Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday September 30, 2004

Blogspehere debate on Sun and OSS

So Jonathan and RedHat's Tielman started up a debate, and then Marc Fleury of JBoss jumped in.

I talked with Marc when he came by for our JUG meeting and heard his discussion on Open Source. I admit, there is a difference between Professional Open Source and what Marc has termed Corporate Open Source.

At least when he was here, he did not, I don't think, make the argument that one was bad and the other was pure. But perhaps I was wrong.

In his posting over there though, he suggests that Sun is made up of "open source girlie men". I can see where in competitive sales situations he might start to see Sun as non-open source. Sun definitely has embraced open source for parts of the app server (the ones most used), while keeping other parts part of the product to itself. However, in other situations, Sun has entirely open sourced big chunks of code and has it's engineers work out in the open. Notably, OpenOffice, NetBeans and GNOME. Heck, in the GNOME case, the first thing Sun did was build in multilanguage support and accessability. Without these things, which weren't really being taken up by individual open source developers, GNOME's market addressability would be limited.

Does this mean Sun's business model is wrong? By Marc's post, he seems to contradict his earlier statements. He does seem to suggest it's wrong. I'd like to think that Sun could get credit where credit is due, and not be torn down because the world has changed since Sun shipped it's first product (which was based on open software and hardware, by the way). Major new projects like lookingglass, JDNC and JDIC are all being done out in the open. And with Sun's top-notch engineers. I lurk on the mailing lists, I guarantee there are great contributions from both Sun and the community. I don't know for certain, but most of the members of that community are contributing on behalf of the technology and the use of it at their companies (who by the way pay their bills). Isn't that one of the tenets of open source and community development? The stuff will be better because of all of those contributing to it have a vested interest in it?

I don't know that I agree with your blog Marc. As recently as two days ago, my team was having a conversation with a customer about how they'd adopted open source (in this case, 'professional open source') in a big way and were having trouble finding a stable environment that met all of their needs. I don't doubt JBoss can get a point-in-time stable environment with itself, but this customer needed stable with respect to the other guys too¹. Is it wrong for Sun to use open source as a way to allow for innovation, and then fold stable pieces of it back into products that can be licensed and OEMmed?

People smarter than me can figure that out. Or, we could just let the market decide.

1. Sun pushed within the J2EE expert group to delay the release of J2EE 1.4 to be compatible with WS-I BP. I'm not suggesting JBoss is not, I'm just suggesting that where it matters, Sun values open standards, not just open source. The latter sometimes means quickly releasing something and only talking about the standards.

Monday September 27, 2004

The community, open source and Sun: An interesting bifurcation

Take a look at Eric Schrock's entry on Open Solaris.

Then note This article amongst many others.

I wonder why it is when it comes to open source and Unix, Solaris is seen as a threat by some in the community (which as Jonathan noted, is mostly because of this company), while Java is seen as something needed. It's all very odd-- unless you consider that people have motivations other than what they're stating...

Could it be that some people are just so emotionally invested in Linux that they can't even consider an alternative? Could it be that certain companies aren't really fighting for what they say they are, but instead just trying to tilt the playing field their direction?

In either case, either the argument from the Linux camp or the OS Java camp doesn't hold up, since both can't be true to what they believe and make their claims.

On a tangent, why is it pure evil, in some people's opinions, for Sun to target Red Hat, when Red Hat has built their business for the last few years targeting Sun. I agree with Jonathan; let's start calling a distro a distro.

Tuesday September 21, 2004

Family enjoyment

Funny comment from the online chat at today's Network Computing launch. It's worthwhile to tune in to.

Q: Scott, with all the amazing happenings at Sun, how do you find time to enjoy your wife and three young children?
Scott McNealy (A): I enjoy my wife enough to now have four children. Actually, the SunRay at home allows me to work very productively from home. Our mobility story is the best in the industry. I could not do my job and have a life without it.

Monday September 20, 2004

Thanks for the backup!

So late last week there was a thread running amuck on places like /. and the local Unix and Linux mailing lists. It was this one. Now in the past, this kind of fodder would linger around the net for a few days and those of us who talk to customers on a regular basis would be able to give our opinions on the matter, but we never really had backup from the higher ups.

Now the world of blogging is upon us though....

Jonathan responded this way within a day or so and Danese Cooper responded this way. Thanks to both of you!

That gave me the backup I needed to get back to the UUASC mailing list at least. Of course it spawned another whole thread on law suits and what not, but at least it wasn't thrown out to the community as fact and left to lay around there without a couple coherent, well written responses.

Thursday September 16, 2004

ZFS Usage the /. community thought of

This made me laugh out loud, so I had to share it.

Sunday September 12, 2004

The Power of Television

I talked to my 92 year old grandfather, Ed Ingenthron, for a little bit tonight. [I'd wanted to post a link to this article about him in the Kansas City Star, but their content isn't solely advertising supported :( ] Anyway, he's an avid poker player (his preferred game is Omaha hold-em), and has been for many, many years.

