Daily Technology News

Microsoft and Nikon have signed a cross-licensing deal that gives each company access to the other’s patents.

The deal is one of a growing list from Microsoft, which has been seeking to establish the heft and significance of its intellectual property effort.

Detailed terms of the Nikon deal weren’t disclosed, but the companies said Nikon is compensating Microsoft through the alliance.

“The companies believe that this patent cross-licensing agreement will substantially benefit customers of consumer products including digital cameras,” the companies said in a statement Wednesday. “Both parties will be able to innovate openly with each others’ technologies, enabling new features and products to come to market.”

Nikon and Microsoft didn’t indicate what new products and features would be enabled through the patent agreement, but they did point to existing cooperative efforts involving wireless cameras and raw image formats.

Raw images are taken directly from a camera’s image sensor with little or no in-camera processing; the formats more detailed and flexible than JPEG, but they’re also proprietary and specific to each camera model, and they require processing with software to become useful to most consumers. Windows Vista has the ability to display raw images as long as a camera maker supplies the necessary encoding and decoding software plug-in, called a codec.

(Credit: Audi Sport)

As fast as Audi’s R8 is, there will always be someone who wants to go faster. According to Audi, the company has been inundated with requests for a race-prepped version of its halo car. Come fall 2009, Audi will deliver in the form of an Audi Sport-developed racing sports car specifically developed for customer use: the GT3 version of the Audi R8.

The GT3 R8 eschews Audi’s Quattro all-wheel-drive system in favor of a GT regulation rear-wheel drive transmission. The R8’s 500-plus horsepower is delivered via a newly developed six-speed, sequential, sports gearbox. A modified front end and an extra large GT-style rear-wing keep the race model glued to the track.

Notably, Audi claims that the suspension almost exclusively uses components from the production line. As amazing as this sounds, consider that the standard R8 is in fact a supercar, already based on race technology.

Audi hasn’t published a price, but for what we assume will be a limited-quantity GT3 level full-race car, you can expect to pay handsomely over the R8’s already lofty $109,000 MSRP.

(Credit: Audi Sport)

A New Jersey company said on Tuesday it will invest $20 million over three years to develop an underground compressed-air storage system for wind turbines and other power sources, a sign of growing confidence in the technology.

Energy Storage and Power is a joint ventured formed by energy developer PSEG Global and Michael Nakhamkin, who designed the only compressed air-storage facility in the U.S.

With Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), air is pumped into underground formations, such as depleted natural gas wells or salt caverns, using a natural gas-powered machine. The pressured air is released later to drive a turbine to make electricity.

A diagram of a compressed air storage facility. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of different grid energy storage technologies.

(Credit: CAES Development Company)

The system allows for several hours or even days of stored energy, which allows power producers to make electricity during off-peak hours when the demand for electricity–and price–is highest.

The two CAES plants in operation right now–one in McIntosh, Ala., and the other in Huntorf, Germany–use several hours of storage to deliver electricity during the middle of the day.

Energy Storage and Power said that it intends to develop equipment for storing renewable power resources at a large scale. Utilities are already using more wind and solar, but energy storage means that they can be used more broadly since electricity can be “dispatched” as needed.

“We have learned a lot since building the McIntosh plant in Alabama, and I believe the time is right technically, environmentally, and economically for a large-scale deployment of Energy Storage and Power’s CAES technology,” Nakhamkin said in a statement.

It’s not the only commercial company pursuing compressed-air storage of wind energy.

General Compression is designing a wind turbine that has a compressor built into the nacelle, the housing at the top of a wind turbine tower. The company hopes to test a machine with utilities in the next few years.

With the growing use of renewable energy on the power grid and a push toward energy efficiency, energy storage is getting serious attention from investors and utilities.

Lithium-ion battery company A123 is working with utility AES on grid-tied energy storage devices. These 1- or 2-megawatt devices can be used to stabilize the grid’s frequency and store enough power for less than an hour.

