tealeg

A huge day for Berlin Fintech, Upvest GmbH. OpenAPI specs and documentation are published to the general public for the first time.

Almost all Elsevier development and infrastructure work is farmed out to companies in India, so they're probably not directly responsible for the cock-up, but their general attitude towards development, and their customers, probably plays a role.

IBM Plex Mono

Nearly 4 years ago I wrote a library in Go to read XLSX - that was trivial. It's grown over time, and this year it started growing feature that allow it to write XLSX format. This is a whole different ball game - Microsoft Excel is really picky about what it will and won't accept. In most cases Excel will simply moan and do an automated repair on files that don't match exactly it's expectation. LibreOffice is less annoying in its XLSX handling.

I still disagree with your description of Red Hat re the cloud vs traditional server sales, but let's let that slide.

So Red Hat could buy Canonical? I actually think the resulting company would have an awesome market position (but a terrible challenge to unify their tech-worlds). I think the linux world would be less rich and exciting as a result though. Still it won't happen, because it rather depends on the shareholders of Canonical don't you think? I suspect it wouldn't be as easy as all that to convince them (him!). I saw an article recently suggesting Microsoft should buy Canonical. An even worse idea IMHO - Ubuntu users wouldn't go for that. They might even see Red Hat as a bit too corporate.

Re: Canonical's financials. Which do you want, bigger revenues or profitability? Canonical could be profitable with it's current revenue levels, if it stopped investing in new things (an idea you seem to support, but be careful killing the cloud products if you're after a profit). They could also have tried to make a lot of money from limited utilisation with mandatory support, at a higher price, a la Red Hat - but how would they have competed with Red Hat if they used exactly the same model? Someone, somewhere must have a reason not to do that, don't you think?

Here's another question. Why hasn't Mark Shuttleworth just given up and walked away after 10 years of not making a profit? There's a tendency to look from the outside and assume that this must be a terrible business decision, but I find it dangerous to make assumptions about the motivations and strategies of others, especially those with a track record of success. You might be mistaking ambition for delusion. If you're wondering about Mr Shuttleworth's understanding of the current market place check out these two headlines:

1. http://www.inktank.com/ceph/mark-shuttleworth-believes-ceph-...

2. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/30/red-hat-buys-ceph-provider-...

Guess what - that means Red Hat just gave Mark Shuttleworth a bunch more cash for his share of InkTank, at a much higher market valuation than he bought them at. Foolish business man that he is. Maybe it's dumb luck. Or maybe Mark Shuttleworth saw the potential and invested in it at a relatively early stage, and even got the thing into Ubuntu and supported it so that customers could get to grips with it painlessly. Two years later InkTank had a decent customer list and Red Hat acquired it to try and gain a foothold (and some control) in the OpenStack market.

Now, the desktop. No one has ever said Canonical isn't going to do Desktop, just that you shouldn't necessarily focus on it as the main source of potential revenue for Canonical. What about those finite resources? Canonical has more resources today than it did 5 years ago, you have to do something with those millions of revenue to stay in the red! ;-) It may still be a smallish company, but it's not the case that Canonical sacrifices one thing to do the other. You'll notices that there are new partners shipping Ubuntu machines , especially in the developing nations - there's a reason for that and it wouldn't be happening if Canonical didn't care about it's desktop. Is Canonical overstretched? Well, it could be, but that's the fight, that's the nature of every start-up, every business perhaps. There are probably people at Apple right now moaning that they don't have enough resources.

Robbie Williamson, the man at the head of the responsible division of Canonical has documented how Cobbler and Puppet were used in the early days and how experiences there lead to MaaS being developed.

https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals-office-o...

Jono Bacon was responsible for that kind of Metal As A Service in Canonical - he's moved on to the X-Prize now, you should try there ;-)

Note that as of late both Apple and Microsoft are making moves towards "the OS is free" for certain markets. I hear tell that Microsoft are even paying OEMs to put Windows on phones.

