DivaBlog

At the first night of EuroFoo, and already I'm happy!

Foo is an invitational conference that's put on by O'Reilly....its sort of a camp-out for geeks. This is only the second ever Foo and the first ever in Europe, where O'Reilly hopes to host a European OSCon sometime next year...so this meeting is a chance to hook up people active in the European F/OSS scene. But it so much more than that. There's a whimsy to Foo that's lost at regular conferences (sadly even at O'Reilly ones). It is much more reminiscent of 1990s era Apple WWDC events, because people are encouraged to play, to get to know each other and to have fun (not just to circuit between flashy keynotes and endless sessions). At those old WWDC events there were always (pre-MindStorm) lego contests and afternoon junkfood binges and pinball tournaments...and if your demo crashed (of course there were tons of real sessions too) you had to do pushups while the system rebooted ;-).

So tomorrow I'll be co-presenting on "Guerilla Evangelism" with the enthusiastic Zak Greant. Then on Sunday I'll co-present with Rishab Ghosh on "Open Source in Developing Countries"...but the sessions I'm really looking forward to attending are the ladies from the BBC talking about how their open source archive project and the guys from this week's FOAF conference talking about what they decided (oh and the lock-picking session). Conferences like these remind me why I was interested in software to begin with. The people are so weird and wonderful, and so enthusiastic about projects that let them express themselves.

So, I'll blog more about EuroFoo in the next couple of day, but in the meantime check out that funky clocktower here at the University of Twente, where EuroFoo is being held. This university has all kinds of whimsical features...What a perfect place for a Foo!

Just read the /. story about how the IOC decided to forbid Olympic atheletes from blogging, in order to protect the scoop rights of the media giants who have paid for the right to "cover" the Games. This is just so enfuriating (and confirms the nagging thought that all the Games are anymore is a big business where the atheletes are exploited like trained animals at a circus). Evidently the media giants and the IOC realize just how contrived and boring Olympic coverage is and the last thing they want to see is authentic voice associated with their circus. And clearly Olympic atheletes have no right of Freedom of Speech. Do they lose their medals if they talk?

For those of you who try to read me regularly...I know I've been disappointing lately. I was on a much needed vacation for the first part of August. We go to Lark in the Morning Camp, which is about the best place to go if you like hand-made music (and camping...to love Lark Camp you've gotta love camping).

Anyway today I'm on the road again traveling for Open Source, so there will be more to blog.

My Notes on what was said (your mileage may vary and apologies for no links and potential misspellings). -Danese

Tim asked how many Java developers at JavaONE were working in Open Source (because he believes that all the interesting stuff in Java is happening in Open Source, like Struts for instance) and he got not many hands. Of course here at OSCon all the developers who are interested in Java are also interesting in Open Source. Wants this panel to explore questions of whether the status quo way Java has been handled is NOT working...

Eric Raymond (ESR) threw down the fundamental idea of Open Source in the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Bruno Souza is an open source developer, but also the leader of the largest Java User Group in the world (in Brazil). Simon Phipps used to push Java at IBM and then went to work for Sun.

ESR says Open Source developers don't trust tools that someone else has an exclusive lock on. This is the result of bitter past experience. Eric says the right to fork is like the right to sue, the right to strike or the right to bear arms. You many not want to exercise them, but once someone tries to take one of them away from you.

(Tim): So Simon...is Java open enough?

(ESR): No!

Simon Phipps agrees that the problem is trusting the tools. In 1995 Sun was trying to solve that same problem by creating Java. Java (and its emphasis on compatibility) is one attempt at solving the need for "freedom" from vendor lock-in by forcing all vendors to follow an agreed-upon standard. Open Source is another attempt at solving the vendor lock-in problem (via the "freedom" of code availability). So this debate boils down to a need to bridge between two large and successful communities of software freedom. Just as the word "Free" is not enough to describe both "gratis" and "libre", the word "Java" isn't enough. There are many parts of Java and some of them are already "Free" in the Libre sense. Java isn't open enough in the sense that although it is now possible for a compatible open Java to exist, there isn't one yet.

