Marc Fleury says something that doesn’t ring true for me in his analysis of which license – GPL or BSD – to use for a new startup. Marc gives a great answer, born of hard experience, and one that is definitely worth reading. (Teaser: Use GPL if you want protection of your code and BSD if you want to be free lunch for everyone else to achieve ubiquity.)

I have one quibble, though. Marc suggests that the RHEL/Fedora model is only for established companies:

Alfresco, my employer, went to a RHEL/Fedora model at roughly one-year old. A year later, we’re up 400% in sales (forecasting another 300% in 2008) and not far from where JBoss was when it was acquired. We’re actually making more money on fewer downloads than JBoss did.

That sounds like a viable business strategy to me, given that in my eyes JBoss was a tremendous success.

Are we a better company? Absolutely not. We’re the beneficiary of all the hard work that JBoss did. My point is simply that it’s a great model. It’s a model that I’d like to see more open-source companies adopt. Marc calls it a proprietary distribution of a free product. OK. “Words, words, words,” as Hamlet might say. I’m not worried about the nomenclature here.

I’m concerned with seeing faster growth in open-source companies, growth that doesn’t come at customers’ expense, and this is a model that works. It works because it drives ubiquity and then leaves room open to monetize a significant chunk of that ubiquity. It’s by no means the only model in open source (Zimbra made more money faster than any other open-source vendor with an open source plus proprietary extensions model), but it’s a viable, robust model.

Much depends on what Marc means by “established products,” because my own experience with the model is directly contrary to Marc’s statement.

Listen to what Marc says. But don’t discount the validity of the RHEL/Fedora model for your business, no matter how young.

…[T]he ultimate license scheme for OSS is still RHEL/Fedora: a proprietary distribution of OSS software. It doesn’t matter if the software inside is GPL/BSD or whatever. Realistically speaking however, RHEL/FEDORA is not an option for young projects, this is only viable for established products and may snuff your growth in the early stages.

And, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try them all out. The vagaries of driving hundreds of miles a day on top of reporting stories and writing them left me with little time to test the gear I’d brought, something I knew intellectually after last year’s journey of 4,891 miles through the Southwest on Road Trip 2007.

Ultimately, I used the iPhone constantly, to check e-mail, to figure out where I was, to make phone calls, as my morning alarm clock and more. And yes, I suspect I will be paying off my colleague within a matter of days.

The telephoto lens was great. As I wrote early in the trip, I showed up for the Space Shuttle landing, telephoto lens in hand, only to find that some of the pros there were sporting huge lenses. I thought I was screwed. Yet, the lens did just fine, shooting a series of very serviceable shots, maybe nothing that would work in a magazine, but just fine for online.

The last device I had with me was a Dash Express car navigator. Unfortunately, I was never able to find the time to get it set up, and so I wasn’t able to evaluate it. I hope Dash will be willing to let me hold on to it for a little while longer to try it out in my regular life. But I do apologize for not getting around to using it. I truly was looking forward to doing so.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

There’s no question that the most important piece of technology I had with me was the MacBook Air I had with me. But rather than go into my experiences with it here, I’ll just mention that I’ve already written a story about that.

To be sure, the device–at least the original version–has problems. The AT&T Edge network is painfully slow, as everyone knows.

TAMPA, Fla.–And so it ends.

And that leaves the last device I used: an
Apple iPhone.

The Subaru Outback 2.5 XT that I drove around the South on Road Trip 2008. All told, I drove 4,593 miles across eight states.

On Road Trip 2007, I had one from Verizon, and I loved it. I would say the same this time around about both the Sprint modem and the new one I had from Verizon.

To be sure, there were places where neither one worked all that well, and when that coincided with poor Wi-Fi reception, that made for some difficult situations, as broadband connectivity is a crucial component of a project that involves sending more than a dozen photos over the Internet every day, as well as tons of Web-based research.

I have to say: it was great. It was simple to use, it was fairly light, its batteries lasted forever and, I think, it took great pictures.

Nikon lent me the camera, as well as two lenses, a 70-200mm telephoto and a 16-85mm.

The Nikon D60 and 16-85mm and 70-300mm lenses I used on Road Trip 2008.

Did I think I’d get hooked? No. But one of my colleagues bet me $5 that I’d return from Road Trip ready to buy my own.

