Monday May 30, 2005 Gosling: Apache the "Gold Standard"
I see James Gosling has written about the fact that he was not criticising Apache in the remarks that a VNU operative spun so poisonously recently. I believe the Apache Software Foundation to be the very best example of open source community practice and it seems James agrees:
I was not trying to say that all open source projects are chaotic: there is a spectrum. Apache is at the very high end of the scale, on average exhibiting excellent behaviour. Their governence rules are very effective. Apache and the Linux kernel set the Gold Standard.
James also says "I need to stop talking to reporters" and I have a lot of sympathy for that position, especially as it relates to British and Australian ones. As Humbert Wolfe wrote many years ago:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British Journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.
I feel the same tension. Like James, when I am talking to folk about stuff I am passionate about, I adopt a conversational approach, assuming that I have a counterpart who is also wanting to get beneath the skin of the issues, search for insight, explore new ways of understanding. I assume that when I illustrate points or when I explain extremes that the context will come with the reportage.
And like James, I have got burned when the other party describes themselves as a journalist, where all that's going on is a tabloid cockroach is snuffling about for things they can make dirty and using the search for insight as a climbing frame. It's probably better to leave them to people who are just spouting party lines and save the insightful conversation for real seekers after truth - who, of late, I have found to often be those in the F/OSS movement. And I need to keep reminding myself never to believe reported speech.
Posted by webmink
( May 30 2005, 03:22:23 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [1]
Thursday May 19, 2005 JavaOne Bloggers Social?
You may remember that I and others got together for drinks at the Thirsty Bear ar JavaOne in 2003 and 2004. Is anyone arranging anything for 2005? If not I'll try to fix something for Monday evening...
Posted by webmink
( May 19 2005, 03:31:28 PM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [4]
Out of date
I must say I am fascinated by the news that IBM and Red Hat have teamed up to try to get Solaris users to switch away to Red Hat. I could have understood that strategy back a few years ago when Sun had dropped the ball and had no x86 or x64 strategy for Unix, leaving a gap in the market big enough to drive a red bus through, let alone a red hat.
But today, when Sun both makes some of the best x64 hardware on the market and offers Solaris 10 on terms (open source, no $ to use, no platform switch when you go live, binary compatible with all previous offerings since v2.6, same architecture on x32, x64 and SPARC etc etc) that make Red Hat's offerings on IBM's old iron look rather shabby, I wonder what's going on? Has IBM not noticed that the world has changed and that Sun is not a lame duck waiting for their cart to come round to pick up the dead and wounded? Maybe we should send them another invitation to join the OpenSolaris community - after all, IBM's proprietary software is reputed to run better on Solaris :-)
Posted by webmink
( May 19 2005, 07:28:17 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [0]
Wednesday May 18, 2005 SOSUG First Meeting Scheduled, May 31
I just heard from Che Kristo that the Sydney OpenSolaris User Group has scheduled their first meeting. I'm pretty sure we'll see folk like Alan Hargreaves there so if you're within commuting distance of North Sydney then make a note of the details now! The venue is an easy walk from North Sydney station.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
6pm on Tuesday the 31st May.
Sun Microsystems
Ground Floor
33 Berry Street
North Sydney
note: Building automatically locks front doors at 6pm, so try
to arrive before the start time.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
To contribute, go check out the SOSUG Group on Google.
Posted by webmink
( May 18 2005, 04:50:54 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [0]
Saturday May 07, 2005 Harmony tunes up
I'd like to add my welcome to the Harmony project, a proposal (which I assume will be approved) over the Apache Incubator to grow a new, independent, up-to-date and 100% compatible implementation of v5 the Java platform. Things like this (and the new openness of the v6 - Mustang - work) renew my confidence in the promise of the Java community - read the FAQ to see more. This is just the sort of responsible, community-led evolution that the JCP rules were changed to facilitate.
Update: A positive and interesting posting from Sun's Java leader Graham Hamilton who comments "We'll probably participate in the project at some level". This two-track approach may well be the ideal thing for the future of the Java platform.
Posted by webmink
( May 07 2005, 06:16:50 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [2]
Friday May 06, 2005 Innovation Happens Elsewhere
Jim Grisanzio isn't the only one in Sun to have a new baby (huge congratulations, Jim!). Inside Sun we hold regular "Open Source Council" meetings so that the many, many open source communities in which Sun is involved can be co-ordinated. At our most recent meeting, Ron Goldman proudly arrived with an actual, paper copy of the new book he and Richard Gabriel have written, called "Innovation Happens Elsewhere".
The title alludes to a famous comment made by Bill Joy, to the effect that no-one can hire all the smart people so some of the innovation inevitably happens elsewhere. In the massively connected age in which we find ourselves, the only smart way to develop software is to collaborate with those people - relying only on the ones you can hire is the wrong move. To me, open source software development is the obvious approach in the massively connected age.
Dick and Ron have for many years been the foundation of the research group at Sun Labs exploring and understanding different approaches to community-based development, and the book is an excellent text explaining what open source and free software development really means and how to get significant projects started inside a company. We've all been lucky enough to have PDF review copies of the book for the last half-year and I would warmly recommend it to readers here. Many congratulations to them both on finally taking the last step to print.
Posted by webmink
( May 06 2005, 04:08:39 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [0]
Tuesday May 03, 2005 BlogEd - Java Blogging Client
 |
Kudos to Henry Story and the BlogEd community on the beta release of BlogEd, a simple blog editor originally created by James Gosling. Henry has added plenty of good ideas such as a WYSIWYG editor and remote API support and it's now looking pretty cool. For me, the best part is that it works offline yet can also be invoked from a server. I especially love the Java Webstart support. I'll try using it for SunMink and see how it goes. |
Posted by webmink
( May 03 2005, 05:35:45 PM PDT )
Permalink