One advantage of CAES technology is that it can be used for longer periods. The Iowa Stored Energy Park plans to use a natural gas compressor in conjunction with a wind farm that it expects to go online in 2011.

Digital inclusion, but how?

By Ina Fried
Staff writer, CNET News
August 27, 2008, 4:00 a.m. PDT

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Editors’ note: This is part of a series exploring computing in Latin America.

SAO PAULO, Brazil–At one end of the trendy Cafe Aprendiz, patrons enjoy
dishes such as three-cheese ravioli and salmon salad with cucumber, but it’s not
the food that has drawn a group of older women seated in the back. They’ve come for
the computers.

They are part of OldNet, a program that has seniors learning computer
skills from high school students at a PC lab tucked in the back of the cafe.
While other diners eat and converse, a half dozen women surf the Internet, chat
with friends, and send e-mail to relatives.

“These are the poster girls of the program,” boasts teacher Izabel Marquez,
pointing to one woman who just did her tax return and another that was the
first in the bunch to get an MP3 player.

OldNet is just one part of the Aprendiz “neighborhood as school” concept
put forth by Brazilian journalist Gilberto Dilmenstein. Dilmenstein does more
than just pair old and young. A modern-day Robin Hood, Dilmenstein has wealthy
schools pay for their students to get the volunteer experience working with
seniors while Dilmenstein uses that money to pay the poorer youths who take
part. There’s a common denominator–all the youths who go through his programs
have to go to college.

Click here to read all of the blogs in The Borders of Computing series.

Aprendiz is not your typical digital inclusion center, but it does embrace
most important characteristics of the successful ones. It has at least three key elements
beyond the technology itself: a clear curriculum, community support, and a model
of sustainability.

While these elements sound straightforward, they are often missing in programs
that attempt to close the digital divide, whether here in Latin America or in
the U.S. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital inclusion projects in Latin America, however critics say that too many of the programs start and end with the technology.

“The computer is just 10 percent of the cost of ensuring lower income people or
schools use these tools and have access to the Internet” said Maria Eugenia
Estenssoro, an Argentine senator from the country’s Coalicion Civica, an
opposition party.

“You go to many places today and the computer lab is closed or they can’t
repair them or they become obsolete because they don’t have a plan to renew or
buy more,” Estenssoro said.

Too often, says Gartner analyst Luis Anavitarte, countries use all their
technology resources to buy a large number of PCs.

“A computer won’t reduce the digital divide by itself,” Anavitarte said. “It’s
a first step, but it’s not even the most important one in my mind.”

Beyond the purchase, computers have to be fixed and kept up to date.

“When a company buys technology, there has to be an implementation plan,”
Anavitarte said. “Governments should do exactly the same on a larger (scale).”

In many cases, Latin American centers have outdated technology ranging from dot
matrix printers to low-resolution screens, says Daniel Brandao of Brazil’s
Instituto Fonte.

“That gives rise to frustration and the sensation that there is ‘half digital
inclusion,’” Brandao said.

Without sustainability, the PCs often fall into disrepair and disuse. But
sustainability has many factors. The computers have to be working, for sure,
but the centers also need a clear aim. Among the most successful inclusion
centers are the ones that have a purpose–whether it is helping students with
homework, providing job training for the unemployed, or helping the disabled to
communicate. Microsoft’s research shows that the average utilization rate for
PCs at telecenters in Brazil is just 21 percent.

Meanwhile, many credit for-profit Internet cafes, or LAN houses as they are
called in Brazil, with doing the real work of digital inclusion. It is here
that many people get their first and most sustained access to technology.

“LAN houses are very often used,” said Brandao. The challenge, he said, is that they are often small mom-and-pop
operations that don’t have the same kind of social service connections as the
nonprofit and government-run inclusion centers. “Is it possible to develop any
work in the sense of integrating them to the digital inclusion movement?” he asked.

