As you know, Microsoft made an offer last week to buy the number two on the Internet market, Yahoo.
This merger makes economically sense for both companies :
Although Yahoo is a giant, its annual revenues and profits both deceived investors. Its products are technically good and innovative but Yahoo cannot compete alone against Google, especially on the very profitable market of the online advertising.
Microsoft is still a major player in the software industry, but the increasing market shares of open-source products and its relative weakness on the Internet market obliged them to a reaction… and what a reaction !

Both companies could save a lot of money if they would put their IT infrastructures in common, and their different target audiences make them natural partners. Talks between both companies in order to merger already took place two times in the past but they could not be achieved. Now, Microsoft is investing a lot of money to counter Google on its own ground : the web.

As we have seen, this merger really seems to be a great deal for both companies.
Now I will explain the bad consequences this could have.

First, the fact that Microsoft is one of the most evil companies regarding the privacy of the users is really not a good sign. Just to know that Redmond’s guys can take over such products as Flick’r, Yahoo Mail or Yahoo 360° and their huge user basis sends shivers down the spines of anybody willing to keep an acceptable privacy on the Internet.

Then, and this also a real concern for Free Software supporters, Yahoo is one of the biggest fund provider for the development of projects such as PHP or FreeBSD and a great sponsor of OSS (Open Source Software) in general. Given the MS policy against Free Software, this is not good news for them and for those who use them, that is to say, everybody (at least indirectly).

Last but not least : one of the most promising open-source project, let’s say the jewels of Yahoo’s open-source crown, Zimbra, is directly threaten. This project is an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and is a really promising tool. If MS takes Yahoo over, there will be no surprise if Zimbra dies.

Instead of having the 3 components
- MS Active Directory
- MS Outlook
- and MS Exchange

the companies could have chosen these 3 programms for their collaboration suite :
- openLDAP
- Evolution (on Ubuntu)
- and Zimbra

I think Microsoft cannot tolerate such a direct threat to one of its core products, so maybe it is time for the guys of Zimbra to remove the last barrier that could ensure the future of their baby : put it under the General Public License and save it from a licensing change !

Even though this merger could benefit both companies, this will not do any good to Free Software and I really hope, that Zimbra, at least, will be preserved for the future.

Xen is a tool that allows a computer to run multiple instances of an operating system.

This means Windows and Linux can not only run on the same PC (they can since almost the beginning). This means that they can run at the same time. This technology is truly amazing!

This allows you, for example, to write an article with Microsoft Word in Windows, to release the cursor, to switch the window just as if MS Windows was a simple application of your operating system and to go on your work with Ubuntu or any Linux flavour (that supports Xen, however).

Basically, Xen is based on a guest OS (the dom0). It is in general a GNU/Linux distribution, but some other operating systems (such as NetBSD or OpenSolaris ) supports it. This dom0 is modified, so that it can welcome the guests (the domU’s).

If your hardware is good enough, the domU’s will not have to be changed. You can boot your MS Windows as you ever did (this is the so called full-virtualization – the guests are absolutely not aware that they are running virtually). If not, you’ll have to find a suitable modified distribution (most Linuxes for example) that will allow you to run multiple instances. This is called the para-virtualization.

Even though the performance is a little reduced, it remains excellent (especially for the para-virtualization, because the guests are designed for this technology). Moreover, you can determine what hardware you will assign to which virtual machine VM. Your Windows need a new network card? Just add one! You need to add a hard drive to one of your VM’s? No problem!

This sounds great. Ok, the reality is not as simple as I described above (especially if you have a PC with multiples network interfaces), you will have to find some tricky solutions, work with the command line and edit files, but it the end, it works ! As soon as the Xen developers will build an intuitive graphical interface, this technology will become one of the killer-features of GNU/Linux for the desktop.

The desktop market is the ultimate goal for Linux. But behind the lights, where Linux is not an exception anymore (and little people are aware of that fact), Xen is going to be one of the reasons why system administrators should leave, for example, Netware.

The most striking argument in favour of Xen on the server market is the cost: why should companies continue to pay for 6 average servers when they can build 6 virtual machines on top hardware. This can cut costs in energy, administration, and networking.

Last but not least, Xen is Free software. It means that the basic version is free (whereas Xen Enterprise and Xen Server are not) and you can get the source code, modify it, and adapt it to your needs.

To me, Xen is the ultimate example of how innovative and attractive free software can be. VMware, the proprietary solution is also a good product, but as Xen respects the GNU General Public License, it will be included in a lot of Linux distributions (it is already part of openSUSE) and thus, its community will grow very quickly. It will so benefit from the feedback of millions of the users and developers.

Free software (I will try to give my point of view on it later) does not necessarily mean software communism: XenSource (the company behind it) sells its enterprises versions. I hope they will make money with it and will continue to improve their product -with the support of the open-source community- so that end-users and companies can improve their productivity or have simply have fun with it!

This weekend, I go to Berlin to the LinuxTag, a fair where geeks meet geeks and/or IT professionals

It will be a great opportunity to meet the people of Ubuntu-de again and of other open-source communities, to discover new projects and to attend interesting conferences. Moreover, I will write there the second exam (LPI102) of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) to obtain the first level of the Linux certification. Last but not least, I come right for the OpenSolaris love day!

I also have been in Wiesbaden last year for the LinuxTag 2006 and I hope this event will be at least as good as the previous one !

This meeting, which slogan is “where .org meets .com”, is traditionally put under the patronage of the… German minister of Interior Department, Wolfgang Schäuble ! (see my last article). I wonder how he will be accommodated by the open-source and Free software supporters, who do not seem to appreciate his will of supervising people’s computers…