:-) Of course it's not inventing anything, it's just providing a convenient way to commission those servers that can also be driven by other tools. If you bring a lot of server resource on line this is very handy. Juju, for example, can put things on MAAS servers, and one of the things it could put on there is a virtualised environment that could also be managed by MAAS and juju to deploy other workloads. MAAS knows some stuff about the hardware too, for example, how many network cards the machine has and on which networks, which means you can interrogate MAAS to find machines suitable for a given workload.

As the author of the 2nd link there, I'd advise some caution, it's old and not complete, I will update it at some point soon when I have time to run through my whole process again.

I won't make it an argument, but I'll share what I know and see if you see things differently. You probably won't, but I'm inclined to say it anyway :-)

First, to clear some things up, I'll avoid conflating traditional enterprise servers and hosted servers with the on-demand, pay-as-you-use cloud model. The later is what I mean by "Cloud", not just hosted servers.

To my knowledge Red Hat only holds a lead in server OS installations with paid support, and that's almost all in the former model (non-cloud, for me). Incidentally that's also the stat you'll see when companies publish reports about Linux's market share in general - they often just look at who's buying Linux. It's hard to get a real picture of what people actually use when you include unpaid Linux usage (which is most Linux usage), but the best data I know of is created by scanning web hosts, and suggest that Linux server run in order Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and RedHat:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

Red Hat's sudden obsession with OpenStack in the last 12 months, the move to take over CentOS and the purchase of InkTank are reflections that Red Hat are struggling to get in that game and are prepared to spend big to do so.

Why are they struggling so hard? Because they're frightened. The steady, "we want everything to stay the same for 10 years" model they've been serving so well is seriously threatened and they need to be in the new market to continue their success. Businesses love the idea of the cloud (if not yet the reality). Read what companies say about the cloud - they'll talk about it in terms of flexibility, and opportunity, but what they really love is that it means that you can offload the genuinely generic work of IT infrastructure management. This reduces the reliance on staff and consultancy costs, which are the most expensive aspect of corporate IT (hint, want to stay employed, get with the program, fast!). It also means that whether you're using Red Hat or Ubuntu, you get to negotiate the fee for OS level support via a behemoth like HP, Amazon, Microsoft or Google, or if you're a huge company with a private cloud, you centralise all that and do it in bulk. The same goes for the physical space for hosting.

Now Amazon were an existing Red Hat customer and so their servers were already running that when they started on this public cloud adventure - which afterall was a clever way to reuse their existing investment in infrastructure and personnel outside peak load time. That's not a big win for Red Hat, but there's growth of their existing business for sure (who knows what kind of deal Amazon got from them?). Still, the utilisation of that cloud is the bigger chunk of new business there, and it's Ubuntu winning the majority of it.

Now spread out to the nascent cloud market as a whole, sure Amazon are a huge public cloud with the bulk of utilisation, but there are many others, new ones all the time. Additionally and many, many private clouds that are being created those are the opportunities for new revenue in the hosting market. Almost all of them are going with OpenStack and 55% of OpenStack deployments are Ubuntu right now (I've seen Red Hat running at less than 1/10th of that business. I'd expect Red Hat to increase that number a lot in the next couple of years (they'll convert some existing customers for sure), but don't be fooled by the recent, aggressive press releases from Red Hat - they're fighting to get a foothold in this market, not controlling it by any means.

If you go look at what companies are running in the cloud, and what companies are hosting their clouds on, Canonical and Ubuntu are the 800lb gorilla in the cloud market. If you were talking naively about where Canonical should focus to make money you'd have to favour cloud tech over the desktop. It's not a simple as that though, those two facts aren't separate - Ubuntu got to be the platform of choice for the cloud not just by being their early and investing in it, but also by being a great choice for the people developing cloud tech in over companies. Ubuntu in the cloud is a success story already and both the Ubuntu Desktop and Server are integral to that.

Well - RAID is more or a traditional architecture solution than a cloud one. A cloud storage solution like Ceph provides redundancy across nodes, and I've even read that they strongly discourage the use of RAID. Still, the orange box is a homogenous architecture that can be used flexibly as a training and introduction tool - I've not heard anyone suggest you run it as your production cloud. If you go and spec a real cloud you'll find vendors will provide different configuration for designated storage and compute nodes.

More specifically, Pasing.

Munich, Germany