In Colombia, one group is trying to use Internet kiosks as a means of both
digital inclusion and healing the wounds of civil war. It is hiring
ex-combatants to install and maintain the machines.

But Internet cafes, even those with social aims, have their limits as well. In
numbers, they may reach more people. But they are reaching mostly people in
urban centers, or at least in decent-size towns, and only those who can afford
to pay anywhere from the equivalent of 50 cents to $2 per hour.

Brazil, for example, is spread out over an area larger than the continental
United States with many remote regions. Only the government–and even then only
with the help of telecommunications companies–has the reach to get to those.

New technology, including WiMax, could help on this front. Intel, for example, has a pilot project in Parintins where it has hooked a remote village onto the Internet.

Working together for digital inclusion
What is clear is that shared access facilities–whether government-sponsored,
NGO-led or for-profit enterprises–are a key to reaching huge swaths of the
Latin American population that are not likely able to afford their own PC anytime soon.

“I don’t reach the next 1 billion or 2 billion people without great
shared-access,” said Orlando Ayala, a senior vice president of Microsoft and
Colombian native charged with helping shape Microsoft’s policies for emerging
markets.

The LAN houses deserve credit for bringing a measure of digital inclusion, but with investment and partnership, the for-profit computer centers can
serve a broader role, said Jorge Salas, general manager of Microsoft’s
Unlimited Potential unit.

Salas said that Microsoft is kicking around the idea of helping spearhead a
for-profit enterprise. The idea is a chain, sort of the Starbucks or McDonald’s
of Internet cafes. Microsoft won’t own or run the effort, but will help it get
off the ground, Salas said.

“We think we can contribute big time for digital inclusion–genuine digital
inclusion–not just access to the Internet,” Salas said.

Microsoft is working with CDI–a nonprofit that has been working on digital
inclusion issues for more than a decade after founder Rodrigo Baggio sold his
technology company and decided he wanted to use his know-how to bridge the
digital divide.

CDI started with a single center in 1995.
Now it runs digital inclusion centers in prisons, has specialized ones for
those with developmental disabilities, and has stretched to remote regions of
Brazil and beyond its borders into other Latin American countries. But it also
requires that its projects have means of being economically sustainable.

Microsoft hopes it cannot only expand the number of Internet cafes in
Brazil–from today’s 65,000 to more than 100,000–but also add educational and
job-training components and improve the quality level.

“There is high turnover, about 40 percent,” Salas said. “Most of them don’t
follow standards for hygiene, for technical specifications (and) security.”

Microsoft hopes to offer not just cut-rate Windows licenses, but also training
and assistance in marketing, finance, and administration. The company hopes to
have a pilot by October with five participating LAN houses. The effort should
expand to 50 by January, and by mid-2009, this project should be open and scaled
to the entire country.

The effort won’t be unilateral on Microsoft’s part. “We’ll have several
alliances to run the program,” Salas said. “We cannot do it alone.”

My coworker Lori Grunin already covered Canon’s announcement of its $1,400 mid-range EOS 50D SLR, but as somebody who’s in the market for a new SLR, I thought I’d weigh in with some thoughts of my own. I’m glad Canon is investing where perhaps it counts most: the sensor, and if the reviews look good, this is the first time I’ve really been tempted to upgrade from my well-used Canon Rebel XT.

Canon’s EOS 50D will ship in October for $1,399, not including a lens. Also shown here is the new EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.

(Credit: Canon)

When it ships in October, the 50D will sport a 15.1 megapixel sensor, up from 10.1 megapixels in the current 40D. The increase in megapixels is nice for the poster-print and microstock-sales crowds, but what’s most notable is the increase of the top ISO from 3,200 to 12,800.

