Trouble is BIND is insecure. As security expert Dan Kaminsky discovered in 2008 the cache can be poisoned, people redirected to malware sites.

So do you go with something proprietary, like Skye? You could, but there is another option, OpenDNSSEC, which hit Version 1.0 this week.

OpenDNSSEC adds digital signatures to DNS requests before they are acted upon. It’s still not perfect. Until standards are developed you need to connect with your parent zone registrar periodically to assure security.

But it’s a lot better than nothing. Nothing is, unfortunately, what a lot of sites are offering.

The release of a working version of OpenDNSSEC gives the open source process another shot at getting DNS right. Big companies are earning big money keeping customers’ DNS secure. If you are a big company such protection will look cheap.

If you are not a big company, however, you may not be able to afford that kind of security. The fact so many companies can’t afford it also helps the bad guys.

Like everyone else I don’t know everything, and I do make mistakes. But I try to fix my mistakes and when I don’t know something I know who to call, or how to find who to call.

OpenDNSSEC should be on every good security manager’s bookmarks.

The term cloud computing is becoming problematic, as it becomes evident this is just the next evolution of what we used to call the mainframe.

All we’re doing is using virtualization on server farms, meaning your applications and data don’t have to live in a particular location, freeing capacity and simplifying things.

But this is a very big deal. Virtualization eliminates a key advantage of Windows, something Microsoft must respond to. It accentuates scaling advantages that Linux, with its Unix heritage, has long had, which is why Red Hat is doing all it can to explore the meaning of that.

One way is through Infinispan, an open source project meant to reduce the bottleneck databases now have on cloud computing. By building a new data structure format, one compatible with a virtualized environment, Linux could do to Oracle what it has already done to Windows, make it less relevant in high-end computing.

The need for such tools is only going to accelerate as companies like Eucalyptus push clouds as something anyone can have. This is computing evolution in action. Something becomes possible, then commonplace, and it eventually gets cheap as chips.

What happened to Silicon Graphics in the 1990s, high-end graphics moving from dedicated workstations to chips and software, is going to happen in this decade to Microsoft’s and Oracle’s market advantages. Open source is grinding down those advantages through cloud computing.

It’s the big story of this decade.

The phone network is going away. Everything is going digital.

This is already taking place. Cell networks are all-digital, because you can cram more calls into less spectrum by digitizing and compressing them.

Millions of people like me are dumping their phone lines and taking numbers with us. We save money, it’s more convenient, and it’s a more efficient use of the resource. Large enterprises have also transferred their phone service to digital networks. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) saves money.

Now the revolution is hitting the small and medium-sized business community, the last holdouts against digitization. Open source is helping.

Digium calls its program Extreme Phone Makeover. Using open source Asterisk, productized as the Switchvox Unified Communications system and Polycom phones, Digium promises to give you a 21st century communication system, in order to demonstrate what this can mean for everyone else.

What it means is better service at lower cost. By running calls over the Internet rather than through a dedicated phone line long distance charges go away. Instead of using an entire line you’re using a portion of shared digital capacity on that line. You now have the bandwidth to do other things, like conferencing and database look-ups.

One network, digitized, instead of two networks, one digital and one analog, makes all kinds of economic sense.

It makes sense for everyone. ADSL runs at “just” 1.5 Mbps mainly because it’s taking up just a portion of your phone line. The rest is still analog, so you can talk on the phone while your kid is downloading The Daily Show in the next room.

If that copper were all-digital you could have more bandwidth. DSL would run faster, and it would be effective over longer distances.

By lighting some of its dark fiber and seeking applications, Google is accelerating this important trend. Increase demand for faster digital services while reducing demand for analog services and phone companies are bound to respond.

Voice is a low-bandwidth service. Text is an even lower-bandwidth service. The time is long past for moving these services onto digital networks and clearing out space for better broadband.

Digium and Google are doing the phone companies a favor by showing them the way forward. Disruptive is good.

The blog post from FAST CTO Bjorn Olstad was downright apologetic, nothing like the spin Microsoft is noted for.

Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change.

