Ksplice Uptrack, whose general availability was announced today, eliminates the need to reboot Linux servers to perform monthly updates and security patches, the Cambridge, Mass. company said.

ZDnet wrote about the technology in early 2008 based on a tip from Linux Foundation’s Ted Ts’o, who saw great promise with the technology.

The subscription service that is based on the MIT technology allows the Linux kernel to be updated live without restarting or disrupting applications: no downtime. This is key because of the frequent updating of the Linux kernel.

Ksplice Uptrack is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, and OpenVZ. The subscription fee is 3.95 per month per system after a 30-day free trial. A free version is available for Ubuntu, the company also announced.

“On the coolness scale, this is like changing out a car’s engine while speeding down the highway,” said Keith Winstein, a business development spokesman for the company.

DreamHost, Media Temple and HostGator are among 40 early adopters of the technology.

Ksplice developer Jeff Arnold, a former MIT graduate student, is Ksplice Inc’s CEO. Here’s what he said upon the product release today: “Now system administrators can keep their systems up to date
without coordinating outages, and they don’t need to come in Sunday at
2 a.m. to take everything down,” Arnold said in a press release. “They can avoid the biggest headache of server maintenance, with better availability and a smaller window of vulnerability than ever before.”

Microsoft’s strategy against open source uses authority. It ties up institutions that are authoritative, that have power over professions, creating a benefit for the institution that ties its members to proprietary Microsoft tools.

I have covered this extensively at ZDNet Healthcare regarding products like Amalga and Healthvault, but here is an example that goes beyond medicine and is specifically about open source.

The British Library is the authority here. It’s a great library, with extensive online resources. It does a lot of outreach, too. The picture is from its business and IP centre, which targets entrepreneurs.

What Microsoft has done with the library is an open source project called the Research Information Centre Framework. It’s a virtual research framework, helping them manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in 21st century research.

OK, where’s the catch?

Built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the RIC extends the core MOSS functionality to meet the needs to academic researchers engaged in collaborative research projects

Gee, doc, you’re not a Microsoft shop? Even if you can connect with these resources, you’re always going to be second-class in a group project that depends on them.

Which is sort of the point. To Microsoft open source is not an end in itself. It is a marketing tool. It is a way to gain lock-in with important customer sets.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the way of the world. But sometimes it’s nice to look behind the nice worm and see the hook embedded therein, so you don’t get caught.

The lady in the picture, by the way, is Mandy Haberman, an inventor best known for the Anywayup Cup. She is also a campaigner for patent rights.

Windows 7 ads are Madison Avenue at its best. “Windows 7 was my idea,” users say, and the TV ads feature them at their most heroic, as male models taking showers and being virile while they imagine features Microsoft wound up implementing.

Google ads are all Mountain View. Its Super Bowl ad was a shortened version of one of its search stories, a series of Google searches that told the story of a man who met a woman in Paris, married and had a child. In 30 seconds.

Google gets it. Microsoft does not, Matt writes. But what does Google get exactly? (They got something Scott Adams wrote about, in Dilbert, back in 1995.)

I think what they get is that people get tech. People today are comfortable around computers. Nearly all people are. So talking to us in English about features, about what your tech can do for me, is far more acceptable than it was 20 years ago.

The jargon of strips like Dilbert, in other words, is now understood by everyone. We all get the joke.

This goes well beyond TV. Take the Google comic book. It’s techies talking tech, but in simple English, and not the kind which assumes you don’t know what’s behind the words being said. It doesn’t talk down. It talks at.

It’s that, but it’s also a Manga. It’s as if Google programmers are living in a Tokyo of the mind. The pictures break up the pitch, turn the pitch into a story. I think Madison Avenue believes this kind of thing goes over peoples’ heads, and 20 years ago that might have been true.

But no more.

There is another key Google communication tool, one that relates directly to open source, but also relates to Google’s financial advantages over other open source companies like Ubuntu.

These are its Software Development Kits, its SDKs.

SDKs are often written alongside code. They’re coding documents for coders. Getting through them separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the Americans from the Chinese.