That means Canon has done some serious work to cut down on the noise levels inside the sensor, which bodes well for image quality not just at the new extremes but also at more ordinary sensitivity settings. ISO 3,200, for example, is now part of the ordinary range, not the extended range that must be manually enabled before it’s available. Canon hit some sweet spots in sensor design, for example with its earlier 20D and the full-frame 5D, and the 50D holds the potential of being another model that balances megapixels with low noise and accurate color.

Canon attributes the advance to “newly designed gapless microlenses over each pixel to reduce noise.” Microlenses gather light for the light-sensitive part of the image sensor, compensating for surface area occupied by other electronics. Gapless microlenses presumably stretch across the entire pixel width. Perhaps this technology will also help out whatever model will succeed Canon’s 5D, my other obvious upgrade path but one that likely would require spending twice the price for the camera body and that would require me to shell out another few hundred dollars for a new wide-angle lens to support the full-frame sensor size.

Fending off Nikon
Higher sensitivity is important for Canon. It’s been losing market share to Nikon, which has pushed high sensitivity as an advantage, though with lower megapixel counts. The full-frame sensors on Nikon’s D3 and D700 can reach ISO 25,600, though reaching that level was made easier through a sensor design that emphasizes a smaller number of larger pixels.

The 50D has some other features that sound promising, including a higher-resolution 3-inch display, the new Digic 4 image-processing chip, a more dust-repellant sensor coating to avoid image-degrading speckles, HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) output for nicer output on high-definition TVs, and the higher-speed UDMA CompactFlash standard. It’s also got a built-in database of lens characteristics that can help correct for vignetting, the darker corners that some lenses produce.

Photography buffs who know their way around a $1,400 SLR may sneer at dummy modes for portrait, macro, and sports shots, or the new Creative Auto Mode (CA) that offers photographers English-language options such as “blur the background” and sets the camera accordingly. I think that’s shortsighted, though: even if you know how to best balance depth of field and shutter speed, perhaps somebody else in your family doesn’t. My complaint with the automatic settings is that at least in my camera, they only permit shooting in JPEG. I prefer raw, and even if somebody else is shooting, I’m usually the one who processes the images.

Two areas concern me, though.

First is live view. Canon claims its latest attempt is better, but I remain skeptical it’ll match the expectations of those with point-and-shoot cameras who’ve grown accustomed to framing the shots through the display rather than the viewfinder. Focusing sluggishness and pauses while a mirror flips up and down have seriously degraded live view on most SLRs.

The heart of Canon’s 50D is this 15.1 megapixel sensor, whose increased sensitivity now reaches ISO 12,800.

(Credit: Canon)

It doesn’t bother me much, since I’m happy with the viewfinder. But I have friends who demand it, and I do see its utility for taking shots while holding the camera overhead or low to the ground. Live view also is nice when you want to talk to photographic subjects rather than hide your face behind the camera.

A more personal concern is weather sealing. I’m careful with my cameras, but I shoot sometimes in light rain, San Francisco mizzle, or waterfall spray. And on hiking and camping trips, dust is a serious concern. Full weather sealing is expensive, but it’s an area where Canon competitors have been leading the charge, and it’s important to me.

Finally, a modern Canon ultrazoom
Another smart Canon countermove to Nikon is the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens, costing $700 and also due in October.

With a zoom range that long, you can bet the lens will have some serious compromises in areas such as sharpness, vignetting, distortion that can bow parallel lines into a barrel shape, or the chromatic aberration that can leave colored fringes around object edges. But that won’t matter much to the large fraction of SLR buyers who don’t want the expense, hassle, and bulk of multiple lenses. Nikon’s 18-200mm lens has been its best-selling ever, despite a similarly steep price tag and highly limited initial availability.

It’s probably not the lens for me, but I know several people waiting for something of its ilk, so Canon is smart to offer it. I’d probably rather put $700 toward a big telephoto lens if I were in a lavish spending mood.

