Industry Weblog
Market Watch
July 11, 2005
“VoIP providers are moving into uncharted waters, Cell and GSM phones have to register the phone,” Farnsworth says. “VoIP is working from a different paradigm — for example, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) services. How do you register users and devices, authenticate users and ensure legitimate devices?”
“It's difficult to do security [for VoIP] because of its inherent complexity,” explains Internet veteran Karl Auerbach, former ICANN Director and CTO of Internetworking Labs, a VoIP interoperability testing company. “The design of VoIP protocols tries to cover as bases as possible, implementers have to deal with all these possibilities.”
, including issues regarding activation and authentication of VoIP phones. VoIP calls account for a growing number of financial transactions that are currently unsecured over the Internet.
Market Watch
June 28, 2005
To Open Source or not to Open Source - that is the question. Or is it? Open Source has matured into a robust development model, and many businesses that shied away from it are reconsidering it. The good news these days is that Open Source is no longer an all-or-nothing choice.
This article, found on linuxworld.com, summarizes the dual-licensing business model, and includes issues involved with dual-licensing and examples of companies that practice it.
Market Watch
June 22, 2005
Here is a link to the Australian government open source guide. It is a pretty good overview of different issues related to using open source products, including indemnity/warranty and issues to be aware of when using various open source licenses including the GPL.
Included is a description of the dual-licence approach for open source software vendors:
A number of open source software vendors release products under both an open source licence and a proprietary licence. This approach can work well in situations such as subcomponents or libraries. Releasing software under an appropriate open source licence increases the likelihood of broad adoption without expensive marketing. In such situations, other developers may want to build proprietary technology using the library. They generally need to opt for the version licensed on proprietary terms. Such terms generally include a royalty component, which is part of the original vendor's revenue model.
Market Watch
June 08, 2005
iRobot and Frontline Robotics are each developing robots with swarm or hive capabilities. These are robots that can make decisions as individuals but can also communicate with other robots in order to coordinate their actions to solve problems.
iRobot's SwarmBots communicate with their neighbors using their own internal messaging system. Global behaviors are formed from the interactions of many individuals by using a collection of "group behavior building blocks." [...] Proposed applications include land-mine disposal, nuclear/biological/ chemical threat detection, surveillance, and interplanetary exploration.
Frontline Robotics is developing six-wheeled unmanned ground units, or "Grunts," that are able to "perceive a security threat and take action in a coordinated manner."
Using their "hive intelligence," every robot in a team will be able to see what others see.
Market Watch
May 16, 2005
An Ars Technica article reports that,
in the new PSP, Sony has included support for 802.11b networking but has neglected to support WPA security. The WEP security protocol, which contains several major security problems, is supported but provides insufficient security. The security implications for a hand held device might not be great, but customers will have to revert to WEP on their home networks in order to maintain compatablility with the PSP.
WEP is garbage. Someone clever commented in a Sony message board thread about this issue that WEP is so insecure and fast WEP-cracking utils are so widespread and easy to use, that it's almost like there's a Ron Popeil product out that'll do it for you.
Market Watch
May 12, 2005
According to an article on Slashdot,
Palamida Inc. has created an "open-source detector" - a tool called IP Amplifier 3.0 which can match code to a database of more than 38 million commonly used open source files.
With open-source related lawsuits on the rise, a market is developing for automated tools that detect the presence of open-source code within larger application development environments. Palamida Inc. stepped in with IP Amplifier 3.0
Here is a link to a more detailed article about the market for open-source detection software and Palamida Inc.'s IP Amplifier 3.0.
Market Watch
May 06, 2005
A Linux programmer has reported a legal victory in enforcing the General Public License. CNet News.com reports that a court in Germany has issued an injunction barring a company called Fortinet from distributing products which include "initrd," a GPL-licensed linux component to which Harald Welte holds the copyright.
The case highlights the ease with which open-source software can spread across the computing industry--but also the growing pains that companies face as they adjust to new legal concepts underlying the collaborative programming approach.
In an update,
Fortinet has settled and agreed to make available the GPL-licensed components of its software and to modify its licensing agreement to include the GPL licensing terms.
Market Watch
May 05, 2005
MontaVista is changing to a royalty based sales model. This model, which is more traditional in the embedded market, can reduce upfront costs associated with per-seat licensing.
The new model is intended to appeal to those who can't spend large amounts of money on Linux products-the very customers who are most likely to build their own version of Linux instead, Ulander said.
Royalty-based sales models are common in high volume products such as
cell phones and other consumer electronics devices.
According to the article at CNET, MontaVista expects its revenue to be split between the per-seat and royalty-based licensing models.
Market Watch
April 28, 2005
According to an article in EE Times,
security is the main factor that is stalling the development of multimedia content in mobile handsets. Despite an explosion in design for mobile phones delivering digital media content such as MP3 files, streaming-TV broadcasts, and videogames, these multimedia features still aren't being offered to consumers.
What's the holdup? According to Jay Srage, cellular-system marketing manager at Texas Instruments Inc., it boils down to security, the absence of which prevents the development of content, thus stifling consumer interest in newer handsets and discouraging traffic on next-generation cellular networks. The lack of a secure mechanism to protect valuable digital content within a handset could evolve into "a killing issue" for operators.
Market Watch
April 19, 2005
As full-featured handset sales increase, with forecasts of 43% of the global handset marked by 2008,
Linux is projected for long-term smartphone dominance. Mobile platforms were scored across various criteria and Linux scored highest on the criteria that "matter most to OEMs and carriers."
Linux leads other platforms in openness and low cost - factors that are essentials to success in a market defined by tight margins, rapid innovation, and standards adherence.
PeerSec's open source MatrixSSL solution is open and cost effective for exactly these reasons.
Market Watch
April 19, 2005
A memory leak caused a disruption that inconvenienced some of Comcast's 7 million high-speed Internet customers nationwide. The problem occurred sporadically for roughly a weeklong period ending Wednesday.
Engineers have fixed the problem, which occurred in the software that enables customers to call up Web pages. [...] Comcast engineers say data that normally would be discarded remained in the system. It took up space, or memory, that should have been made available for new Web page transactions
PeerSec's MatrixSSL has support for zero memory allocations, making MatrixSSL safe for this type of operation.
Market Watch
April 06, 2005
With linux currently accounting for less than 10 percent of business,
CEO of Wind River Ken Klein sees Linux bordering on becoming half of its device software business in three to five years.
Why did you make the switch to Linux?
Klein: We responded to the demands of our customers. Customers, particularly in the telecommunications marketplace and to a lesser extent in consumer electronics, were making a beeline to Linux.