(Tim): So, Bruno...is Java open enough?

Well, in Brazil participation on the JCP lets Java developers specify what Sun and others implement. This is working for for now, but Bruno believes there needs to be an Open Source implementation eventually and that JCP 2.5 allows for this. He says his friends in Brazil would be willing to participate on an open source implementation.

(Tim): Audience...is Java open enough?

Brian Behlendorf...explaining the Apache position says that the JSPA version associated wtih JCP 2.5 (which Apache signed) allows for open source Java compatible re-implementations. The Apache movement sees incompatibility as a bug to be fixed but not necessarily regulated by legal means. Brian says Sun promised (circa JCP 2.5) that Apache would not be required to pass on compatibility requirements downstream. Recently Apache has noticed that the TCK license has a clause in it that doesn't work with the Open Source Definition...that code created in open source at Apache can't be reused without compatibility (required passdown of compatibility). He says that Sun and Apache are negotiating on this issue now and hopefully it will be resolved.

(Tim): Simon, do you want to comment?

This is an artifact of the fact that Sun is dealing with TWO paradigms of creating software...ONE that is bounded by competitors who want to destroy the value proposition by advantaging their implementation against all others, and SECOND from developers who want Sun to "give up control".

(Brian): Microsoft already created a fork...its called C#.

(Tim): Was surprised by number of developers at JavaONE who were cheering for Sun's stewardship of compatibility.

(Brian): Maybe we the F/OSS community need to get the word out how F/OSS supports compatibility.

(Eric): In the F/OSS world, we have languages that don't fork because its in nobody's interest to fork. Why doesn't that convinced Sun that the same can happen for Java?

(Simon): Because the F/OSS community isn't the problem...its the substantial marketshare of big companies who ARE incented to fork.

(Bruno): Notice that IBM sells WebSphere, not Java Application Servers. It is true that we've seen them provide SWT outside of the JCP system. When you hear IBM telling customers that they can ship a JVM without SWING which will be faster, that's a problem for WORA.

(Simon): Because programmers need WORA to work...they need everything there so they know what they can depend on it.

More Audience Questions...

(Russ Nelson): Why isn't there a good Java interpretor in OSS?

(Eric): There is! The problem is the libraries.

(Russ Nelson): Then we should dig in and write them!

(Bruno): Agrees...Its all possible for us to do now. We as a community need to go off and do that now.

(Brian): What we learned at Apache is that to implement the spec, you need to read the spec. To read the spec you need to sign up to the copyright notice (which is bounded by the JSPA). Those restrictions keep companies from committing resources to Open Java implementations and THAT is something the F/OSS community would need to hope to do a compatible re-implementation. Apache is working to try to fix this one problem licensing problem, which they hope will open the floodgates.

(Simon): Predicts that there will BE open source Java (possibly based on Cafe, GNU Classpath) real soon now.

(Tim): Has never understood why Sun gets hung up on theorhetical worries and loses all credit for the much good work they have really done.

(Audience member Scott Dietzen) : Would like to propose a middle ground based on control of the Java Namespace and Brand. (Scott works for BEA and this is their current proposal) to the JCP

(Brian): Apache have also proposed this to Sun. Nothing would give you the right to use Sun's trademarks without their approval in this proposal.

(ESR): That would be compatible for OSD.

(Simon): This is worth pursuing (in his opinion, but he isn't going to speak for Sun on this).

(Bruno): Feels this type of debate is important because there are two communities here who are seemingly at odds...There ARE Java developers who are worried that Java isn't open source yet. Sun needs to hear this.

(Tim): But maybe also the F/OSS community needs to hear that there IS evidently support in the Java community for Sun's point of view among their key constituents. So there needs to be more dialog...How can we get this discussion to happen more constructively?