Google developer documents aren’t like that. Here’s a piece of one taken at random:

Content providers are activated when they’re targeted by a request from a ContentResolver. The other three components — activities, services, and broadcast receivers — are activated by asynchronous messages called intents. An intent is an Intent object that holds the content of the message.

Sounds like nonsense, but each term mentioned here is defined before it’s used. It’s easy to follow, it’s organized, it’s structured. The sentences are short. It’s thought out by people who are well paid to translate geek into English, or any other language.

In the early years of open source proprietary companies like Apple and Microsoft had a big advantage in this area. They had the revenues that let them hire the tech writers who could do this kind of thing.

Open source projects did not. Some open source advocates even prided themselves (some still do) on how poorly they communicate what they are doing.

This is changing rapidly, because Google has raised everyone’s game. Take a look at these documents for a simple open source tool called UltraDefrag. It’s got pictures, bullets, and simple language. It’s well done.

Point is that time has changed the tech community. We know more than we once did, or we have been replaced by kids who do. Google speaks to this audience, eye to eye, and has raised the game of every other open source developer in the process.

Google is taking Microsoft down with the tools of journalism.

He’s a programmer, and an honest man. So when he finds something he likes he says so, without artifice, and that’s all it means.

I hope people will understand that following Torvalds’ blog post extolling the Google Nexus One.

Apparently Linus has the same problem my son does (along with millions of other people). Directions are not his strong suit. So for him, Google navigation was a killer app.

Trouble is, in many ways Linus Torvalds is not “just a programmer.” He’s a brand name. He is, however reluctantly, a celebrity. So a simple blog post can read like an endorsement.

Put it this way. If Steve Ballmer picked one of the many Windows Mobile phones and said, “this is the one I like,” other makers of Windows Mobile phones might be upset. So he doesn’t.

Linus just did.

Google is trying to build a competitive ecosystem in Android, and Android is not the only Linux-based system in the mobile space. It’s like saying which one of your children you like best.

If you want to go the full paranoid on this one, you could even call Linus unpatriotic. After all, Motorola has staked its future on Android, and here he is making nice with a device from HTC, a Chinese company! (I know. Motorola has had its stuff made in China for years.)

This is as crazy as Jay Leno appearing in an ad for David Letterman’s TV show. It’s inconceivable! (I don’t think the word means what you think it does.)

It was the split within Oracle over mySQL. (Picture from Oracle’s Collaborate 2007 event.)

Ken Jacobs, who was one of CEO Larry Ellison’s first 20 hires, says he is leaving the company after seeking to run mySQL and being turned down.

Jacobs gets credit for keeping InnoDB moving forward after its 2005 acquisition. This was a big win for open source.

InnoDB was an integral part of mySQL, and there were fears then Oracle planned to box-in mySQL by controlling its storage engine. But that didn’t happen, Oracle was able to claim open source bonafides.

Now Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, is in charge of mySQL, which could lead to the same fears expressed over InnoDB when Jacobs took it on.

Screven, however, also has some open source mojo. He was interviewed by Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin in 2008, touting the company’s commitment to Linux. “We didn’t view GPL as something that was going to get in the way of business in the least,” he told Zemlin.

Trouble is that while Linux is an enterprise product, and has long had substantial server market share, mySQL began as something smaller and simpler, not scaled. The code base was moving toward greater scale before Oracle bought it, but during the debate even open source advocates like Matt Asay admitted it wasn’t a direct competitor.

This was always at the heart of the dispute. Would open source be allowed to develop a true competitor to Oracle? Would Web start-ups have to make a costly switch from open source as they scaled, or commit to open source in their business plans, raising costs substantially?

Internet success happens in Internet time. A start-up subsisting on pizza, even a small open source project, can be discovered by the masses and become world famous within a year. Will there be an easy migration path, or will that path be slammed shut?

Ask Edward Screven.

Hunter was named the new executive director of the CodePlex Foundation late last week, and spoke to ZDNet Open Source.

The CodePlex Foundation is based in Seattle, but Hunter lives in New Hampshire and works in the Boston suburbs. That may prove an asset as Hunter works to distance the foundation from its roots as a Microsoft open source site.

