration among business leaders, technologists, government, academia, and nongovernmental organizations. The mission is to:

(Credit:
World Wide Web Foundation)

In his speech, Berners-Lee said the foundation is meant to address the social aspects of the Web to promote adoption around the world.

Tim Berners-Lee and Alberto Ibarg?en, Knight Foundation's CEO, at launch of the World Wide Web Foundation.

In a speech, Berners-Lee–a proponent of a “nondiscriminatory Internet”–said the creation of the foundation is necessary to ensure that the Web serves humanity by connecting people.

An academic program called the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) helps drive technology innovation. But the Web has largely been made by and for the developed world.

“But you cannot ethically turn your attention to developing it without also listening to those people who don’t use the Web at all, or who could use it, if only it were different in some way. (I have read that 80 percent of the world does not have access to the Web.) The Web has been largely designed by the developed world, for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all,” he said.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee on Sunday unveiled the World Wide Web Foundation, an initiative to spread the Web to developing countries and maintain its openness.

The organization, launched at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., is funded initially by a $5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Luckily, help has arrived. The solution to my problems does not come from Cupertino, Calif., but Finland.

A week later, with the phone and SIM in hand, I called up Boost to activate. The process took about 20 minutes, required no hacking of devices, flashing of firmware, or anything similar. I gave Boost my credit card number, and the company loaded $20 onto my account.

I won’t lie. It’s not speedy. But for airports, waiting rooms, and the bank lobby–it’s perfect. By switching to IMAP based e-mail and an offline RSS reader, it’s actually surprisingly usable.

I want a device that gives me freedom, that does not lock me into a specific platform, and that is sold by a company that treats its customers with respect. I want to be able to leverage the significant base of existing Linux/open-source applications. I want to be able to run
Firefox and the hundreds of community-made extensions for the browser. I want to download MP3s and podcasts directly to the device, and I’d prefer a real GPS chip, not some triangulation hack.

For those of you with a thirst for faster data, and a willingness to pay for it, there may be other options. The uber-phone hackers at HowardForums report that Verizon offers prepaid users access to its 115KB/s EVDO data service for 99 cents per day. Setting this up seems to require a fair bit of hackery, including re-flashing special firmware onto your phone. Furthermore, at $30 per month, this is quite a bit more than I want to pay just to be able to google in line at the grocery store.

On the software side, the devices ship with a Mozilla/Firefox-derived browser and support the hugely popular Web-advertisement blocking extension Adblock Plus. Internet telephony is made possible through Skype and Gizmo, both of which come preinstalled. Prefer to use someone else (or your own Asterisk server)? No problem–SIP-based voice over IP software is also included.

What else?….

The Boost connection

Nokia has gotten quite a bit of press over the last year for its N800 and N810 Internet Tablets. The devices run Linux, and are built on an open-source core. They include 802.11 Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth (including A2DP stereo audio) and a built-in Webcam that can be used for videoconferencing.

Apple's iPhone: No user apps for you!

Boost requires that you load up your phone with a minimum of $20 in credit at least once every 90 days. Voice service costs 10 to 20 cents a minute, depending on the time of day. Interesting enough, incoming text messages are free–which is not something I’ve seen any other prepaid carrier offer. Thus, for a little bit more than $6 per month, mobile users can get access to an always-on data connection that is perfect for e-mail, IM, and Google searches.

I then followed YoDude’s simple instructions for setting up the Nokia Tablet with a Boost iDEN phone, and within minutes, I was using my N810 to check my e-mail via the Bluetooth-provided cellular data link.

A BitTorrent client? Yep. Encrypted instant messaging for AIM and Google talk users? Yep.

Want to sniff a wireless network, break a WEP encryption key, or hack into a server? No problem. Metasploit, Kismit, and nmap are all supported.

The N800 ($200) and N810 ($400) have practically the same hardware powering them, the only real difference is the GPS chip and slide-out hardware keyboard that is included with the N810.

Apple’s iPhones seem to have a monopoly when it comes to usable mobile Web browsing. Until now, freedom-loving users not wishing to get into bed with Steve Jobs were, for the most part, out of luck. This article explains how to get an even better mobile Internet experience, without having to do business with either AT&T or Apple–with no contracts and no $60 per month bill just to surf the Net.