(Audience Question): How can we help?

(Bruno): Download the F/OSS version of Java and use it...then contribute to enhance it!

(Simon): Programmers join libraries together these days, so VMs are sort of irrelevant. There is still time to work out how to get Java open.

(Audience Question): Is Mono having any implications for F/OSS server-side in the future?

(Tim): Seems to be Java all the way on the server.

(Bruno): There is a BOF tonight at 8:00 about this...come and lets see if we can go anything more ;-)

My Notes on what was said (your mileage may vary and apologies for no links and potential misspellings). -Danese

Tim notes that OSCOon attendance is growing (again) perhaps its an indicator the industry is coming back (applause)!

Tim says O'Reilly doesn't publish books...they try to capture knowledge from the people who are inventing the future. Sometimes that's a book, sometimes its a conference and sometimes its pure activism. "The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet" - Gibson. For example, CarPC Hacks (an upcoming book) describes what some people are doing now in custom car mods (which we expect to see coming from Detroit in 10 years).

OReilly has been publishing more books about Google and Yahoo and other web implementations. He used to say at OSCon that OSS should want not to replace Microsoft, but rather to become the "Intel Inside" of the leading edge. Clay Christiansen, who wrote the Innovator's Dilemma, talks about commodization of software as a migration of value to different levels.

History of personal computing a la Christiansen...His law of "Conservation of Attractive Profits" meant the API lock-in at the software level alllowed hardware to be commoditized. Open Source tried to break the software lock-in, but Tim thinks all we enabled was a lock-in above the data level (data is proprietary). Lock-in was achieved by "Network Effect" meaning that the massively connected market only needed one provider of each service.

Tim thinks the Internet is the platform now. Apps are built on top of open source underpinnings, but are not themselves open source. Open Source (as we know it now) is less and less a solution. Source + Compliation != Application anymore. You could give someone all the source for Google, but you'd still have to run 100K servers to match the Google experience. O'Reilly has been pushing to have Google and Amazon open up APIs, but Network Effect makes it darned hard to level the playing field.

Getting your users involved in the product is key (Amazon gets its users to contribute content and that makes them feel ownership of the tool and enhances the value....MapQuest is commodity software on top of a commodity database and according to Tim they've stopped growing and are being copied. Tim says if they'd figured out how to get their users to make the service richer they would have dominated. Navteq is a company Tim is watching that IS working on getting users to add value (they are about to IPO - wanna bet Tim has fnf?)

So, takeaways...Data is becoming the new frontier. Start thinking about how to build a participatory layer around the data.

-Free and Open Source doesn't guarantee freedom when applications depend on network effets and data lock in more than software secrecy.

-It is key to invite users to build services and data, not just code.

-Think beyond Linux. Its the whole stack!

-Open Questions: Who will control the data in the future, Who will control the namespaces? Who will win the stack integration wars?

Switching Topics, Tim showed Microsoft's connection tool (called Wallop) that give a visual picture of the social network. Suppose Google put GMail and Orkut together? They would control the data, which is a huge deal now.

Call to Action!!! F/OSS needs to "Napsterize the Data"! We need to own our own data at least. We need to think about layers of access (private contacts, public contacts). The Network is the fundamental platform for applications. Think about Federated Identity Systems. Look at what Apple is doing with iSync (its a huge potential control point for them). Look at MoveOn.org, which no matter what your politics might be must be recognized as a leading edge of the Napsterization of Democracy (expressing the voice of the people).

Switching topics (again) Sofrtware Above the Level of a Single Device - (quote by Dave Stutz)

Look at iTunes and the iPod. Its seamless integration. The music store web backend and the small device iPod are elegant. A system designed from web to hand. Rendezvous (oops, ZeroConf) is cool! (Note that Tim really hates the new name, OpenTalk). Rendezvous Tutorial yesterday yeilded a Ruby port. Keep an eye on this!

