Open Source: Opinions

Put three geeks in a room and it won't take long to start an argument. Well, analyst Dennis Byron, veteran open source exec Stuart Cohen, and ex-Microsoft developer Keith Curtis weren't exactly in the same room, but all three have provocative opinions about the future of software in general and of open source in particular.

Reports have Motorola announcing as soon as Thursday a big push to build new Android phones, but the more important move would be a potential plan by the handset maker to reduce the number of mobile operating systems it uses, analysts said.

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.

Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

T-Mobile, HTC and Google launched the "world's first Android-powered mobile phone" today and proudly announced that this phone was going to be "game-changing". But after reading details on the phone, the service and some of the new applications, I'm left wondering where the game is actually changing.

At a conference for UK press this week, Red Hat added some detail to its plans for virtualization, cloud computing and application messaging.

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.

It started small. A faint grumble here. A clenched-teeth comment there. Then came the accusations. Google is abandoning Firefox! Google is unfairly exploiting its position! Google is ... acting like Microsoft!

Reports of data losses and system breaches are almost becoming passe but from time to time events happen that take on a life of their own and have effects far beyond what the initial breach would normally represent.