In one of my last few visits to Kansas City, we went to a riverboat casino¹. He showed me a room they had on the barge where they used to have poker pits. He told me that the casino closed the poker pits, due to lack of popularity. He was forced to go to Las Vegas to play poker.

Well, when I talked to him this evening, I asked him if the recent popularity of poker on television had any effect on the casinos there in KC. It turns out that all of the casinos have re-opened their poker pits and they're packed all of the time!

I just find this weird. I wish I understood the chain of events-- did latent poker players become inspired to go to casinos? Or did people get enough confidence watching it on TV to chance their own money on it? Btw, the casinos do win more often than not, in case you weren't sure.

In any event, it just reconfirmed how powerful television is in this society of ours...

1. It's a bit of a misnomer to call it a riverboat. It used to be they had to go out and cruise the river to be legal. Well, over time, the boat became a barge on the side of the river. In an accident, one boat broke away from the bank. There were more changes to laws, and now the barges only need to be in river water, in a pool, attached to the river. To me this is just silly....

Friday September 10, 2004

LA-JUG's JSR-168 presentation by Gluecode

This last Tuesday we had the latest installment of the LA-JUG. I'd meant to post a followup after the meeting, but have lacked the time to do so until now.

First of all, thanks much to Gluecode for presenting. Especially to Dave (I think is the name) the presenter, who had to slap together the presentation on short notice. Dave's an EG member (I believe), so I can appreciate how it's hard to take a few minutes out to explain what you've been working on for the last 12 to 18 months to people in the room that range from neophyte to expert.

Then afterwards we all went to the local watering hole (with authentic Thai food!-- an inside joke) and debated the state of the union. I had a good conversation with some of the Gluecode folks. Hopefully after that, they realize we Sun folk are pretty open to different ideas and different ways of looking at things.

There was some concern about how the JSR-168 EG sees things, but as I'd explained, my experience with the product team for the Sun Java System Portal Server and our Sun Java Studio teams seems to indicate nothing but JSR-168 support and momentum. PAPI is the way of the past. JSR portlets and JSF are the way to go for new development.

Next month should be lots of fun, as we're going to bring Craig McClanahan in to cover JSF, Creator and other things from Craig's rich past. I hope some of you can come in for that!

Catching up with my past

Hmmmm. No updates for a while. I need to get better about short updates instead of long ones once a week.

The title refers to the fact that I went to a High School reunion last week. Pretty interesting stuff. I was unsure at first if it was something I wanted to go to, but after the fact I'm pretty glad I did. I could point to the website or some more info, but that might give away my age!

Hmmmm. I still need to get some photos on the site from pebble beach. I'll take a whack at that tonight if I can.

Thursday September 02, 2004

Sun providing Windows Support to our Families/Friends

I've seen some other blogs on this site along similar lines. It's amazing how often we Sun employees end up providing Windows support...

For instance, you go to a party or a family gathering. Before long, someone finds out you work with "computers" (what they really mean by that is personal computers) and then the questions start coming out. Things like "why do I get these popup ads" or "why does my computer just shut down?".

Then you ask "does it say something about an RPC error?" or "are you using Internet Explorer?"

Of course, the answer is always yes. It almost makes me want to carry around copies of Sun Java Desktop System, or some other variant on an OS designed with security. Actually, now that I think about it, that'd likely be a productivity saver-- in a couple such cases (and I'm not complaining, I'm happy to help) I've spent many hours or days trying to fix up a hosed machine.

Anyway, on the latest such expedition, I've encountered the ugly underbelly of IE/Windows's "flexibility". Before this last weekend, I didn't realize that many pieces of adware/spyware are actually loadable modules (DLLs in Windows speak), often to IE, and they're loaded before you even log in by entries in the registry. How insidious!

While trying to fix a friend's machine, another friend turned me on to Ad Aware which has turned out to be a top-notch piece of software, especially considering the price. :)

I don't know who to blame in this whole process. From a MSFT perspective, the end user has some responsibility for operating their PC, but from the end user perspective, there's NOTHING you could have done about the aforementioned RPC error. You also couldn't stay online long enough to download the patch if you're a dialup user. I do think some kind of open way for signing software is a good idea (gee, kinda like in Java) and engineering out most of the ways to spread such stuff is also a good idea (gee, kinda like Java, again). The end user still has some responsibility, and the developers do have to live with coding to an environment with security built in, but in the end the productivity gains for all of us are worth it.

Back to that PC problem, I still have two things that aren't working. One is that Norton Antivirus doesn't seem to "AutoProtect" (turning it on fails), and it identifies something it calls "Adware.Gator", that Ad Aware, unfortunately, does not find. Norton can't remove the darned thing either. So I guess a few more safe-mode reboots and registry edits later maybe I'll have things fixed up. I hope....

Oh, by the way, I patched JDS recently too. And for the first time. And I'd not been infected by anything before doing it.... :)