“My responsibility will be to embrace the business community,” she said, adding she plans on hiring a technical director soon. She also plans to develop something like the old Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) user advisory board, covering a range of industries beyond software.

“One primary area we’re trying to focus is the commercial software development area, and certainly the east coast is not only a center for software companies but large enterprise IT shops,” she said.

Hunter is the foundation’s first employee. Even the permanent board of directors has yet to be named. This gives her enormous influence on the group’s direction. But she emphasized to ZDNet that the direction has already been set, and that her plan is to execute on it.

“It’s not necessary for one company to shoulder the burden of this effort. There are plenty of companies that can benefit. Over the next few weeks I’m going to create a program and set of benefits for those people we want to sign on board.”

The direction was described by Sam Ramji, a former Microsoft executive now with Sonoa Systems, when the new foundation was set up last year. That is, provide a way for Fortune 500 companies outside the software industry to make contributions, gain the benefits of open source, while maintaining some code control.

Andy Updegrove is pleased with the appointment, noting her work with United Linux and the OSDL, which was merged with the Free Standards Group to create the present Linux Foundation.

“Paula knows her way around the block,” he wrote, and most stories about the appointment emphasize she’s an open source “veteran.” This makes me feel old. Hunter got her degree from Bentley College in 1983, when I was five years into my own journalism career.

I’m a huge Matt Asay fan (right). Always have been.

Matt is the Anthony Bourdain (below) of open source. By that I mean he cooks better than most cooks, writes better than most writers, and he has made himself a big time brand. He’s also hungry for more.

One might compare his move to Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, with Bourdain’s move to The Travel Channel. It means he now has a palette big enough for his talents.

This should not be taken as a knock against Alfresco. A content management system is an important thing.

But it’s a bit like Food Network. It’s about software, like Food Network is about food. And while Matt Asay can program, while he knows software, he has always shown — especially through his writing at C|Net — that he is about something more than that.

I believe what Matt is about is selling transformation. He’s also about putting things together, and then executing on that understanding.

This is what Canonical, and Ubuntu need. They have a great story to tell. Ubuntu is a big success. But it is a limited one.

Ubuntu sells itself as a desktop, but its money comes from servers. Ubuntu sells itself as universal, but its success comes from localization. Ubuntu is a wonderful dream, but a prosaic reality. It sells itself as the shining city on the hill, when it’s really just a small attractive village.

Matt Asay can change that. His new title is chief operating officer.

“As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company’s strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”

Matt is going to try and make the trains in London run on time from his base in Utah. A neat trick.

But I think he’ll pull it off. He can give Ubuntu strategic, practical directions, and he has the operational experience to know when goals are being met and when they aren’t.

In other words he now has his own show, which he can take anywhere in the world he wants to go. No reservations.

At his Global Guerillas site, John Robb (right) calls the conservative Tea Party open source.

He compares it, in this context, to open source warfare. I don’t think that’s a compliment, because by that definition Al Qaeda is open source. But let’s continue.

Robb says that Tea Party activists swarm, that their movement has no barriers to entry, and that it consists of a lot of small groups, even individuals, with a variety of different motives for their actions.

This is the point where I, personally, have to say we’ve extended the open source metaphor a little far.

There are a host of American political movements from the past that emerged similarly. The Netroots early in the last decade. The Far Left of the late 1960s. The Populists of the 1890s. Even the Know Nothings in the 1850s.

I don’t think Millard Fillmore was open source. Do you?

New political movements are seldom tied directly to political parties. Absorption takes place slowly.  And it tends to be a mutual thing.

Tea Party activists are running primaries against regular Republicans all around the country — they’re trying to take the party over.

The Netroots are still not happy Democrats. They stand on certain political principles, like the Tea Party people. They organize online, like the Tea Party people. They were, when they began, all about grievances and the stupidity of government, just like the Tea Party people.

What has happened, in our time, is that the Internet has given people the opportunity to self-organize, and to act on that self-organization. The Internet lets political movements of all types rise quickly from the bottom-up. This is in contrast to the way government must act, which is from the top-down.

This President came to power through a great bottom-up movement, some of which he organized, some of which he co-opted, some of which was drawn to him by the times, and all of which moved as one thanks to the expert use of Internet tools.