Doesn’t sound like change he believes in, does it?

Microsoft spent $1.2 billion on FAST just two years ago, and critics say many of those users are left stranded by its decision.

But that’s not even approximately true. The Apache Foundation has two open source alternatives, Solr and Lucene. Paid support for both Solr and Lucene is available from Lucid Imagination.

Lucid is already bragging on its Web site that its customers include the White House, Netflix, and C|Net, from which ZDNet emerged. (CBS is now parent to both.) Not bad for an outfit that conjured up its first outside investment just last year. (Note: C|Net blogger Matt Asay is on Lucid’s advisory board.)

On Lucid’s blog, marketing guy David Fishman said the company is unsurprised by the Microsoft decision.

If even the FAST development team itself needed to drop everything to make FAST work on dot-net, how hard would it be for a FAST-on-Not-Windows customer?

Fishman was being polite in placing a picture of Claude Rains as Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca on his blog post. ZDNet does not have to be polite. Hence, Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons.

Clouds took another step toward being just-another-computer this week as Eucalyptus and Terracotta began joint marketing of a system that mimics the Amazon EC2 cloud with scaled Java.

Both companies are open source. (Picture from ZDNet Asia.)

Eucalyptus is bringing its version of the Amazon AWS technology to the party while Terracotta totes the Java. A Webinar is planned for February 25 to introduce the system and you can sign up here.

IBM has been building private clouds for a few years, both selling and leasing systems around the world. With the new, as-yet unnamed system (Eucacotta? Terralyptus?) the two say fundamental problems with scaling access to SQL databases can now be addressed efficiently.

Terracotta has already done work in transaction processing, while Eucalapytus lists NASA among its customers.

Terracotta CEO Amit Pandey predicted the new system would be “ideal for enterprises that are adopting the cloud as their IT infrastructure.”

The announcement will be a big help for Amazon, which leads the cloud race so far but is being hammered in the media by Google and Microsoft.

The system being delivered will allow companies to build clouds that can easily off-load to Amazon, or pick up Amazon instances, creating “hybrid” clouds with more capacity than a company may be able to afford for itself.

Eucalyptus is expecting to sign other, similar ideas throughout the year as it seeks to replace the server farms of the past with private clouds which feature virtualization and integrate with Amazon’s infrastructure.

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.

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

The beauty of open source is that it prevents one monolithic entity from dominating any software market. There’s plenty of room for Google’s mobile browser, Mozilla’s mobile browser and other proprietary and open browsers to play in the burgeoning space.

(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.

Is it too late?

(I found this on the Symbian home page. Any idea what it is? Or what it means? Anyone? Bueller? )

Symbian dominated the mobile world for years. Its real time operating systems powered nearly every phone out there. The Symbian Foundation includes five of the finest old-line mobile makers — Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson — along with China’s Huawei.

But the world has moved on. Symbian is no longer the leader. Apple is. Symbian is no longer even the momentum play. Google is. Despite all the talk of tablets and connected devices, there is still no there there.

Fact is, Symbian needed a lot more than Nokia was willing or able to give it in order to be competitive. The group says its goal is for Nokia to control just half the code base next year. The rest of it better be something special.

While backward compatibility matters with desktops and servers, it doesn’t seem to matter much in mobile devices, which are often priced to be thrown away. My son accidentally washed his Symbian phone in the laundry this week. I didn’t panic. We just got him another one.

Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens. Carriers like Verizon Wireless openly bragged about their control over customers, how every program running on their gear was pre-approved, and how they were getting a cut on every bit. The networks were strong, the devices weak.

It’s not that way anymore. We are evolving toward a world where the devices are strong but the networks weak. A lot of iPhone data traffic runs over WiFi. It’s the Internet, stupid.

The result is there is a lot more demand for bits, but carriers don’t get as much per-bit as they did before. The result is that consumers look at their devices as being more akin to computers than to phones.

This is not the world Symbian made. This is the world it is trying to enter. This is the world Symbian’s partners, on the whole, ignored as it was coming on. Why should they be trusted to lead now?