Minor update: Boost uses the Nextel/Sprint network, not Alltel.

Got a better solution? Found a way to get a high-speed Bluetooth tethered connection at a low price? Leave a note in the comments, and I’ll be sure to update this post.

In terms of technology and software, the N810 does everything and more that the iPhone does. The only real problem thus far has been the issue of Internet connectivity. That is, when there is no open Wi-Fi access point nearby, my N810 has been pretty useless.

(Credit:
Nokia)

Following YoDude’s advice, I went onto eBay and purchased a used Nextel/Motorola i605 phone. There are plenty of these listed for sale online, and can be found for about $40 including shipping. I also purchased a new Boost phone SIM (subscriber identity module) card for $2 including shipping.

In addition to my problems with Apple, I really dislike the wireless carrier it’s gotten into bed with–AT&T. My complaints about AT&T’s profit-motivated collaboration with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program have been frequently aired on this blog. Furthermore, the company only really offers practical data services to customers who sign up for a two-year contract–something I am unwilling to do. Finally, I see no reason to hand over $15 of my monthly wireless bill to Steve Jobs.

Thanks to YoDude from the Internet Tablet Talk forums, I now have a solution that works, with no contract, and at a price that I can afford.

The data offerings from U.S. mobile providers are, sadly, pretty awful. While users on some expensive plans can surf the Web from their phones, tethering (the act of sharing your phone’s data connection with another device) is often forbidden. Verizon went so far as to totally cripple the Bluetooth functionality in several of its Motorola phones.

Worse, to get data, users are often required to sign lengthy contracts with the wireless carriers. A few do offer data services to prepaid users, but at rates that’ll make you cry. For example, AT&T prepaid customers can purchase monthly allotments of bandwidth–1MB for $5 and 5MB for $10. Data hungry users who go over their 5MB per month are charged 1 cent per kilobyte. Want to use AT&T’s prepaid plan to look at a few Flickr photos? That’ll be $24.07 please.

Steve Jobs treats his customers with contempt. On a “stock” iPhone, you have no control over the applications you can install, cannot use MP3 ringtones, and can’t even download songs to iTunes over the 802.11 connection. Yes, you can join the customer vs. company arms race, and try to hack your phone. However, the next time a software update is released, you may find yourself the owner of a $400 brick.

The
iPhone is clearly the must-have device of the digerati. All of my colleagues seem to have one, and frankly, I’m rather jealous. However, I have several deep moral problems with the iPhone that have prevented me from giving Apple my money.

Furthermore, I am extremely nomadic. I can rarely plan more than six months into the future, and can’t predict the country I’ll call home a year from now. Thus, a two-year contract with AT&T is simply not an option.

The data problem

Disclaimer: While I paid retail for a Nokia N800, the company did give me a heavily discounted N810 as part of a developer program. I interviewed with Nokia for a summer internship last week. I interned with Apple (along with several other companies) in the past.

Help from Helsinki

Would you like to hook up an external hard disk, an Ethernet adapter, or a thumb drive? No problem. The tablets all include a USB port that supports “host mode.”

N810 Internet Tablet

Boost is a prepaid wireless company that resells access to the Sprint/Nextel nationwide wireless networks. Their voice services aren’t particularly attractive (at 20 cents per minute). However, the Sprint/Nextel network uses Motorola’s iDEN technology and provides a free, always-on data connection to phone customers. The data service isn’t speedy, at 19.2 kbps, it harks back to the days of dial-up. For a free service, however, it simply can’t be beat.

Lenovo Group reported a 10.5 percent increase in its fiscal first quarter revenues, despite a weakening global economy.

The Americas, however, continued to be affected by a weak economic environment, the company stated.

The computer maker reported revenues climbed to $4.2 billion in the quarter ending June 30, up from $3.8 billion a year ago. Shipments of PCs climbed 14.6 percent for the quarter.

“Despite a softening global economy, we delivered solid gains in worldwide sales,” Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo chairman, said in a statement.

Sales in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, for example, increased by 26 percent, while Asia Pacific shipments grew 11 percent.