Another interesting thing...Nat Friedman's Dashboard. Written in Mono, Nat has the idea of "CluePackets" that enrich your working environment

Firefox is finally revitalizing the Browser Wars.

Mobile (Tim showed MobileWhack blog for example) is interesting...watch this space (noteworthy mention of Python on phones)

O'Reilly Safari is an something Tim hopes you'll look at. They are annoucing an affiliate program for Safari, giving commissions like Amazon does for selling accounts, exploiting the new Web Services API (you can search Safari from inside Eclipse). They are adding special services for academics. Generally they are trying to make the Safari experience more particpatory. Think this is a great way to do Corporate documentation. Want also to talk to people who are working in developing countries (contact Tim if you have any ideas).

Network-enabled Market Research. He told the story of asking Gartner and IDC about Open Source and got back the answer, "Our customers aren't asking for it yet". What kind of Market Research waits for customers to mention trends? Tim showed a visual map of the book market. Java is the biggest topic in the tech book market, but notice Ruby is growing as a topic. In terms of book sales...Java, Visual Basic trending down, pHp rising, also C# rising. He showed visualization of the market by locale as well. Interesting to see who is buying/reading what -> where!

Finally an announcement that O'Reilly will be co-hosting the next MySQL Developer's Conference next April

Its OSCon time again. I'm flying up to Portland tonight and looking forward as always to a great conference. No matter what Sun UK employee Alan Burlison thinks, OSCon is still the center of the F/OSS Conference universe to me. This year lots of Sun folk are attending and several are speaking:

Simon Phipps is participating in two talks, one on Wednesday at 10:45am, the "Open Source Java Debate" with Tim O'Reilly and Eric Raymond on Open Source Java, and a separate session on Thursday at 10:45am called Open Source Software - An Industrial Revolution for the 21st Century"

Peter Korn is giving a great talk on Thursday at 1:45pm about the future of Java Desktop System. I saw this talk last month in Sweden and its really inspiring.

Members of the Solaris Kernel Engineering team are doing a BOF on Solaris 10 and Open Source, and they'll be giving away t-shirts and other goodies as well, to entice everyone to come on by before they go to the Free Speech party upstairs.

Other sessions of interest include Christian Cheline talking about java.net (which isn't on the schedule next, but I think its happening on Friday in the Products and Services track). Also we look forward to Chris DiBona's Java On Linux BOF, Louis Suarez-Potts' OpenOffice.org Workshop BOF and Bruno Souza's Java Libre BOF.

Hopefully if you read this blog and are going to OSCon you'll catch me in the halls or at one of these sessions to say, "Hi!".

Thanks to the many thousands of you who picked up my last blog (and of course also to those who contributed to the lively comments section). It was a fun ride, although I must admit I had no idea when I wrote it that it would be so popular. Tim Bray tells me that individual blog entries with readership draw above 20K are in the top 1%. Evidently even after all these years people still love to consider the Mozilla vs. IE issue. Hopefully my blog made some people try Firefox or some of the other non-IE browsers for the first time. Diversity makes a market strong.

I found the comments about the "coolness" factor interesting (...Has it become socially "uncool" to admit you use IE?...). Software taste has become conditional on the clique you're running with...so for instance at OSCon this week I'll be quite at home with my MacOSX-running Powerbook, whereas at GUADEC I got some heat for still not running Linux on my laptop.

Since I was in one comment accused of "lying" I'd like to concede again to Rob Scoble and others who counted more hands in the BlogOn audience than I was able to see. I promise that I only blogged what I saw (and heard).

Observers have been at pains for some time to point out that Microsoft software is so widely in use that we can expect its large share of use to continue for years to come (due to market inertia if for no other reason). And Microsoft is a smart company. They will figure out eventually how to show up in the F/OSS arena. Already we see them showing up as sponsors at every major (and many minor) F/OSS conferences worldwide. As a F/OSS advocate, I feel my job with respect to Microsoft is to help them understand why they need to create level playing fields and then to be vigilant in evaluating that they are in fact doing so.