One odd iPhone experience I had was at Fort Benning, the Army base in Columbus, Ga. In truth, the base straddles the border between Georgia and Alabama, and thus the dividing line between the central and eastern time zones.

I had been holding out on buying one, but I definitely was interested in trying out the famous smart phone.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Thanks for following along with me. I really appreciate it. And stay tuned for Road Trip 2009. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Geek Gestalt.

Each has a simple software interface. In ideal circumstances, it takes no more than a few seconds to get online and get working.

At one point while I was on the base, my host and I were driving around trying to find something, both of us clutching our iPhones. I looked down and noticed that my phone had switched to central time, while his hadn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around. But the point is that both phones were on the same network, and yet were registering different times. I found that very interesting, and neither of us could figure out why.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

I was in Pensacola, Fla., standing on the tarmac at the Naval Air Station there where the Blue Angels make their home, and suddenly, without warning, the camera’s LCD cracked. Not the glass, mind you, but the LCD under it. This made it impossible to see the pictures once I’d shot them or to make any kind of menu changes.

It’s really hard to differentiate between the two of them, though there were clearly places where one worked better than the other. I had all the best intentions of keeping track of where each one worked better, but that was one of the logistical things that fell by the wayside as the realities of the intensity of my daily routine on the trip set in.

For my Road Trip 2008 computer needs, I used a MacBook Air, from Apple. At one point, Apple sent me a second machine, so I had two.

After driving through nine Southern states and crossing innumerable borders, Road Trip 2008 has come to an end.

Still, I did manage to use almost every pieces of gear I brought with me, and if you’ve been following the trip, then you’ve seen some of my stories about them.

Luckily, the camera itself still worked fine, and I was able to take at least a thousand or so pictures after this.

I’ll be happy to return to my Rebel XT, but I wonder if I’m going to enjoy it as much as the D60.

To be sure, if I knew a little bit more about how to use it, it would have taken even better pictures, but it did just great thanks.

What began in Orlando, Fla., ended 4,593 miles later here in Tampa. Along the way, the trip has taken me to a Space Shuttle landing, to the Corvette factory, to watch the Blue Angels practice at their home base, to being banned from Graceland, and much, much more.

Beyond the computer, though, there’s little doubt that the next most important set of tech I had with me were the two EVDO modems I was carrying, one each from Sprint and Verizon.

Suffice it to say that overall, I would say that they performed equally well: In most places, they both worked great, while in some one would work well, while the other wouldn’t. Over the course of the 4,583 miles, I’d say it was probably a wash as to which one worked better at any given time.

Sprint’s Compass 597, one of the two EVDO modem that I used on Road Trip 2008.

Of course, visuals being as important as they are, a huge piece of this whole project was the thousands of photographs I took. I ran 27 different photo galleries during the trip, and with a couple of exceptions, I shot every single photo with a Nikon D60.

It is worth noting, however, that one very odd thing happened with the camera.

And indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

It doesn’t really matter, of course, but it is worth mentioning.

But no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of the LCD cracking on a digital SLR, and even now, I really have no idea what happened. My contact at Nikon is looking into it, I believe.

In the end, Road Trip 2008 was a success. I visited some of the most interesting places I’ve ever been to, and saw very large parts of a region of the country I’d never been to before.

The D60 has a very satisfying shutter action, an intuitive menu structure, and a satisfying feel in my hand. It is easy to swap lenses on and off, and I did so fairly regularly.

Yet, the ability to get what amounts to a rich Web experience on the go, as well as to use the mapping tools and the extremely well-thought out iPhone interface won me over.

As I mentioned, the camera was with me pretty much at all times. It had to be in order to shoot as many pictures as I did.

Despite it having a form factor that I think is a little too big to be comfortable–for me, at least–I’m prepared to fork over the $199 for an iPhone 3G, if only because I know that it has become essential in my life to have Internet as often as possible. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but it is what it is.

And I think she’s going to win the bet, especially now that the iPhone 3G is out.

Of course, none of the trip would have been possible without a good
car, and so the Subaru Outback 2.5 XT I had for every mile of the journey–except for an overnight round-trip flight from Nashville to Houston and back–was a great solution. But you can read my story about that.

In addition, because Nikon wasn’t able to provide me with an ultra-wide angle lens, I rented one from RentGlass.com, as I knew that that would be the lens that I’d use more than any of the others.