Even then, I confess this all-purpose model is tempting for the next seven-day backpacking trip or Argentina tour when lugging lots of lenses is a huge effort. I have no such ambivalence with the 50D, though. It’s aimed squarely at photography enthusiasts such as myself, and you can bet I’ll be poring over the reviews to see if the 50D performance matches the promise of the press release.

There’s a rich market for Web sites and services on automotive topics. There are general content and community sites (for example, Edmunds, Autoblog, and CNET’s Car Tech), marque-specific sites (AudiWorld), sites for car show-offs (Car Domain), and utility services (RepairPal; review).

And now there’s DriverSide, whose CEO wants to take them all on with a single site.

DriverSide founder Trevor Traina ran down the things that car owners have to worry about: “repairs, insurance, recalls, resale…” He maintains that there is no good site that actually makes car ownership easy in all of the categories where it matters. DriverSide is his attempt to rectify that–and pick up a piece of the massive automotive advertising economy in the process.

Take this to your mechanic. Good luck.

DriverSide has been out for about two months, and the current beta shows the ambition, but not yet the realization, of Traina’s vision. Like RepairPal, it’s a good helper when you need service. It will show you the cost of a repair or maintenance item, based on a database of repair jobs and information about repair rates in your town. Unlike RepairPal, it doesn’t give you a range, but rather a precise dollar amount, and it lets you print out your own repair order to take to your shop. Whether this will help you get a fair rate from your mechanic I don’t know, but I think it’s a good way to begin the conversation about a repair task.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing that it’s acquiring FairBenjamin, an online service that anonymously shops repair tasks out to local mechanics and connects them with car owners. It should add to DriverSide’s service offerings. Of course, if your car requires diagnosis of an odd or intermittent symptom, neither DriverSide nor any other online tool can reliably deliver it (yet), but for common jobs like oil changes or simple part swaps, it’s a big help.

If you put cars in your “garage” on DriverSide, the system can alert you when scheduled service is due, and when recalls are issued for your car. Other features are getting layered in to DriverSide over time. There’s a resale value estimator that, Traina asserts, is more accurate and fair than the Kelly Blue Book. (DriverSide uses the competing Black Book service.) DriverSide’s estimator will show you the price curve of your car over time; if you’re leasing and want to wiggle out of your contract, it can help you identify the best time to do so.

Currently, DriverSide displays classified ads from partner sites, but it may launch its own ad network. Other services to round out DriverSide include professional and community content: reviews, advice, message boards, Q&A, and so on. You can also buy Terrapass carbon credits through the site.

I would also expect to see insurance shopping layered into the mix, and perhaps a deeper integration into the auto repair market. Given Traina’s ambitions, an OpenTable of car repair may come along at some point.

Traina wanted me (and you) to know that the current version of the site is being reviewed and redesigned. That’s a good thing. I found the navigation confusing, and some of the data incomplete. I hope, for DriverSide’s sake, that the team can make the service easier to use before it layers in too many of the new features. But even though the service is not yet a serious threat to other auto sites, Traina’s vision of what an auto site should be is the most comprehensive I have heard, and I do believe that users and the advertising market will reward him if his company can deliver on it.

The site has a ton of resources for car owners, including the most depressing one: your depreciation curve.

Gratuitous car link:
Trevor Traina covered his participation in the 2008 Gumball rally on his company blog.

M2E Power, a company formed last year to charge electronic gadgets with human motion, has reported back that its system actually works.

Next year it expects to release a charger that can harvest enough motion from walking to replenish cell phones or other small gadgets, like GPS devices.

It says that six hours of cumulative motion can add 30 to 60 minutes of talk time to a cell phone.

M2E Power’s charger, powered by human motion.

(Credit: M2E Power)

The idea is to place the charger inside a purse or backpack and let it charge in the background, said Regan Rowe, director of business development at the company. When fully charged, M2E Power’s device stores enough to recharge a phone at a speed comparable to an AC outlet.