And I'll bet that THAT stance will continue to keep me off the list of folks Microsoft is seeking to hire for some time to come.

Another story from "BlogOn2004" today.

Some folks from Microsoft were presenting on the fine work they've done with Channel 9 (rant...the videos don't work on my Mac or presumably on Linux, but they looked great on the demo)...

Anyway, the presenter was doing his pitch in a polished way and at one point he said he wanted to show us a "really cool" feature and he looked up into the audience and said "Show of hands...How many of you use Internet Explorer?". Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands....

Informal survey afterwards said the Windows users in the crowd were all using the latest Firefox. Wouldn't it be amazing if Mozilla ended up winning in the end?

This is my second day of attending "BlogOn2004" on the UC Berkeley campus. Its another in a series of conferences announcing the dawn of "Social Media". This morning's panel has Dan Gillmor, Ross Mayfield, James Currier, Reid Hoffman, Michael Sikillian and Jim Spohrer. They're talking about new media futures, which is pretty interesting I guess

Funny enough that many of the futures they are talking about have been floating through the conferences I attend for about the last 2 years. This conference exists to push the vision further into industry consciousness, I guess. Some of the organizers used to work on the Demo tradeshows, whose reason for existence as far as I could tell is to get rich "influencers" together via exclusivity and luxury...they bill themselves as the "world's most elite product showcase". The folks they've invited seem to mostly be members of the choir, however. I guess you have to start somewhere (they plan future events they tell me).

So far nothing very new to those already following blogging is being discussed here. Predictions that Social Networking phenomena will become increasingly important (from people who run companies banking on that outcome). Predictions there will arise a Social Media marketplace. Assertions that Social Media is "virtuous" (more so than traditional media" and (Dan Gillmor's) prediction that early proprietary "standards" will quickly lose to open standards. Concern over the effect of over-regulation on the potential of this new movement.

Looking at other people's blogs on the conference, I see I'm not the only one wondering when we'll go past the known here

This is a story of helping out a friend, which is a good thing for community members to do if they get the chance. The friend in this story is Bruno Souza. He is the current Community Leader of the JUGS Community on java.net, and a more enthusiastic guy you'll never meet! (and he's a snappy dresser!)

Now, those of you readers who know me are not surprised to learn that I have spent some time in my life attending Grateful Dead concerts. At any Dead show, you can find sweet kids holding up one hand pointing to heaven (in a gesture later poached by the folks at Microsoft). It means they need a free ticket to the show. They are hoping for a "miracle ticket", and from time to time when I have a spare ticket I have been known to gift it to one of these miracle seekers. Its totally worthwhile just to see the beatific smile you get (and anyway, I can use the good Karma points :-) )

So anyway, an opportunity came along this week to bestow a Miracle Ticket to O'Reilly's OSCon on Bruno! Since I missed JavaONE this year (see my blog on GUADEC), I didn't get to see the Be-flagged Brasileiro in action this year. But thanks to Simon Phipps' trip to FISL we've all become familiar with Bruno's novel stance on the question of Java and Open Source. Hopefully he'll find time at OSCon to do a BOF on that topic.

But even if Bruno doesn't get to hold a talk at OSCon, its gonna be great seeing his smile in Portland. É isso aí meu, Bruno!

By the way, I've cross-posted this blog to java.net and to blogs.sun.com. I'm studying the reach of the two blogspaces. Apologies if you get this one twice (but they are slightly different...this one has a picture!

Its funny how PR works. About four weeks ago I was asked to do an interview for some writers doing a story for sun.com. I invited my pal Simon Phipps to join the interview, because he's been working on a presentation called "Rivers of Freedom" that talks about the parallel paths of Java and Open Source.