Through it all I carried with me thousands of dollars worth of tech gear, aiming to road test it all. The list of gadgets included some of the coolest new toys around, as well as some that have been on the market for many months.

The Verizon USB727, the other EVDO modem I used on Road Trip 2008.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

And without many of the gadgets I was ferrying around with me, I wouldn’t have been able to share it with you, and that would have been a shame.

And I’m a Canon guy. My own personal camera is a Canon Rebel XT, but this year, I thought I’d try Nikon’s new D60, just to see what it was like.

Q: Will this optimization mean Web surfers will see more Flash pages?

Q: What is Adobe doing?

“Now, you are losing all the context of what content was near each other and running at the same time,” says Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. He likened the impact to the difference between reading the index of a book and reading the contents of the book.

Q: How will the search experience change as a result?

A: Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with optimized Adobe Flash Player technology so that their search engine spiders will be able to find and index SWF content, including Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.

A: “This will change the way sites are designed,” Everett-Church says. “It will allow more creative ways of interacting with the browser…and sites won’t have to sacrifice searchability.”

Q: Can Google users disable the optimization if they don’t want to see more Flash results?

Q: Will searchers be able to see more Flash-based content composed only of images and video as a result of this optimization?

(Credit:
Google)

In addition, text in all languages is supported with the Flash optimization, except for bi-directional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Q: Do Flash developers or Web masters have to do anything differently?

A: No. However, blog site Search Engine Land suggested that Flash developers should still spend time on search engine optimization and create distinct URLs for each piece of content.

Q: How does this work?

A: An Adobe spokesman said the company couldn’t comment on its work with other vendors, but said it is exploring ways to make the technology more broadly available. Microsoft has a competing technology to Flash, called Silverlight. A Microsoft spokesman was attempting to get comment about the company’s plans on Tuesday.

A: The text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used when Google generates a snippet that appears below the URL on the search results page. The words that appear in the Flash files can now be used to match query terms in Google searches. In addition, the URLs that appear in Flash files will be fed into Google’s crawling system and be indexed.

A: Google has already started rolling out the changes. Yahoo expects to offer improved Web search capabilities for SWF content in a future Yahoo Search update, but could not specify when that might come.

A: Not at this time. Only text and hyperlinks will be indexed. However, Everett-Church said “there is no reason why images and video can’t be supported in the future. It’s up to our search partners if and when they choose to do that, but it is a possibility.” A Google representative declined to comment on any future plans.

It sounds exciting, but what exactly does it mean for Web searchers, Webmasters, and Flash creators? CNET News.com asked Adobe, Google, and Yahoo and got some answers.

A: More than 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops have Flash Player installed and Flash is hugely popular. Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links within SWF files, but much of the content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect of the rich media files. Currently, all that content that was essentially invisible to the search engines will appear in the search results and the small amount of content that gets indexed appears on the search results page in jumbled words and code that are of no use to the Web searcher.

A: Yes. Google doesn’t crawl all types of JavaScript, which is used to execute most of the Flash content on the Internet. Google won’t specify which types of JavaScript are executed, but said the company was working on executing all types. Adobe’s Everett-Church says: “This is our initial implementation… I think there will be some areas to expand on there, as well.”

This screen shot shows what results look like on Google for Flash content that is indexed without optimization with the new Adobe Flash Player Technology.

A: Sort of. Google users can go into Advanced Search Features and put a minus sign for “filetype:swf.” But this will only eliminate pages that are SWF extensions and not necessarily all pages with Flash embedded in them.

Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.

Q: Any other limitations?

A: When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized Flash player on the search engine server. Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way a person would, such as by clicking on buttons and entering input. The algorithm then indexes all the text it encounters through the navigation.

More information about the effort is available on Adobe’s Web site and through Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

Q: Will Adobe be providing the technology to Microsoft for use on Live Search?

Q: When will Web searchers see the impact of these changes?

Q: Why is this necessary?

Chris Beard, VP Labs, Mozilla

After the product road map roundtable I live-blogged Wednesday, I had a talk with Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla. Beard is working on the things you won’t see in Firefox 3, but will, if he has his way, surface in Firefox 4.

Prism

Weave

Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the “awesome bar,” which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He’s looking to extend on this with a “linguistic user interface” that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he’s cribbing from.

Beard said the Labs are playing with other “crazy ideas,” but that Prism and Weave technologies are are being targeted at the next version of Firefox.