But once this President achieved power, his attempt to turn the movement into a tool for governing quickly fell apart. Government is a sausage factory, and one tour was enough for most activists to go screaming back to where they came from.

John Robb has a way of making everything the Internet is capable of seem like a threat. Violence is a threat to order, and to the extent that the Internet allows those with violent intent to self-organize there is danger there.

But the Internet can also organize anger into something useful. That’s what open source is. It’s something useful.

As open source has evolved, bottom-up tools like Sourceforge have mostly given way to top-down tools like custom forges, and to company-specific sites like Google Code and CodePlex.

Successful political movements marry bottom-up activism with some top-town structure. They have this in common with big open source projects like Linux itself.

This tends to be organic, a market process. Which I think is my real objection to Robb’s analogy.

Because at its heart, open source is a market process. It’s about building, about saying yes to something, even if that something is merely an alternative to something that already exists, like Windows or Microsoft Office.

Open source is about saying yes we can, not no you can’t. And about proving it.

I’ve wondered the same thing about Firefox Mobile, which debuted on Jan 29. Like Symbian on the proprietary mobile OS front, Mozilla’s Firefox has been the leading open source browser for more than six years. Yet it only released its mobile offering, code named Fennec, less than a week ago, and for only one platform: the Nokia Maemo 5 OS.

In the last 15 months, Google’s open source Android mobile operating system and included browser — based on the open source WebKit application framework — has gained some market share and skyrocketed in popularity. Motorola’s Android-based Droid is oft compared to Apple’s iPhone and Gartner predicts that Google’s mobile OS will be the second leading mobile OS platform by 2012.

So does that mean that the mobile version of Firefox is too late? It’s hard to call this early in the game. There are numerous complaints about the current Android 2.1 browser. But certainly it would have been much better if Mozilla jumped into the mobile browser market earlier and grabbed the spotlight away from specialty offerings like Opera Mini.

Mozilla has a version of Fennec under development for Android and an Alpha 3 release for Microsoft Windows Mobile available now. There are some who look forward to running Fennec on Android but based on reports it will be some time before it sees the light of day.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s reputation in the open source world evolves. Android is open source, and released under the Apache license, but not all of Google’s code is open source. It will also be interesting to gauge customer reaction to Fennec’s performance on Nokia devices.

Of course, there’s tons of market share to be divided.

Mobile Firefox screenshot

(Two members of the Internet Generation are pictured at right, in 1991. The one on the left is now a video game expert. The one on the right likes Facebook.)

My baby boom generation defined TV, starting in that epochal decade. We defined it as an audience, and in time we took control of it.

Our parents invented TV. They created its vocabulary. The half-hour sitcom, the hour-long adventure show, the interview show for Today or Tonight. But Tomorrow was ours.

The same thing has happened with the Internet. My generation created it. We built it. We understand its pipes and how it works. We defined things like http://, Web sites and e-mail and chat. We created its vocabulary.

But the Internet belongs to the Internet Generation. People like my kids who grew up around the medium, who take it for granted. They don’t care about its plumbing, or how it works. They’re not techies. They’re users.

Two new Pew surveys show that this line has been crossed. A torch has been passed to a new generation. Users now dominate, people who grew up in a world of Web sites and video games and any question answered as fast as you can ask it.

This also means leadership has been passed to a new medium. TV today is what radio was in my day. It’s background noise. The Internet is the new medium. Use is nearly universal among those under 30. And it’s constant.

One other point is that the big screen no longer defines the medium. The average teen owns three or more online devices. Screen sizes vary, resolution varies, the size of the pipe can vary from moment to moment.

The balance between doing-and-being has also shifted. There is less writing and more reading.

I say being as opposed to watching. You don’t just watch the Internet as you did TV. A new medium has a new vocabulary, new folkways, new habits of thought.

I consider this great news, not just for the Internet but for open source. Open source is a product of the Internet. The friction-free economics of open source, of contributions coming from anywhere, distribution costs of zero, all these came from the Internet.

Open source is attuned to Internet values, the values of the new generation. Its future is secure.

The kids are all right.