So we spent an hour talking to these writers and explaining open source. This week the resulting article is on the FRONT PAGE of sun.com! The main article is talking about the Java Education community, but there's plenty of content in there about open source and Solaris and Java. Check it out!

I've been traveling around Europe for the last couple of weeks, evangelizing blogging to the various Sun engineering offices here. Last weekend landed me in Prague, which is one of my favorite places. Prague looks like Europe used to, before WWII bombing. It also clearly shows how much of Disneyland and Disney entertainment generally was simply copied from Old European sources (a face which my friend Larry Lessig pointed out in his OSCon 2002 speech - there's a wonderful Flash file of here

So anyway, I had a weekend to spend in Prague and a traveling companion who actually likes to hike around and just look at stuff (a rare thing). Here are a couple of pictures from our walkabout. First a picture of the Charles Bridge (and surrounding neighborhoods). This was taken from the top of the South Tower, St. Vytas Cathedral.

Here is a picture of my friend and this trip's traveling companion, Chris Cheline, who works with me in the Open Source Programs Office. Notice the beautiful Vltava river over his shoulder.

And finally here is a picture of yours truly "in the Looking Glass"...enjoying the great little Mirror Maze built in the 19th century by the Prague Visitors Association

Yes, I know. All of my life my name has been spelled this way. When I was little I really hated it because I couldn't have a personalized license plate for my bicycle...but then my parents told me the story of my name and since then I really like it.

When I was born, my Dad owned a special car.

It was a one-of-a-kind race car (although it was intended for european-style Grand Prix street racing, so it was legal to drive on the road in California). This car had a plaque on the front that listed the names of the designers, and thanks to the internet, here's a picture of that plaque:

I got both of these pictures off a website with pictures of the restoration of the car, but today I can't seem to find it to point you to the rest of the great pictures they had there, but here's a picture of the car, although you may find as I did that an annoying redirect forces you to navigate rather more than you'd like to catch a look.

Yesterday my blog on the Open Source observatory yielded the following anonymous comment

Not sure the context of this comment...did it mean to comment that the US is being out-clued? I've seriously not seen this born out in my travels (at least not with respect to original software development, or even Open Source software development). Most of the time, I'm exhorting developers in other countries to start contributing original work to the Open Source movement because most of it is still happening in the US, with Europe following behind.

If the comment meant that the US is behind in Open Source adoption, yes the US is definitely behind and I agree that we need to do better. Bob Stack, CTO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, seems to have a clue but most branches of US government seem to still be unwilling to make a big change in favor of Open Source. I'd expect that there is plenty of Open Source adoption going on, just not formal policies that we can point to as "wins".

As to the question about Sun getting a clue...indications are that Sun is changing as we speak. Can we fairly correlate the number of Sun employees worldwide to whether or not Sun "has a clue"? From my perspective Apple for instance gained considerably in its cluefulness about the time Steve Jobs came back. This was due in part to the fact that he put policies in place that focused the remaining employees on a few well chosen and realistic goals. Sometimes transformation takes drastic measures. I'd imagine the chrysalis transforming itself into a butterfly feels acutely the drastic nature of the changes it is enduring. Most of what is going on inside of Sun is incredibly positive and I for one am feeling more optimistic than I have in years.

Comments?

My friends in Brussels are getting ready to launch the "Open Source Observatory". They plan to provide coverage on Open Source Policy adoption around the world (but especially in the European Union). A lot has happening in the world of Open Source in Europe since I first visited a couple of years ago when everyone was just trying to understand the whys and wherefors. This is an official European Commission website with content edited by actual free and open source software activists!. The website has been up since January, but they are going to add human editors to make sense of the rush of information that is rolling in. Also hosted on the site will be IDA publications designed to help EC nations to sort out how to use open source, including all the migration guides, gender bias studies, procurement guidelines and other great things. This site will be really useful to help all the other nations of the world decide where to start in formation of their own Open Source programs offices. Bravo, IDA!