Lenovo posted earnings of $1.25 a share for the quarter, up from 78 cents the previous year.

In the process of reviewing a client’s Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer “link juice” from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

It’s not all bad news with Flickr, though…at least not so far. The nofollow tags have not been implemented throughout the whole site. While links embedded in individual photo descriptions are nofollowed, so far, links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them. Will this change? Only time will tell. SEOers everywhere are certainly hoping not.

While it’s understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have–misuse and spamming–it nonetheless marks another step toward the end of major social-media sites passing on PageRank.

Economics

Whether or not Apple will allow the iPhone to be available on other services relies on its ability to get out of the exclusive agreement it formed with AT&T. And although it may not be an easy move, I think Apple either has already done it or is well on its way to getting out already. Of course, it probably came at quite a cost. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the company needs to maintain a similar relationship with AT&T where the iPhone will be available for sale at the carrier’s stores.

That said, a full review of figures are practically impossible considering Apple never explained how much it actually makes off the sale of one iPhone over two years. But if it’s willing to abandon exclusivity deals overseas, wouldn’t it make sense to say that it stands to make much more without revenue sharing?

Making the iPhone available to all carriers in the US this year makes sense on a variety of levels. Now we just need to wait for it to happen. And I think it will.

Although I believe it will happen this year, there’s no doubt that there are a number of hurdles in Apple’s path if it truly wants to open the iPhone up to different carriers. First off, the company will lose its revenue sharing deal with AT&T and ostensibly back out of a five-year exclusivity agreement with the carrier. And while these two issues are important to consider, I have no reason to believe Apple can’t come out on top by backing out of both agreements.

Simply put, there’s no reason to suggest that just because Apple isn’t announcing the end to its exclusivity deal in the US, it won’t happen here. And if it’s following that strategy overseas and obviously realizing that it’s not the best way to be competitive in this industry, who can possibly say that it won’t follow such a path before the five-year agreement is up?

In most major companies, the executives sign a deal with carriers that allow them to get a special business relationship, but also require the use of certain devices depending on an employee’s position in the company. More often than not, major companies will allow the use of a few cell phone carriers, but smaller enterprises usually only have a deal with one. What if AT&T isn’t one of the supported carriers? Regardless of the iPhone’s new features, if people can’t have it on the carrier they’re required to use by their employer, what good is it?

The enterprise

Unlike its competitors, you can’t find an iPhone on other carriers (unless it’s jailbroken) and Apple and AT&T have strictly prohibited iPhone use on T-Mobile or any other GSM carrier. But if you look at Apple’s main competition — RIM, Palm, LG and others — you can use most of those phones on almost any carrier you prefer. Because of that, Apple’s competitors are capable of expanding their base much quicker and have the opportunity to stifle the iPhone’s growth in the smartphone market.

If Apple truly wants to avoid competitive upheaval, it needs to eliminate one of its most vulnerable points — availability. Although it was able to coax many to AT&T’s side last year, it wasn’t able to coax enough people to justify it maintaing an exclusivity deal with the carrier. After all, if a customer truly dislikes AT&T’s offerings and prefers T-Mobile, is the iPhone enough to bring them over? If not, all of those issues would be resolved with a moratorium on all exclusivity deals.

Invariably, the discussion on whether or not Apple should make the iPhone open to all carriers will come back to economics. What will the net effect on the company’s bottom line be if it abandons its revenue sharing deal and tries selling the iPhone for use on any carrier instead?

Apple has all the leverage right now and there’s no reason to suggest that it can’t use it to its advantage.

Nowhere is the focus on competition so paramount than in the enterprise space. And nowhere is the issue of exclusivity as important as it is in the enterprise space. So far, Apple’s ability to break into the enterprise and push RIM out has been laughable. And although it has announced a slew of improvements to the iPhone to make it more appealing to the enterprise and help it better compete with RIM, exclusivity is still a major issue with many companies. And you’re kidding yourself if you believe Apple doesn’t care.

