The Top Five Linux Stories of 2011

5) GNOME Forks

Not that long ago, GNOME was the most popular Linux desktop interface. KDE was, and is, good, but most popular Linux distributions, such as Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu all used GNOME 2.x for their interface. Then along came GNOME 3.0 and it all went wrong. To this day, I, and a lot of other people, aren't sure what GNOME's developers had in mind for their take on the desktop, we just know we didn't like it.

GNOME has seen a major revision, 3.2, and many people still don't like it. I certainly don't. So, Ubuntu has continued to go in its own direction with its Unity interface. One group of Linux developers decided to fork the still popular GNOME 2 into a new desktop they call MATE. And, Mint, after trying to add extensions to make GNOME 3 more palatable, is now forking the GNOME 3.x shell into a GNOME 2.x like interface: Cinnamon. Good-bye GNOME. It was nice to have known you, but I see you only as a desktop infrastructure, not the interface itself, in the future for most users.

4) The Decline of the Linux desktop

I recently wrote a story that got a lot of people worked up noticing that Mint has gotten to be the most popular Linux desktop People are still writing responses to that story over a month later. It's a pity none of them have thought the issue through.

The matter of whether Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution isn't that big a deal.Windows, as I've said before, has won the desktop war and Linux isn't going to somehow magically catch up with it. That doesn't mean that you should drop the Linux dektop. I'm going to keep using traditional Linux desktops for years to come. They're better than the alternatives, but put all the Linux desktops together and they still have only a tiny percentage of the desktop market. Let's just deal with it and move on to much more interesting Linux interface news: Linux is winning everywhere else.

3) Ubuntu changes directions

Ubuntu gets it. You may hate the Unity interface, but they're not making it for you-the long time Linux desktop fan. They're making it for Windows home users; Windows business users; andtablets and smartphones. And, why not? Does it mater that much whether Ubuntu is number one or two on the old Linux desktop market when Windows 7 is used by almost a hundred more users for every Linux desktop user?

Ubuntu also is seeking to integrate the cloud into its desktops They're not the only ones.OpenSUSE has also figured out that an old-style fat desktop can do well with full cloud integration. Google wonders, however, just how much desktop do you really need if you could do everything on the cloud.

2) The rise of Android and ChromeOS/cloud computing

For more on that look at where Linux is kicking rump and taking names in a new and growing end-user market: smartphones and tablets. Yes, Apple is still the number one tablet maker, but the Android-powered tablets are catching up fast and on smartphones, Android is already number one with a bullet. Windows? It's barely an afterthought here. The mobile future belongs to the Linux distribution we call Android.

At the same time, Google thinks those of who will still be using desktops in the future will want to use a cloud-based operating system that uses Linux as its foundation: ChromeOS. Google is betting that you're going to want a Chromebook for your PC needs in the future. I think they may be right. There's a reason why not only Google, Ubuntu, and openSUSE is looking into this. Apple, with iCloud, is also exploring it. I don't see the old desktop going away quickly but I can see cloud-based, end-user alternatives catching up more quickly then you might have thought even a year ago.

One thing I am sure of though, tomorrow's end-user computing experience is going to be powered by Linux one way or the other as the legacy Windows systems start to dwindle away.

1) Patent Wars

Remember when people who weren't in the know thought that SCO, with its bogus Unix copyright claims was danger to Linux? I do, I covered the heck out of that story since, while I knew from the start SCO didn't have a case, other people thought SCO actually was on to something. Today, however Linux, open-source software and indeed all programming development faces a far more dangerous intellectual property (IP) threat: the granting and mis-use of bad software patents.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle have all used patents to threaten Android devices' very existence. In the end, these lawsuits will fail. Not because they lack merit-in a world whenApple can get a patent for using apps during a phone call anything goes-but because Google, et. al. will sue them right back with their own patent portfolios. As Microsoft knows all too well after its defeat by i4i, they can be stung by patent lawsuits just as much as any Linux vendor.

Sooner or later I expect big business will get sick of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars suing and countersuing each other to no good purpose. That won't be the end of it though. Patent trolls, who have no real business of their own, will still collect patents and then sue the companies as soon as they actually do something useful with patented ideas. That will mean higher prices for all of us since end-users are ultimately the ones that pay the patent trolls blackmail money. What's even more troubling s that some patent trolls are now targeting small businesses. Google and Samsung can afford to defend themselves, a small business? They can't.

This isn't just a Linux issue, it's bigger than that. If we expect real programming innovation, software patents must be discontinued. That, alas, is something we may not see this decade… if ever.

Taken all-in-all, though, it was a great year for Linux. Whether it was supercomputers, big data or smartphones and tablets, Linux keeps growing. By this time next year, Red Hat will have become the first Linux company to have recorded a billion dollars in earnings, and, if you count all users on all devices, it just might be that Linux will be the number one operating system of all.

Microsoft reluctantly bows to Linux users

Cats & dogs, aka Linux and Microsoft, will work together on Azure.

Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she's not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service.

