Supporting Open Source One Download at a Time

We’ve always been vocal about our support for open source software and the communities surrounding the movement. After all, we wouldn’t be around without Linux and the myriad of open source components that help us run our business. This isn’t a simple reaffirmation of the obvious here, we are true believers and we want to show it. Below are a couple of the open source initiatives we’ve been involved in the past few weeks, with even more to come!

In April, we decided to double down and become Silver members of the Linux Foundation. We did it for two key reasons.

First, our entire product line is is based on Linux, so we felt compelled to help ensure that the platform is sufficiently protected and represented in the growing tech world. Secondly, we believe that real innovation comes from a level playing field.

There is no fairer platform than Linux.

A little while later, we also became official sponsors of the CentOS.org. Our VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series all leverage the power, and flexibility of CentOS Linux and we’re proud to put our money where our mouth is. We’re also hosting a CentOS mirror on one of ServInt’s Solo Series Dedicated servers, so those interested can download our favorite distro!

Finally, ServInt’s COO, Christian Dawson, will be visiting LinuxCon 2010 in Boston this coming August. If you’re in town, don’t forget to say hi!

In the near future, we’ll be announcing even more open source initiatives so stay tuned!

Questions? Comments? Let us know below, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Photo by sidereal.

What Can Buzz Lightyear Teach Us About Backing Up?

If your data is your livelihood, watch this and learn about the time Toy Story 2 disappeared:

It’s a teaser for a longer story on the Toy Story 2 DVD, which I watched with my son this weekend. It starts:

“When making a film like Toy Story 2, we use a bunch of UNIX and Linux machines. On those kinds of machines there’s a command, RM*, that removes everything on the filesystem as fast as it can.”

“Somebody had run RM* on the drive where all the Toy Story 2 files were kept, and things just started to disappear.”

After the teaser, the story goes on to describe how their backups for the past two months had been corrupt, and that the work on the film from the past two years was just gone. Freaking out, they started putting together a plan to push the film back an entire year to try to keep from having to scrap it altogether.

But Galyn Susman, visual arts director at Pixar, came to the rescue. She had just had a baby, and in order to spend time with her newborn had set up a system she could work on from home. She brought with her a copy of the film. The ONLY copy of the film.

My wife calls this story a lesson about how cool new moms are. I say it’s a reminder that if your data is important you can never have enough backups.

Imagine that for moment. Imagine everything you had worked for, months even years worth of data, literally disappearing in front of you. This happens to countless people everyday and it really underscores the fragility of our data. A few unfortunate keystrokes and Pixar, one of the most respected and lucrative animation studios in the world, nearly lost a Golden Globe winning film to the ether.

At ServInt we back up our clients’ files for free, automatically, on every product we sell on our website. Our backup service is awesome – it is reliable and robust and I think it’s an Industry-leading service. But if anybody tells you that ANY backup is 100% reliable 100% of the time, call them a liar and run away from them immediately.

If your data is critical to your livelihood, you can NEVER have enough backups. Go ask Pixar. Then go watch Toy Story 2 or some other Pixar movie. They are all awesome – and at least one survived to be seen because of backups.

ServInt Joins The Linux Foundation

Today, all of us at ServInt are proud to announce that we have become a Silver Member of the Linux Foundation.

For over 15 years, Linux and Open Source Software have been integral components of our products, services, and network. We’re fond of saying that both our products and culture are open source, and as such ServInt is a company that evolves alongside the Linux community, quietly breaking technological barriers every single day.

Our formal membership with the Linux Foundation underscores two key values all of us at ServInt hold dear:

• Our unwavering commitment to the advancement and adoption of open source software.
• A true spirit of community and partnership with our clients and partners.

You can expect the same great products and services that you’re used to from ServInt, and now you have further proof of our commitment to helping build a more open web.

For more information about the Linux Foundation, visit them here.

ServInt Announcement, Linux Foundation Announcement

Google Chrome OS – Eating Words and Raising Eyebrows

“We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.”

- Marshall Mcluhan

Now that the hype has died down a bit, and now that I’ve had a chance to play with very early builds of Chrome OS myself, there are some interesting questions about the new OS that arise as they pertain to the web, and to web hosting in particular. I’ll start by saying this, what Google is doing through Chrome OS will eventually change the way we use computers forever. Bold statement, I know, but here’s my take.