Further reading: See Labs.mozilla.com.

This post has been corrected from the original: Mozilla has no plan to ship
Firefox 4 this year; references to that effect have been removed.

Prism is Mozilla’s shot at busting apps out of the browser. Part of the Prism project is making the browsing core available to apps developers so they can build products like Zimbra Desktop (review) that are essentially Web apps, but that don’t look like it.

Firefox 3 users will, though, experience some online services being fed into their browser. For example, Mozilla will update all running browsers every 30 minutes with malware signatures, to stave off drive-by downloads and phishing scams.

The dream is to be able to take any Web site or app and turn it into an app that can run directly from the desktop. A very big part of this initiative is to make sites/apps work when they are not connected to the Internet. HTML 5 (the next version of the basic standard for the encoding of Web sites) includes explicit support for local, offline resources.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Beard’s philosophy is this: The browser needs to evolve. Beard believes the browser concept hasn’t fundamentally changed in 10 years. It’s still an isolated piece of software, he says. Mozilla Lab’s push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it’s running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications.

At the moment, these are two separate projects Mozilla is running to push out the edges of the browser: Prism and Weave.

HTML 5 and Prism will, Mozilla execs say, render Google Gears obsolete. Not to mention other important, and proprietary, Web app platforms that are already in production, like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight (What is Silverlight?).

Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual’s browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on. That means synchronizing bookmarks, home pages, favorites, and passwords to an online service that the user can attach to when he or she fires up the browser. As more people move between browsing machines (their laptop and their mobile phone, for example, or between different PCs), this will become more important.

Firefox 3 is laying the groundwork for this. It has a new transactional database that stores user preferences and favorites. However, it won’t be used for cross-browser syncing in version3; Beard hopes this extension to the database is rolled out in Firefox 4.

The newspaper said the situation is fluid, though, its Thursday night report. Translation: The paper is giving itself a lot of wiggle room.

Microsoft declined to comment on the report.

Microsoft is leaning toward a hostile attempt to acquire Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported, saying an announcement is likely to arrive Friday.

Earlier this week, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp told me this was an idea that had been kicked around the office for years–six in fact, and the only reason it hadn’t happened sooner is that Camp and others felt it would diminish the number of people who were populating the service with rated content. That number is still staggering, with more than 35,000 new URLs submitted every day by 6 million registered users. Camp hopes this new install and registration-free solution will make those numbers even larger, and improve some of the uptake as people get to try the service without that first hurdle.

On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you’re on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.

The new toolbar doesn't require a download, although it'll disappear if you go to another site without using the stumble or rating buttons.

The new StumbleUpon.com should be available right now. Camp says user profiles, reviews, and friends lists will get updated to match the new style in the coming weeks.

StumbleUpon's new home page will serve as a starting point to various bits of media, and exploring it no longer requires a software toolbar. (Click to enlarge.)

To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you’ve clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.

(Credit:
StumbleUpon)

The future of StumbleUpon

When I asked Camp for comment on the rumored sale of StumbleUpon from parent company eBay, he said he “couldn’t talk about any rumors.” However, what’s interesting is that this new system could be ported over to eBay, or any other product site, which is something many were expecting when the company was acquired last year. “This does open us up,” he said. “We’re a lot more media focused, and this would allow us to do product discovery.”

Camp says there are 10 other partnerships in the works, including several for video and music content. Eventually the system will be open for anyone to place it on their blog, although Camp says the system needs to be fine-tuned before it’s ready for that.

Presumably with such a system in place you could jump around the site and discover new products while rating them at the same time–something the auction site does not currently provide. Camp says StumbleUpon might one day provide that, but for now he says that realm has already been covered pretty well by search. “(We’re) more interested in doing media stuff. There’s a greater need for discovery than products right now.”

(Credit:
StumbleUpon)

In addition to its exploratory angle, StumbleUpon is introducing a new partner program. Sites that have StumbleUpon installed will be able to offer their users a new “Stumble This” button with a counter on it. When a user clicks this it adds to the number, which can help promote it for other StumbleUpon members. It’s also got an option right underneath the counter that lets users jump to another piece of related content, something Camp says should drive traffic to other existing posts. It’s worth noting this is different from the previously existing StumbleThru feature, which would do this randomly.