You know what would be great fun, though? If somehow, Symbian made me eat my words three years from now. That would make my day. So go ahead and try.

ZDNet Asia blogger Frederic Muller, who has been promoting Linux in China for some time, says it’s about ownership and getting credit.

I believe there is something to that. (The picture is part of a screen capture from the U.S. home page of HTC.)

Chinese businessmen today don’t really bow to Mao or even Adam Smith. They take after Charles Darwin. Despite their intense competition, they are always looking for a way to differentiate themselves, to stand out, to get above the commodity rat race and have an easier time of it.

Open source does not offer that. You make a Linux box, you make the big effort to succeed with it, and your competitors can have the same box on the street the next day. On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, but in open source it’s hard to tell your breed.

Ties to western companies with proprietary advantages that could assure a steady stream of orders were better business. Whether the advantage was that of a carrier, a technology or a brand mattered little. What counted was an assurance of regular checks with which to pay the bills.

Google is rapidly changing this. We talk about Google in terms of its relations with the government and its search engine, but its Android and Chromium projects have tapped into something different.

That is, Android offers the hope of proprietary advantage. Tweak Android in the right way, offer the right mix of features, and you too can become a brand name. Anyone even know who HTC was before their Android phone came out?

Chromium holds the same promise. Tweak Chromium in the right way, with the right mix of features, and you can become the next HTC. That means climbing up the value chain, becoming a brand, grabbing a bigger piece of your product’s value add.

Ubuntu lacked the muscle needed to push Chinese manufacturers toward this realization. Google has it, thanks to its dominance in search. Google is a brand. Google has now proven it can build Chinese brands.

But the Chinese success with Google is only half the story. Replacing the carriers and Apple with Google won’t bring Chinese manufacturers the heaven they seek.

That comes when you start digging into open source repositories, looking at software from the user’s point of view, becoming their advocate, and delivering what they want, with your name on the front of the device.

Once Chinese manufacturers realize that open source can give them independence, not only from Apple but from Google and every other foreign entity, China will embrace open source.

It took years for the industry to come up with anything even close to the iPhone, and Apple raked in the profits from that. One-on-one, its designers and marketing people can beat anyone.

But Google and open source have changed the game. Combine an open source process with Chinese manufacturing, and Apple’s best features can be copied, distributed, made and sold almost before Apple itself can get them out the door.

It doesn’t matter if Apple patents the iPad software. Programmers can always find other ways to simulate functionality. There is more than one way to pinch a screen.

So Chrome, which last year was seen as a Netbook replacement, the long-awaited desktop Linux that works, is suddenly seen as an iPad replacement, at least a valid competitor.

Chinese manufacturers are showing screens ripped from laptops called iPad competitors. Within a week speculation has moved from how Apple will extend its lead to how Google will match it.

Throughout the last decade Apple had a secret sauce. It knew the customer. It did the design work, the marketing work, the channel prep, the hype. It made the deals with the guaranteed profits. Then it shipped the designs off to China and they came back profitable. It was good.

Well, game over. Google doesn’t market as well as Apple. It doesn’t design as well. It doesn’t even take the risks of manufacturing and putting its brand name out there — the Nexus One is an HTC product.

Yet still Google is eating Apple’s cheese, first with the media and soon with the channel.

Jobs is boxed in. He can’t wave an American flag over the iChrome because he’s using Chinese manufacturers, too. He can’t make a patent case, because the market will be gone before a case can come to trial. And he can’t guarantee his partners fat profits, because mass cloning of features means there are no fat profits to be had.

The beneficiaries of all this are the same people who were being squeezed by Apple’s dominance of the iPhone. Chinese manufacturers on the one side, American consumers on the other. Both now have alternatives.

And this is what open source does. It squeezes out monopoly profits of all kinds, including those resulting from innovation. It’s evolution in action. And even Apple’s business process is no longer enough to hold it off.

Yeah, if I were Steve Jobs, I would certainly call that evil.

Having followed this issue for several years now, I have something important to say about it.

It’s a make-or-buy decision.

The choice is not always a simple one.