That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. WhileAzure has persistent storage, its inability to keep a VM persistent has annoyed many people, and not just Linux server managers. I know several SharePoint and SQL Server administrators who've avoided Azure because of this lack. There are ways to hack your way around the lack of a persistent Azure VM, but they're not easy.

According to Foley's sources, Microsoft will launch a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build of the persistent VM capability in the spring of 2012. Microsoft itself has been close-mouthed about support for persistent VMs and supporting Linux on it in particular.

So why is Microsoft, ever so quietly and reluctantly doing this? Because its customers are demanding Linux support. Oh the irony!

For several years, starting with SUSE Linux, Microsoft has supported Linux on its Hyper-V virtual machine platform. Today, Microsoft also supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. There were also rumors last summer that Microsoft would support Debian and Ubuntu on Hyper-V, but nothing has come of that. Microsoft wasn't supporting Linux then because it loved Linux. It did this because its customers demanded Linux server support and now its customers are once more pushing Microsoft into supporting Linux, this time on the cloud.

Now, Microsoft's business customers are demanding that same VM support on the cloud and Microsoft will be giving it to them. As Foley reported, "Running Linux on Azure has been a surprisingly big business-customer request." That doesn't surprise me. The Cloud Market analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) found that there were 6,556 Linux instance running compared to 1,120 Windows instances. By almost six to one, cloud users preferred Linux over Windows.

But, just because users want Linux doesn't mean that Microsoft will make it easy for them to get it. Instead, Linux users will need to provide their own Linux VM images. At this time, Azure only supports Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images for its VMs. The new persistent VM support will be available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build in spring 2012.

If something goes wrong with Linux on Azure, I'm sure Microsoft will put the blame and support burden on the companies running Linux. That will be a mistake.

Microsoft's business customers are speaking, and they want Linux. If Microsoft doesn't deliver the goods, Amazon, Red Hat, and VMware, to name three of its cloud rivals, are already happy to fully support Linux users on the cloud.

Wi-Fi has become 'must-have' feature on entertainment devices

Home entertainment devices with integrated Wi-Fi support are expected to reach 600 million units shipped by 2015, according to new research from NPD In-Stat.

In-Stat's vice president of research, Frank Dickson, asserts in the report that this is because Wi-Fi has evolved from an extra feature to a "must-have" function on entertainment devices:

It is important to note though that Wi-Fi is growing from being simply about getting content from a network to devices, to sharing content between devices, as Wi-Fi evolves from being a network-centric connectivity standard to one that enables peer-to-peer connectivity. New innovations such as Wi-Fi Display and Wi-Fi Direct will fundamentally change the way that content is moved and shared in the home.

The report asserts this covers everything from computers (which have had built-in Wi-Fi support for some time now) to Blu-ray players, digital picture frames, and even speaker systems.

Although the report also includes televisions in this regard (and this might definitely be the case in 2015), there are still many consumers out there that are willing to forgo Wi-Fi on televisions — mainly because HDTVs without Internet connectivity are pretty darn cheap these days.

However, as Internet-connected TVs become cheaper to produce and infiltrate the consumer world a bit more, these higher-end screens will likely come down in price as well. Not to mention that content providers (especially ones like Netflix and Hulu along with many TV app developers) will be pushing for and depending upon the sale of as many Wi-Fi-enabled TVs and other home entertainment products as possible.

Google announces fifth Doodle contest for K-12 grade students

While many major websites are blacked out today to demonstrate their opposition to SOPA,Google has shown its solidarity by covering up its traditional Google logo and Doodles.

But that doesn't mean the Doodle isn't on Google's agenda today. The Goog has released details about its fifth annual Doodle contest for K-12 grade students.

Google's vice president of product management, Marissa Mayer, was on NBC's The Today Show this morning to promote the Doodle contest, and Mayer also explained more about the theme that judges will be looking for on the official Google blog:

The theme for this year's contest is "If I could travel in time, I'd visit…". That could mean visiting a past, present or future setting—whether it's traveling back in time to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to the future to witness everyday space travel, or to just a few moments ago to relive a poignant experience.

Interested participants are asked to sketch their Doodles about this theme and submit it along with an entry form by March 20.

This contest isn't really a joke either. The winning doodler will receive a $30,000 college scholarship, and another $50,000 technology grant will go to his or her school.

Google recently announced details about another one of its major projects for elementary and high school students. Google's second annual science fair is underway and is accepting entries through April 1.

To take a look back at the international science fair that Google sponsored last year, check out our on-the-scene coverage and gallery.

Amazon Web Services launches NoSQL effort: Here comes some disruption

Amazon Web Services has launched DynamoDB, a NoSQL database that the e-commerce giant uses to crunch its big data, in a move that's likely to entice enterprises to try out alternatives to relational databases.

According to Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, the company has been refining its DynamoDB for the last 15 years. Amazon used AWS's NoSQL as a service effort during the recent peak holiday season. In other words, the service is battle tested.

"The DynamoDB is designed for seamless scalability with no database administration," said Vogels in an interview.