For those who aren’t knee deep in the geeky tech news world, Chrome OS is a new operating system by Google. The premise behind the open-source project is simple, it’s an extremely light-weight operating system that is nothing more than a web browser on top of Linux.

Its file system would be largely inaccessible to the user, its applications would be web based, and again the actual OS would be the Chrome web browser itself. Your documents and preferences would primarily be stored online by Google, in “the cloud” (take a drink), so that if your device were ever lost your data could easily sync back to a new device or to a different computer. By eliminating the distinction between a web browser and an operating system, Google is banking on the idea that most people only use their companion computers to surf the web.

More after the jump…

Read more

Open Source and Private Stewardship

On September 25th, CNet’s Matt Assay wrote a terrific post on his blog The Open Road entitled “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

The crux of the post was that the particular brand of free software or FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) that is much-lauded by software partisans like Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow is now irrelevant. Assay makes a distinction between FLOSS, meaning software that is free as in freedom and which incorporates no proprietary standards of any kind by default, and open source, meaning software that is usually free (as in beer) and that allows users to contribute to and derive from it, up to and including proprietary standards.

With open source, there is no reason to worry about standards strangling innovation because the community will simply code it’s way out of a corner. Information and software can be shared, and you can still make money.

The free software movement was born from a climate dominated by belligerent and aggressive software giants. Standards and software patents were created or acquired to hold developers hostage in exchange for exorbitant royalties.

Suing over patents became a business model in and of itself. It’s completely understandable why free software rose to prominence so quickly.

But a lot has changed in the past 15 years in the open source world. IBM, once Microsoft’s closest ally and creator of the OS/2 operating system, began an open embrace of…well…openness. Sun Microsystems open-sourced Solaris, laid the foundation for OpenOffice.org, and open-sourced Java.

Apple’s contributions to the Webkit project were immense in its adoption as the defacto mobile web browsing platform. Webkit powers MobileSafari on the iPhone and Google’s Android browser, cementing it as the platform to beat on mobile devices. On the desktop it powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome and is thus a key component of Google’s upcoming ChromeOS, a linux-based operating system that uses the Webkit browser as it’s main navigational tool.

The backbone of ServInt’s network was created using open source software and the vast majority of our server’s run CentOS, a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise. We have included well over 50,000 lines of unique code that has better optimized and secured our products…a task that would have been considerably more difficult in a closed development environment.

Even Microsoft has approached the open source community with a level of engagement that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. The famously closed source company even released Windows 7 as an incredibly generous open beta for nearly two years…unheard of even in most open source circles.

The point of Assay’s article, and I suppose the point of this one, is that these projects are open, but they are all stewarded by forward thinking tech companies, organizations, and individuals who seek to make a living. Revenue and profit are not the enemy of innovation, they are the reward for innovation.

Today, the biggest competitor in the software world is not Microsoft or Adobe or Google, it’s free software. The fact that we are competing with terrific no-cost solutions has forced everyone to be more creative and take productive risks.

So allow me…’Free software is dead. Long live open source!’

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Anyone Else Notice that Microsoft Isn’t Scary Anymore?

ServInt’s hosting is based on CentOS, an open-source derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we’ve worked painstakingly on customizing over the years. We don’t generally offer Microsoft products simply because they aren’t as easy to deploy in our VPS and dedicated server implementation, and being new to this industry I simply assumed the same went for many if not most of our competitors and colleagues as well.

So I have to say I was honestly surprised last week when myself, Christian, Taylor, and Matt from ServInt all attended HostingCon at National Harbor, right across the river in Maryland, and I was first introduced to Microsoft’s resurgent presence in hosting.

The show was my first in this industry, and it was a fun and enlightening experience. I found that hosting, as a whole, was quite healthy, and most companies were using the economy as an opportunity to drive innovation and development.

If people aren’t buying the old, bring in the new.

Our good friend, Parallels Chairman and CEO Serguei Belloussov, gave the keynote last Monday outlining Parallels’ various products for the upcoming year.  He also announced that Parallels was working with Microsoft on a series of new products and product enhancements to better connect the Linux and Windows worlds.