Making stuff means taking responsibility for it. It means hiring people both to make it and maintain it. It means committing to spending money both today and tomorrow. It’s a policy that’s difficult to turn back from.

For many decades the U.S. government was a maker. Even when contracts were handed out for big projects, the government remained the general contractor. Over time it became responsible for hundreds of thousands of mid-level employees, paid on a GSA schedule, who were loyal to the idea of government doing things.

If it sounds like make-or-buy is a political choice, it is.

The Bush Administration was a buyer. I’m not just talking here about Halliburton and Blackwater. But throughout the government, and throughout the Administration, the attitude was it was better to buy what was needed than to take the responsibility of making it.

There were, the Bush Administration felt, sound reasons for this. Private contractors owed loyalty to their employer, not the government. Contractors could control employees in ways the government could not. The hope was that profit motive and flexibility would both save money and deliver good service.

This was carried into the IT sphere. I did several stories at ZDNet Healthcare about efforts by private contractors to destroy the VA’s open source VistA system — starving it of funds, driving away the best employees, centralizing contributions, and eventually replacing it through contracts.

My sources were former government employees. The ex-VA employees stayed in touch with former colleagues and got the story out. This was not a big story, but it held a lesson, namely the risk inherent in having government employees building vital infrastructure.

The Obama Administration has reversed this policy. Its appointees believe strongly in the value of open source, not only at the VA but elsewhere. The National Health Information Network, built by Harris Corp. under contract, is now lauded mainly for its use of open source software components. It’s called the Health Internet.

As Brian Klepper and David Kibbe wrote when this re-branding was announced, this becomes an issue of control. In this case, who will control health data interchange. In the larger context, who will control the systems which result from using open source.

Making things creates constituencies, within government, both on behalf of a project and on behalf of continued government funding. Some may argue this risk exceeds the value of using open source.

I disagree. I say we have run the experiment. We have tried making, and we have tried buying. I say making makes more sense in the long run, and that a government which only sees things in terms of the short time horizons of its political term is short-sighted indeed.

Oh, one more thing, Doug. Leave the facial hair to the experts. I think you’re handsome enough.

It follows by just a few weeks its becoming a top-level sponsor of Apache. (What is Oprah Winfrey doing on a tech blog? Patience, grasshopper.)

Both moves represent good open source citizenship. Cynics will say it’s the least the company can do. But while PHP is open source, it’s not subject to a copyleft license. And in tough economic times it’s easy to justify keeping your hand in your pocket, far away from your wallet.

I argue that both moves serve an important business purpose. Facebook is targeting the Internet Generation, people who grew up with the resource (like my own kids, now 21 and 18). These consumers understand, as their parents did not, the obligations that come with benefiting from open source.

I’m not saying my daughter has a Richard Stallman poster over her bed. She doesn’t. (Although if you made one with black light it could probably make some money.) Something more subtle is at work. Everyone likes to believe the companies they support are good citizens. These are visible ways of proving that.

While copyleft licenses bring a sharing requirement to those who benefit from open source, there is seldom much compulsion involved. If your company adds a tweak to a GPL program and keeps it secret, the FSF police aren’t going to be banging on your door. (Give up the code. We have your server surrounded.)

But the brand equity of any service business is based in part on the public image it projects. I would argue that Facebook overcame MySpace in large part because of a perception that MySpace was trying to control consumers while Facebook had a more open attitude. With switching costs near zero reputation matters.

The fact that all this makes good business sense for Facebook should not, however, lead to the cynical assumption of “they’re just doing it for the money.” Contributions of code and cash for projects is a voluntary activity. The phrase “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” applies.

The point is that in an open source world, how you treat open source communities can make a difference on the bottom line. When switching costs are zero, anything an Internet company can do to prove it’s a good Netizen is both useful and good.

It seems Facebook groks that. It’s a good thing. You get free code and you get free code, everybody gets free code.

(If you don’t think Oprah Winfrey made up in reputation more than those cars cost her, you don’t know business. And if you think she only did it for that reason, you are too cynical to succeed at it, business grasshopper)