LiveCycle is one of the primary products in Adobe’s enterprise business. The product is designed for applications that involve document exchanges inside and outside of organizations, such as government Web sites that require people to fill out and process claims. It uses Adobe’s PDF and Flex software to create paperless, Web-based applications.

LiveCycle ES Update 1 will be available next month, Adobe said.

The PDF Generator 3D ES component is targeted at the manufacturing industry and allows companies to share two- and three-dimensional models in PDF format. The component works with more than 40 CAD applications, according to Adobe.

The new release also includes two new components: LiveCycle Content Services ES, and LiveCycle PDF Generator 3D ES.

The Content Services component, developed in conjunction with Alfresco Software, lets companies build a process or application linked to existing enterprise content. For instance, companies can use the tool to create a system for connecting manufacturers to parts suppliers, or for linking hospitals to insurers.

Adobe Systems is updating and expanding its LiveCycle software for building business-oriented Web applications.

The Department of Defense ordered that the older models be put to good use. Through a program towards that end, the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson in Alaska has been testing out modded PackBots since 2005.

Unfortunately, the CUGV can not entirely replace the soldier. Since it cannot take a sample of water, dirt, or vegetation to be brought back to a lab, a human will still have to go in for that.

The new/old PackBot, called a Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Unmanned Ground Vehicle or CUGV for short, will be ready for field use this fall, according to the U.S. Army.

The U.S. military has been working on a new use for old PackBots that will save soldiers time and aggravation, though not replace them completely, when it comes to chemical warfare.

“The CUGV detects ammonia, chlorine, carbon monoxide, oxygen levels, lower explosive limits, volatile organic compounds, gamma radiation rate and dose rate, temperature, and humidity,” Herschel J. Deaton, CBRN programs technical staff for Concurrent Technologies Corp. at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., said in an Army News Service story.

A CUGV PackBot at the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

With new Foster-Miller Talon and 510 PackBot models being introduced, the old PackBot models will be rotated out of use in combat.

Soldiers from the 95th Chemical Company set up a robot control station.

It’s also fitted with a video camera for live feeds that can be taped by the person controlling the robot back at operations for analysis at a later time.

But the PackBot will still alleviate a lot of the time-consuming legwork leading up to that task by mapping out and identifying the contaminates in a given area, according to the Army report.

In the absence of a CUGV, a soldier has to wear a Level A airtight suit and self-contained breathing apparatus akin to scuba gear when going into a suspected contaminated zone. Because of the heat and the oxygen limitations in such a suit, he or she only had about 45 minutes to get to the site, inspect it, and get back to a safe area.

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

Knowing what kind of contaminate is in the area would also help keep soldiers from needless donning of the Level A suit.

The iRobot PackBot can be sent in to a contamination zone for up to 4 hours if necessary, according to the Army report.

Adobe has also sought to work with open-source software more, in general. It has open-sourced development tools, including its Flex development framework, and contributed a scripting engine to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in the
Firefox Web browser.

Google is sponsoring programmers at CodeWeavers who are using Wine to write a Linux version of Photoshop and other
Creative Suite applications.

AIR is Adobe’s software for running and creating Web applications that run both online and offline. AIR 1.0, released late last month, runs on Windows and
Mac OS. Adobe had said it will port AIR to Linux and then mobile devices.

Correction: The official name of AIR is now just AIR and the software is not a Web browser plug-in. The article has been changed to reflect that.

Adobe said that it joined the Linux Foundation to help promote rich Internet application development on Linux. It’s a bid to raise its commitment to Linux-based software on the desktop, where it’s support until now has been limited.

As part of the AIR-on-Linux release, Adobe is making an update to the alpha version of its Flex Builder framework for Linux. Both will be made available at Adobe Labs for free and will be completed later this year.

Digg Firefox 3 Extension from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

One thing that’s missing, and something I hope gets added in a future version is a way to get real-time notifications when certain stories hit the upcoming section. As I’ve ranted about before, the upcoming section is harder to parse than it used to be, even with the inclusion of the recommendation engine. Being able to pick out stories you want to hear about based on what site they’re coming from, or with certain keywords would make it an extension worth keeping installed.

Digg’s creator Kevin Rose has put together a quick screencast of the toolbar in action, which I’ve embedded below.

The extension only works in
Firefox 3 but joins a previously existing offering that displays most of the same information from a drop down command menu. The newer version has a much more svelte look that can be toggled to exist off-screen with a click of a button.