Inside is a lithium ion battery and a series of coils and magnets. When it moves, an electromagnetic field forms around the coils to generate electricity.

The technology, developed in part at Boise State University, optimizes that field to match the slow frequency of human motion and draw a usable current.

The charger unit can be charged by an AC wall socket as well. M2E Power has had discussions with cell phone manufacturers to build the generator directly into a phone.

“Handset manufacturers are under pressure to deal with electronic waste issues and show they are looking for more sustainable practices,” Rowe said. “We’ve seen a lot of interest in this as the wave of the future.”

But because those products take a few years to design and develop, it will likely take at least two years before a self-powered cell phone is commercially available, Rowe said.

The company is also testing how much charge it can draw from the vibration of vehicles, Rowe said. The amount of charge a generator can make varies a great deal with the amount of motion.

“Someone with an old pick-up truck with no shocks will have a glorious time with M2E technology, but someone with a Mercedes will have to spend more time” charging, she said.

Long term, the company is looking at placing self-charging devices in hybrid and electric cars. Putting a self-charging device near windshield wipers or door locks could significantly cut down on a hybrid car’s electrical load and extend its driving range, Rowe said.

The company also has military grants to explore the use of self-powering devices such as night goggles.

Let’s say Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama sent every one of those “here’s my V.P.” text messages from his own cell phone. And let’s say his mean, nasty carrier charged him ten cents for each one. According to Nielsen’s numbers, his bill would’ve been $290,000–that’s because the statistics firm says that the SMS campaign stunt reached 2.9 million people.

The company’s Nielsen Mobile division did the math, monitoring approximately 40,000 SMS short-code lines in the U.S. and coming up with the final tally of 2.9 million.

“The VP message was sent in the late hours of Friday night and is, by many accounts, the single largest mobile marketing event in the U.S. to date,” a release from Nielsen read. The initiative has been moderately criticized because it ultimately didn’t work: the press reported that Obama had chosen Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential pick before anyone had had the chance to hit the “send” button on that fateful text message.

But Nielsen says that doesn’t matter.

“While much has been said of the timing and the scoop by news outlets, Obama’s V.P. text-message still ranks as one of the most important text messages even sent and one of the most successful brand engagements using mobile media,” Nielsen’s report read, adding that an estimated 116 million American use text messaging actively.

“The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients. Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his V.P. pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cell phone numbers.”

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google’s manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Do you vet code for patent or copyright?

No. We have legal people on our lists. We have two main lists that track these things. Open-source licensing for incoming code and open-source releasing for outgoing code. Legal has a presence there. Patents are incredibly tricky.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

(Credit: Fusion Electronics)

Most aftermarket receivers with iPod capabilities include a USB or dock connector dongle, but they leave it to you to figure out where to stow your MP3 player while driving. Fusion Electronics thinks it has solved the problem with the announcement of an internal docking CA-IP500 iPod Receiver. Essentially, what Fusion has done is put an iPod-size slot behind the faceplate that will allow you to slide the digital audio player inside of the receiver.

Looking at the specifications on the company Web site and the images supplied, it looks like making room for the iPod slot meant sacrificing the CD player, which will be a turn off to some. For users with most of their music library ripped to MP3 format, the omission of optical media probably won’t be a big deal. Fusion also makes no mention of whether the faceplate is motorized or not.

(Credit: Fusion Electronics)

Once the iPod is safely stowed behind the OLED, songs will be chosen with a dual-function rotary knob/joystick meant to replicate the function of an iPod click-wheel. Fusion claims the navigation will be “effortless,” but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about receivers and iPods, it’s that speed is king. Many great interfaces have been rendered almost useless by intolerable load times for song browsing.

FUSION’s CA-IP500 is compatible with the iPod Classic (fifth-generation and sixth-generation), the iPod Touch, and the iPod Nano (second-generation and third-generation). Fusion didn’t state how the unit would accommodate these iPods of varying size.