I looked around, nervous.

Here was a room full of people who, like ServInt, have built successful companies out of primarily deploying Linux-based solutions, and not only were they talking openly about working with Microsoft, but the Microsoft and Parallels booths were right next to one another! What has the world come to?

The attitude had changed, it seems that Microsoft no longer had the reputation of being the giant evil behemoth it was once assumed to be. It’s a softer, friendlier, and — dare I say — more open company today than it was just a few years ago.

Since 2007, Microsoft implemented open xml in Office 2007 (ironically leading to the famous injunction against Word last week), they open-sourced key linux drivers under the GPLv2, and they deployed the world’s largest, longest, and arguably most successful open-beta of a closed source product to date with Windows 7. Couple this with the terrific work in the company’s XBox division and you have a company that, at least at the surface, has fundamentally changed.

Of course, 1 Microsoft Way still has plenty of testiness left.  CEO Steve Balmer’s claim in 2006 that Linux violated more than 200 Microsoft patents was absurd and the litigious spree they attempted shortly thereafter would be just as funny if it didn’t threaten to put people out of business.

Microsoft was successful because it discovered it’s strengths early, it made products that only it could make at the time. In the past decade, it’s business got  a lot more competitive and the company branched into completely new markets. It soon realized that it no longer had to just compete with huge companies, it had to compete with free.

With that, I’m interested to see what comes out of Redmond in these last few months of 2009 and beyond. Is this a new attitude towards a world of open information or a way to embed proprietary standards under the guise FLOSSy cooperation? That remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’ll wait it out on my Mac.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Google Chrome OS: Stating the Obvious

When Google announced Chrome OS, the tech world exploded.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch promptly thanked himself for his own genius, Open Source Advocates and bloggers everywhere looked at Microsoft and Apple and predicted the death of desktop computing as we know it, and hosts and software companies everywhere rushed to release their own Cloud/OS/Storage Solutions in an effort to ride the free software wave. Even Walt Mosspuppet chimed in (probably, no, definitely NSFW).

What a lot of people lost in the hype was what Google OS actually was — Linux with a browser on top of it. As cool as it will undoubtedly be, we already have something very similar in an arguably more useful capacity. Namely, the VPS control panel, ala CPanel or Plesk.

When you sign up for a ServInt VPS, you’re getting a powerful Linux box with stable and tangible resources. It’s a very fast virtual machine — much quicker than most non-virtual machines — and it’s managed largely by a very intricate control panel, the two most popular options of which are Plesk and CPanel. Instead of using a browser to mess with the computer that is sitting in your lap, you’re using a browser to manage a computer potentially far more powerful than the one in your lap that could be thousands of miles away.  Plus, it’s going to get upgraded overtime, it will only get faster with technology, and it’s being managed by some of the most brilliant geeks in the world at ServInt.

Google Chrome OS was supposedly designed for use with netbooks, which aren’t particularly beefy machines, while control panels were designed for use with much more powerful virtual machines. If you need to encode video, you have to install an encoder in Chrome OS and presumably encode the video right there on the unit. With a control panel, you could install FFMpeg on a VPS, upload your video, and have the far superior resources of your VPS encode your video for you in a fraction of the time an Atom-powered netbook could all while you were doing other things (like watching other Walt Mosspuppet videos). Your only bottleneck is your internet connection.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Google or those that are excited by the company’s entry into the world of OSes, it’s merely an invitation out of Google’s reality distortion field and into a larger conversation about the future of computing.

Chrome OS is no doubt going to push the idea of thin client/cloud computing even further. It’s particular flavor of Linux will be fast and sleek and I think that’s fantastic. But, its fundamental argument is that computing can be a remote endeavor, that the web is the real way to get work done and that it’s ok to outsource your CPU.

My point is that no one was really arguing against that. In fact, companies from ServInt to Microsoft and from Oracle to Canonical are all moving towards the complete outsourcing of the CPU. This is not the future, this is the status quo and if tech companies of all shapes and sizes ignore that they will simply cease to exist.

Kudos to Google for helping nudge computing towards where it needs to go, but this technology is already here.

You just have to realize you need it.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user damien78.