The specifics of the Amazon DynamoDB service break down like this:

• Amazon manages the NoSQL database and scales it up and down without downtime or performance degradation.
• Admin responsibilities are handled by Amazon.
• Hardware provisioning, replication, setup, patching and scaling are also handled by Amazon.
• The service automatically partitions and re-partitions data based on applications.
• Pricing starts with a free tier with 100MB of storage, five writes and 10 reads per second (40 million requests per month). Further pricing is based on the number of requests and provision and 10,000 reads per second will run you $1 an hour. Other pricing depends on how much data is used per month.
• The service integrates Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which allows for the analysis for large datasets on a Hadoop framework. The service is also integrated with Amazon's S3 storage service.
• Amazon's Cloud Drive, advertising platform and Kindle are powered by the NoSQL service.

How's this disruptive? Amazon's DynamoDB effort is going to allow many companies to take big data for a spin. One key hurdle for companies interested in NoSQL databases was the administration and hardware requirements. With Amazon's NoSQL service it's more likely that enterprises will try out big data. As a result, relational databases could take a hit.

Also: Big data and the disruption curve

Oracle and others have seen the threat from NoSQL efforts and have been working to become big data players. Vogels noted that many customers have been asking for a NoSQL service. Elsevier, Amazon and SmugMug are customers of the DynamoDB.

"Quite a few customers have been asking for NoSQL because there are no admin requirements," said Vogels. There is interest across the board. We expect a significant pickup in the enterprise."

Bottom line: Amazon's DynamoDB is a big data enabler that will give enterprises an avenue to try non-traditional databases.

Why Steve Jobs' Magic Doesn't Work In Medicine

As Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson made the PR rounds everywhere from 60 Minutes to the Daily Show, the terribleness of Jobs’ too-early death has come into focus: that Jobs evaded conventional medicine when his tumor first appeared, may have died as a result, and regretted it.

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking,” Isaacson told 60 Minutes. “We talked about this a lot. He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

Video: iPod Creator Reinvents The Thermostat

Video: Silicon Valley's Reckless Behavior

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn’t always produce one.

There’s more here than just the simple lesson that people with cancer should listen to their doctors about getting their tumor cut out, or that you can’t cure cancer with diet or acupuncture, as Jobs apparently hoped he could. The kind of innovation Steve Jobs practiced, probably the type of innovation we mythologize and lionize most since personal computers started changing the fabric of society three decades ago, does not and has not translated to medicine in the same way.

To some extent, everything that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the folks at Googlehave done to change our world springs from a single innovation: the creation of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. Every computer technology has sprung from this fundamental innovation. If we really want to talk about the biggest heroes of the digital age, we should always be starting with Robert Noyce, the Intel co-founder, or Jack Kilby, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his transistor work.

But we don’t. Neither of those men ever bonded with the larger public the way Jobs did. And that’s because Jobs (like Gates, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, really), was solving a different kind of problem: how to make a powerful new technology useable to people. And Jobs, with an artist’s vision, went a step further: he made it perfect. Like Ferdinand Porsche building cars, he made the mundane beautiful, building technological gadgets in which people could see themselves.

Certainly, hospitals could use the Jobs touch. In a stunning eulogy, Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson recounted how an intubated Jobs asked for a sketchpad in the ICU. “He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment,” she said. “He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.”

Hospitals could use someone to stitch all the gadgets together, and make it all perfect, but there simply may be too much going on for this to happen. Meanwhile, the innovations that matter most in medicine are more of the Noyce and Kilby variety. The gutsy decision by Andreas Gruentzig, a German cardiologist, to use a catheter to open clogged arteries; the resulting procedure has saved millions of lives. The creation of the first statin drug for lowering cholesterol by Akira Endo, a Japanese scientist, which made no fortune for him but has also saved millions and made billions for Pfizer and AstraZeneca. Millions of people don’t wind up in the hospital because of the vaccines made by researchers like Merck‘s Maurice Hilleman, who developed most of our childhood inoculations.

The hospital where Jobs was has had every bit as much technological innovation over the past thirty years as the computer industry. But much more of that innovation has been technical, and hard to understand, and only physicians and surgeons can grasp it. And we don’t reward it as much as a society: unlike in tech, little of the money in medicine goes to the actual innovator. There are 50% more billionaires from tech than from health care, and they are far richer. This has to stunt medical innovation – although it is still progressing at an amazing pace, which gave Jobs extra chances at life. Isaacson reports Jobs had his genome sequenced, in the hopes of finding the targeted cancer drugs that would kill his specific tumor.

Video: iPod Creator Reinvents The Thermostat

Video: Silicon Valley's Reckless Behavior

I’ve idolized Jobs since I was a teenager. My first email account was on a NeXT, and I think he more than deserves his place in the firmament of business stars. But I’m haunted by a story I heard once about a biotech industry lobbyist who went to see a congressman and was told, “You guys don’t do innovation. The iPad. That’s innovative.” As a society, it seems to me, we say that a lot. We value the magic box built out of many more basic innovations much more than what came before – and as a result, we overlook the work that is actually foundational. And I worry that were this less true, medicine could have done even more for Steve Jobs.