This is in response to http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/en/oct-ubuntu-server-stats

To get details stats on OS breakdown from netcraft to put that 1.4 million Ubuntu web servers in the correct context... you have to purchase their data product. Problem is... they also restrict how you can use that data so even if Canonical purchased it for you to look over..you probably couldn't comment on it publicly. The full Netcraft survey data is problematic in that regard because you really can't have a public discussion.

But we can have a useful discussion about the 2009 Purchasing Survey because they publish their methodology AND they raw survey data.

The purchasing survey  is a really mixed bag of news when you read the whole article and look at the raw data.  The article really begs the question... where is that stated growth of Ubuntu server deployments coming from?  The article specifically makes the claim that windows to linux migrations are stalling and that people are less likely to dump windows for linux.  So where's the Ubuntu serve deployment growth being generated?  Virtualization maybe? Not according to the raw survey results.

If you dig into the raw data...you'll see that exactly one survery respondent(out of 459) said they were using Ubuntu/Debian based KVM for virtualization.  And more sobering only one respondent  (out of 449) said they planned to deploy Ubuntu/Debian based KVM in the next 12 months.  That should raise some eyebrows inside the Canonical fenceline.  Doesn't that survey result run counter to pretty much everything Canonical and its virtualization partners have been saying?  Hopefully they'll repeat these virtualization usage and intent to deploy questions in next year's survey after the next Ubuntu LTS is out and both Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems are pushing Ubuntu server for private deployments.  

But more generally speaking I'm not sure that the Purchasing Survey results are self-consistent enough to be reliable.  For example look at questions 22 and 67.

question 22:   Which server operating systems do you currently have installed? (Select all that apply.)

question 67: Which of the following Linux distributions/operating systems do you currently use on your servers? (Select all that apply.)

The numbers don't compare well across those two questions. There is at best a 10% point discrepancy in the Red Hat deployment percentages between those two questions. There is a similar discrepancy in the CentOS numbers. That's not a good sign for survey accuracy.  If there really is a 10% point error, that potentially wipes out the implied Ubuntu growth in the summary article.  

And I'm not saying that the Ubuntu growth does not exist. What I am saying is that when you look really closely at the survey data.. the survey does not appear to be accurate enough to say anything statistically significant about Ubuntu growth if the noise floor in the survey really is 10%.  The survey summary article consistently overreaches in its conclusions without once commenting on the inherent accuracy limitation of their survey. 

The point I'm trying to make...to everyone.. is that you can't just throw numbers up without considering the accuracy of the methodology.  For this survey in particular... If they can't get Red Hat deployment numbers accurate to 10% between question 22. and 67..the linux distribution with the most respondents and therefore the best statistical accuracy...then you can't really expect the other linux distribution numbers from the survey results to be more accurate than that.

But thankfully the Purchasing Survey do make their methodology and their survey data available so their conclusions can be transparently discussed.  I wish everyone who publish deployment numbers would at least go that far instead of just throwing the numbers out as a PR stunt.

-jef

Good news on the E-Ink front.

I personally think that E-Ink is one of the biggest technology innovations in like the last decade.  It's been slow to be adopted since its public debut... but I really think its an important technology that has applications well beyond E-books.

-jef 

Dell's calling it "Latitude On"... and its based on SLED.  Dell's really mixing it up when it comes to corporate linux partners.   I

http://apcmag.com/dell-releases-latitude-on-alternative-linux-os-for-laptops.htm

http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/notebooks/laptop-latitude-z/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-latitude-z

"Latitude On" has been an option for a while now for some latitude laptop models.. but it a default option on the new highend Latitude Z.   Anyone looking to get a Z?

Man I wish Dell released granular units sales data.  I would absolutely love to see how well the "Latitude On" has been selling an an optional addon to the Latitude E4200 and E4300  compared to netbooks over the past 6 months.    Even if Dell ends up selling gobs more netbooks, the "Latitude On" sales may actually be a better  bottomline revenue stream for Dell with a higher price point and better per unit profit margin then the bargain priced netbooks.  

-jef

Well, maybe not a tree... but sitting in your settop cable box or integrated into your HD TV or bluray player...maybe.

ARM/Android gets a lot of attention from the laypress right now, but we don't hear a lot about MIPS. But if you take a real close look it seems there's a very coherent strategy in place to position Android as an ubiquitious device OS for MIPS based devices   Once you add MIPS into the picture, it sort of makes sense how Google can want to spin up  both ChromeOS and Android as operating systems without stepping all over each others toes. 

Whats fascinating about MIPS is how absolutely under the radar it is as a technology..even more so than ARM.  Do you know how many pieces of electronics you own that has a MIPS chip buried in it?  Android is going to "win" the post-desktop device landscape and noone is really going to notice it happening, just like noone really notices how many "computers" they really interact on a dialy basis.  I'm pretty sure that when Google does finally unveil the Google neural implant ( will that make us all androids in a sense?) that there's a good chance a MIPS chip will be inside it.