(Credit: Apple)

If Piper Jaffray’s report is true, Apple is making about $18 per iPhone, per month. Of course, this number is just an estimate and there’s no guarantee that it stays constant over the life of a two-year contract. If it does, some have suggested that Apple may be making a profit of over $500 per iPhone after sales and revenue sharing are taken into account over the two-year period. Assuming Apple eventually hits its 10 million iPhones sold mark, the company could stand to gain approximately $5 billion from their sale. Of course, that number doesn’t take into account a number of factors (including research and development costs), so it’s probably safe to assume that it’s not making nearly that much.

When Apple first started in the highly-competitive cell phone business, it didn’t know what to expect. Would it be just another wannabe or a major player in the industry? Because of that, it did something unique — formed an exclusivity deal with AT&T — and established itself in the market. But now, the game has changed.

Suffice it to say that Apple will back out of this deal and make the iPhone available on all carriers. Here’s why:

Competition

When the deal was signed with AT&T, one important element that’s missing now was true back then — Apple was an unproven entrant into the cell phone market and the company was trying to establish a foothold. Because of that, it entered into an exclusive agreement with AT&T and used that deal to build up considerable demand. But now, the iPhone is a known quantity and Apple carries all the leverage. Beyond that, it’s being faced with a major contender in
Google Android-based phones that will be available on almost every carrier, and thus, must act before it’s too late.

RIM was one of the first companies to realize that exclusivity isn’t the best tack and has done its part to put its BlackBerry on a slew of major carriers. Because of that, it was able to enjoy success in the enterprise through a dual-pronged approach — give businesses what they want and make sure it’s available to them. Apple may soon achieve one of these goals, but it’s failing at achieving the other. And RIM couldn’t be any happier.

Over the past few weeks, rumors have swirled about the possibility of Apple’s
iPhone being available on more cell phone carriers’ services. Of course, this has already been announced overseas in a number of countries, including Italy, Australia and India, but so far, there has been no indication that it’ll happen in the US. But if you look at the writing on the wall, it becomes abundantly clear that it will.

In just the past few weeks, Apple has entered into agreements overseas that will allow it move away from exclusivity and allow consumers to enjoy the iPhone on almost any carrier. So far, the iPhone will be made available on a host of different carriers in India, Italy, Australia, and seven other countries that Vodafone is currently operating in.

Some have said that Apple’s decision to abandon exclusivity overseas reflects its desire to break into new markets, but let’s not forget that those deals have yielded lackluster results and the company is still stunting its growth in the US by being exclusive.

Regardless, Apple can stand to make much more if it gets out of its exclusivity agreement. Why? Its untapped market figures will leap and suddenly it can sell its device (which some cost at no more than half its price) to millions more. In other words, it should be able to easily make up for its profit loss on the exclusivity deal and make much more through the sale of the iPhone to businesses and consumers who want to put it on other carriers.

iPhone should be set free!

But perhaps more than anything, there are four main factors that help explain why I believe Apple wants out of the exclusivity deal and will get it done: Competition, the enterprise, its strategy overseas is suggesting such a move, and finances.

The idea that Apple would shake free from AT&T first came from a report by Fortune that suggested AT&T would start selling a $200 iPhone. And while I still believe that’s ludicrous — I don’t think the iPhone will be any cheaper than $300 — it unleashed a firestorm of rumors that asked if AT&T was dropping the price to confront its impending loss of exclusivity. After all, it seems to make some sense when you take it at face value.

Its strategy overseas

In the Sun and MySQL case, for example, one can imagine Sun eyeing the vast population of MySQL users not so much for the opportunity to sell MySQL support contracts but as an entree for selling other Sun middleware, Solaris, and Sun hardware. One can imagine a conversation like this repeated many times: “Oh, you need better performance out of MySQL running on Linux? Of course, we’re happy to help. But you might think about Solaris because we have this DTrace tool. We also have this ZFS file system. And, oh, have you heard about Thumper?”

Small software companies get bought by larger companies all the time of course. Open source or not, enterprise customers often appreciate the sort of global support that large vendors are better prepared to offer. And the ability to put together sets of products that address broad business problems is more appreciated. However, in the case of open source specifically, the fact that a large vendor can leverage open-source products to sell other software and even hardware creates far more revenue opportunities than when the only thing a company can sell is a support contract on a single piece of software.

