Microsoft cannot bring itself to say ‘Red Hat’

Microsoft decided to support CentOS in its virtualization offering. Why CentOS and not RedHat? RedHat Linux is open source, and Microsoft has no problem in the expertise area to support it, so why choose a derivative of CentOS that most people believe is simply RedHat with RedHat logo stripped off? My take: It cannot bring itself to say RedHat.

It does not want to be seen to support RedHat, so CentOS is the next best thing without having to say the dirty word.

Regardless of how RedHat feels about CentOS, this announcement to support CentOS instead of RedHat is going to irk RedHat.

At least Microsoft did this in a more polite manner than Oracle with ‘Ubreakable Linux’.

Mono is now Xamarin

As I had expected when I wonder what Miguel De Icaza was doing when it was announced that Attachmate is laying off Mono employees, he had been a busy bee. He was starting up Xamarin as the ‘replacement’ for Mono.

That’s good news. I am sure Xamarin absorbed a few Mono employees from Novell. That reduced the human cost of Attachmate layoff. Even so, there are always developers Xamarin cannot reach and all I can do is to give them my best wishes.

Bold move by Microsoft…

As expected, Microsoft finally integrated Bing with FaceBook.

Searching into Facebook is something Google cannot match, especially since Google did not want to sign an agreement with FaceBook. This also explain the Google’s spat with Facebook.

Bold, because customizing your search using your friend information is an unexplored area and can yield potentially better results. Risky, if for any reason, there is a slight hint that your information is leaked into the search results presented by Bing to your friend, both Microsoft and FaceBook will have a PR disaster. Since it involves issues user hold close to their heart, I am predicting that the effect is going to be bigger than the ongoing FaceBook smear campaign story.

To Burson-Marsteller: Time to manage your own PR properly and uphold your own policy

Dan Lyon got the scoop on FaceBook hiring Burson-Marsteller to run a smear campaign against Google. This is a big scoop and a lot of digital ink has been spilled over it. What I will say is FaceBook and Burson-Marsteller deserve the full blow back they got.

For a PR company, Burson-Marsteller does not seem to know how to manage its own public image. How stupid can one be to delete a negative message on their FaceBook page during the storm? The same Wired website says the two employees involved will simply be sent for ethical retraining instead of being fired.  We will see. To me someone has to be fired. The two employees and, if it turned out they have managerial support, the relevant people in the management should face the music. First, they did it against BM’s own Code of Ethics. If they weren’t fired, what’s the point of the policy in question? More importantly, what does it says about BM’s policy?

A PR company should not find itself in the limelight and if it does, it is important to manage it properly. BM didn’t. If a PR company cannot even manage its own PR, how do you expect it to handle yours?

Hudson on different open source trajectory from OpenOffice.org

When I heard from Brian Proffitt’s blog that Oracle wants to pass the baton for Hudson to Eclipse Foundation, I joined the thousands that says “Oh no! Another SUN open source project hits the dust”

However, after some thinking, I concluded that Hudson is on a different trajectory from OpenOffice.org. The difference? Oracle decided to form a new community around OpenOffice.org. Somehow, may be unfairly, everybody is expecting it is Oracle’s way of getting out from the leadership role and leave  OpenOffice.org out to rot.

However, with Hudson, Eclipse Foundation will  requires a strong lead by a member of Eclipse Foundation, normally the original proposer, and Oracle had indicated it is willing to take the lead. Oracle is therefore, not abandoning Hudson.

Eclipse Foundation, rightly or wrongly, give me the impression that it is an unusual type of dumping ground. By dumping their product there, companies, especially the project lead actually hope to make their offering more attractive to third parties. By dumping Hudson there, and given that Oracle is not one that throws away a cash cow that is not too thin, I think Oracle is actually signalling that it is putting resources behind Hudson, rather than abandoning it. It wants a different governance structure that it itself is unable to provide, but true to Oracle style, do not want to relinquish control. Eclipse Foundation’s might just allow it to achieve that.

Hoping that Miguel De Icaza (and Mono) survives the cull somehow.

When news broke that Attachment is prun Novell’s staffs, my first reaction is that is a sad but expected news. Unlike others, I did not immediately associate this with the Mono project nor the fate of its lead, Miguel De Icaza. However, when I saw the headline that Attachmate is laying off Mono  employees, my thought immediately turn to De Icaza.

Professionally as a developer and team leader, I do not think he will have a problem finding another job. That is the only comfort I have. I am sure he will tell us what he plans to do in this post-Novell era when the time if right (for him). The only thing I can do is to wait for the news and wish him all the best.

For Mono employees, I do hope that Microsoft follows Bob Sutor’s advice and hire them. For the Mono project, besides the employees, Microsoft has the most to lose. For one, it is the only viable enterprise solution for the .Net framework on non-Microsoft platform. Its importance to Microsoft is it lend credbility to the claim that .NET platform is not a single-vendor platform.

If Mono project does go in the tank, a lot of people who rely on it or champion its use will find it bad news. Some in the open source community will tell the world that  they had been predicting its demise and it is bad to rely on one single vendor. Those who make those comments are either naive or divorse from reality. In real life, as developer, you examine, evaluate and finally choose the technology that best suit your purpose at the time. Once you decided on the technology,  you are effectively taking a gamble that it will serve you. That is true regardless of whether you are using open or closed source software.

I do not hide the fact that I do not think the project is good for open source in the long run, but  I share Bradley Kuhn thought and reasoning on why Mono developers losing jobs is not good for all of us, regardless of whether you are for open source or closed source.