-jef

Can anyone point me to any upstream project (that does not require copyright assignment to Canonical)  that has picked up the meta-cadence idea and as a project trying to define something like a 2 year meta-cycle on top of a faster moving time based release cycle?   Shuttleworth has been talking about meta-cycles for over a year now and I haven't seen any public discussion which indicates that upstream projects are warming up to the idea of a meta cycle at all.  Have I missed something?    

-jef

So campers.... what do you think. Is it a good idea to run screensavers that scrapes random images and text from the internet?  I think its a bad idea. I think it was a bad idea when xscreensaver did it with rss feeds and web images and I think its a bad idea now.   We should not be encouraging the pulling of random content from the web to a screensaver. Content has context..and there needs to be a human being sitting in front of the display making a judgement as to whether the content is appropriate for viewing at that moment.  Having unattended screensavers grabbing random material is a garunteed way to display the wrong content in the wrong context to the wrong people.   

This maybe cute functionality to code up...and its certaintly trivial to implement. But just because its cute and doable doesn't mean we should encourage developers to do it and make it available to people to use.  Don't developers have some responsibility in choosing to refrain from implementing functionality that could have problematic social impact?   I think they do. And I think people who lift up this sort of problematic functionality also bear some responsbility...especially when they don't remark on the problematic nature of display random content in unmonitored situations. 

Appearently  a certain Canonical employee doesn't feel its appropriate for me to express these opinions as part of a discussion in his otherwise open blog comments even after the actual developer of the software chimed in and essentially agreed that my concern was valid while disagreeing with me that as a developer he has some responsbility for choosing to implement inherently bad functionality.   

http://castrojo.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/announcing-lifesaver/


Hey if that's what Canonical wants to see... random profanity ripped from twitter and identi.ca in Ubuntu screensavers activated in public spaces... more power to them.  Say the word, and I'll gladly help accomplish that by encouraging wide usage of this screensaver.  In fact I'll go out right now and boot live version of Ubuntu on with the lifesaver screensaver activated on all the public computers I can find since Jorge, a Canonical employee feels its a good idea. 

I find that very very interesting.  And its the highest rank non-US based brand, which is maybe why I was sort of surprised by the high ranking as I am American and thus uninterested in global happenings generally.

reference: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/best_global_brands_2009/

I like my Nokia N810s, even though they are sort of an odd-duck in terms of where they fit in the general consumer device market. ( And I know a thing or two about odd duck devices..I own a 3com Audrey). Though I wouldn't mind it one bit If a N900 magically showed up on my doorstep. I'd give it a nice home 

I also wouldn't mind it if Nokia talked up more about its own open source development strategy in the post TrollTech acquisition.  There's been a reasonable push recently to talk about Maemo in conjunction with the N900 but I'd like to see a roadmap beyond that.  Nokia seems to be running under the radar even though they are number 25 in the kernel contributor line up in this year's report. It'd be fun to see Nokia gather itself up and swing some of that global brand recognition around and position themselves an open source competitor in the same space as Android.

-jef

I found this article interesting:
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/09/microsoft-launches-open-source.html

Is this a sincere effort by MS or not? The cynic in me says its not. But you know what they say about cynics, cynics are just wounded idealists.
Ideally... isn't this sort of foundation effort the sort of thing we want Microsoft to be doing? If we trusted Microsoft wouldn't this sort of announcement be a good thing {tm}?  But we don't..not when they are actively engaging in destructive patent litigation against the larger community's best interests. 

So here's the real question... can this foundation be used by external collaborators to start driving the process of cultural change inside Microsoft with regard to patents?-jef

So we now have Delta Cloud  and the lidcloud projects out there trying to smooth over differences between cloud architectures.   It would be interesting to see how these two different efforts compare in terms of design.  It seems like this is a very difficult problem space. I think  the commetns by Thorsten von Eicken (of RightScale)  in response to a recent article about lidcloud goes to the heart of the matter:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/28/lidcloud/comments/

"The problem is being able to construct multi-server architectures and deployments that can make use of Amazon's load balancing service, IP address allocation scheme, and block storage service, and that can then be moved to RackSpace, which uses quite different ways of accomplishing the same high level goals. These are differences in semantics of the resources being allocated and used in the cloud, not just in the syntax of the API calls. *That's* the fun part from our experience at RightScale."


I do however chuckle that Red Hat's effort is called Delta Cloud considering where Red Hat's CEO's employment history. 

-jef

it really is a matter of personal taste.  You want proof? Check out these links:

http://www.ubuntunapa.com/html/index.html

http://www.fedoradallas.com/index.html