MySQL is the clear category leader in open-source databases; it’s the “M” in the LAMP stack that also includes Linux, the Apache Web server, and the Python, Perl, and PHP scripting languages. And LAMP underpins a huge portion of the open-source software world. As a result, MySQL–like JBoss before it was acquired by Red Hat–made a nice little business of selling support subscriptions for its software. Indeed, it was one of the more successful of the more-or-less pure standalone open-source companies.

Sun said Wednesday that it will pay about $800 million in cash for MySQL’s stock and take on about $200 million worth of options. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos will join Sun’s senior executive team after the transaction closes.

commentary

It’s not so much that there aren’t workable business models around open source. But life is so much easier when those models can include pieces that people have to pay for as well.

Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the provider of a popular open-source database.

MySQL is one of the most successful open-source companies founded in the past five years. It’s part of the popular combination of open-source development products referred to as LAMP, for Linux Apache Web server, MySQL, and the PHP development language, which is broadly used on the Internet and within companies.

On the heels of yesterday’s Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld, Apple may be the tech company that’s top of mind for many readers. However, from an enterprise computing perspective, Sun Microsystem’s announcement that it is acquiring MySQL is far more pertinent. News.com’s Martin LaMonica summarizes the announcement thusly:

Here, I wanted to focus in on one specific implication.

The acquisition is a bold move for Sun, which has embraced open-source software and development practices in an effort to garner more revenue from its software business. Until now, it has sold support services for a competing open-source database, PostgreSQL.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it is a bit. Because so few end users tend to buy support contracts relative to the number of people that use the product, pure open source has been a challenging business model for its practitioners. That’s not to say that there aren’t companies successfully taking such an approach, but there are no pure open-source Oracles, Microsofts, or VMwares raking in the dough.

Spleak Media Network, the San Francisco-based start-up focused on creating “interactive content communities,” announced Tuesday morning that it would be moving into three new content categories: fashion, television, and games.

Spleak widgets can be customized and embedded into other social network profiles.

More content areas are forthcoming, as is a plan to make money off the content with ads, interactive games, and quizzes.

Spleak’s concept is a bit unusual: users read, rate, and create content entirely via instant messaging platforms (AIM, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk), though there’s also an opportunity to embed a Spleak widget into your MySpace or Facebook page. The content–in 250 characters or less–comes from readers and from Spleak’s official content partners, such as CosmoGirl and Fox Sports. Users can vote each element up or down, with the most popular tidbits floating to the top.

Today’s launch includes StyleSpleak, which focuses on fashion trends and tips as well as designer news; TVSpleak, where fans can read about TV shows and characters; and GameSpleak, where users can share game news, strategies, and cheats. The new sites join existing communities centered around sports, politics, and celebrity gossip (which we covered late last year).

An XP-only version of the XO could come soon enough. In December Microsoft said it would begin running limited tests in January to see if the operating system would be a good fit for the low-cost device. At the time, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of the year.

In an interview with the Associated Press following the departure of the OLPC project’s president, Nicholas Negroponte said the open-source Sugar software, developed expressly for the XO, could run on top of XP. Negroponte cited weaknesses in the XO’s current open-source operating system (right now the XO can’t support the latest versions of Flash animation) as well as the Linux community itself (for being too “fundamentalist”) as the reasons for a possible future shift.

(Credit:
OLPC)

Windows XP could soon be available on the XO.

He said the laptop’s open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.

The chairman and founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative said in an interview Tuesday that the XO laptop may switch from using Linux to eventually running Windows XP, according to several reports.

I still have a few drum machines at home I want to connect the Tenori-On to before finishing up my full review. In the meantime, I suppose I can share some of the shots we took of the Tenori-On in our CNET photo studio. View the Yamaha Tenori-On photo gallery.

OK, I have to admit I’ve been somewhat selfish with Yamaha’s Tenori-On music sequencer ever since it arrived at my desk a few weeks back. Can you blame me, really? The thing meets all my requirements for gadget coveting–it’s shiny, futuristic, noisy, and expensive.

(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

Click to view Crave's Tenori-On photo gallery.