Monday October 31, 2005 Just in time for the gift season...
If you were at JavaOne this year, you would have heard that a history of the Java platform was being created. Well, it's out, James is busy signing the signed copies people pre-booked at JavaOne! It's called "Hello World(s)!" and it's a readable yet pretty coffee-table book - lots of cool pictures.
I gather I have a copy en-route as a contributor, looking forward to getting it. Meanwhile, I expect it will be a popular holiday gift for geeks. I gather Barnes & Noble have a load of them as well as Amazon.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 31 2005, 11:09:54 AM PST )
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Monday October 24, 2005 If You Build It They Will Come
I'm in the middle of a tour at the moment, and while I'm out and about I am visiting as many OpenSolaris user groups as possible. OpenSolaris comes complete with an amazing grass-roots movement that has resulted in user groups springing up all over the world - just the last week gives an ABC (Austin, Beijing, Chicago). I find this especially thrilling giving all the nay-saying that was happening this time last year about how no-one cared at all about Solaris, about how no-one would show up to join an OpenSolaris community, and about how this was just some kind of attack on Linux.
Instead, we find over 9,400 people registered at the OpenSolaris web site, we see energetic activity creating ports and distributions, we see a steady stream of code contributions and we see about 30 user groups spread across the world, including in Asia, South America, Europe and the USA. Last week I met fascinating people in new OSUGs in Amsterdam, Chicago and Austin; tomorrow I get to speak at the group in Colorado. It reminds me of the early days of the Java platform, with groups of people eager to meet, learn and hack springing up everywhere. It's a whole new community of open source developers coming on stream and accelerating the revolution. Kudos to the (many) people making those groups happen.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 24 2005, 03:24:03 PM PDT )
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Thursday October 20, 2005 OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
I've spoken with a wide range of local and national government officials recently, and they have almost all told me that a formal release of OpenOffice.org is very important to them as they can't deploy beta or 'release candidate' software in their organisation. I'm therefore delighted to see that OpenOffice.org 2.0 has just been released by the OpenOffice.org community. Huge congratulations to the many, many people involved in the huge task of creating a commercial-quality open source software release. It makes OpenDocument format a viable alternative for millions of people worldwide. The downloads are going to be very popular so I suggest getting the BitTorrent versions and then leaving your BitTorrent client running to help share the load. The more of us do that, the more people will have OpenOffice.org 2.0 sooner.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 20 2005, 06:00:38 AM PDT )
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Wednesday October 12, 2005 Sun Podcaster Gets Published
Posted by webmink
( Oct 12 2005, 04:40:40 AM PDT )
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Sunday October 09, 2005 Award for JDS Deployment
As I mentioned before, I attended the black-tie dinner for the UK Linux and Open Source Awards last Wednesday. Plenty of open source communities were represented, usually by people interpreting "black tie" in a very personal way. Alan Cox, for example, was wearing a splendid red hunting jacket, which may have given him the fire to accept his Lifetime Achievement Award with flair to accompany his characteristic humility (when credited with walking an unbeaten path he replied "Whether the path is hard or easy, if you have 10,000 people at your back anybody can walk any path."). There were quite a few people less familiar with open source events as well - I had one person genuinely ask me "what exactly is open source?"
I had been invited to represent the OpenOffice.org community just in case it won the reader-voted "Best Open Source Application" category for which it was a finalist, but was able to sit back and relax as Joomla won that category instead, in a show of public support following their recent rift. However, a diner at my table did win the award for "Best Enterprise Open Source Deployment", and they're a Sun customer - w00t!
Allied Irish Bank were the winners in this category for their deployment of Sun's Java Desktop System. I chatted with the people from their delegation and was impressed by the thoroughness of their design concept. They have a coherent and visionary enterprise architecture which uses non-WS* web services throughout. It benefits greatly from the transparent modularity of JDS at the desktop, which gives them the flexibility and control they need to meet financial services regulations. They told me that, because JDS is all open source, they can make fine-grained choices that would be almost impossible with close software.
In other words, this isn't just a tactical deployment to force the dominant supplier to reduce their price, nor is it an ideological deployment that will get swept away at the next changing of the guard. It's the best of open source, chosen for its strengths and not its price. They're a worthy winner and I congratulate them.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 09 2005, 04:05:00 AM PDT )
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Saturday October 08, 2005 Linux for the Participation Age
At the UK Linux and Open Source Awards this week (where I was able to wear my new wooden bow tie for the first time), Mark Shuttleworth was there and accepted the Best Linux Distribution award on behalf of Ubuntu. He very graciously called the Debian representative up to the stage and handed the award over to Debian, on the grounds that Ubuntu would be nothing without them. His action contrasted greatly with some of the other award winners, whose unashamed parasitism on the Linux communities was made all the more obvious (to me at least).
I'm just downloading Ubuntu now, using BitTorrent so I can share my download with others - Ubuntu makes you want to participate like that. My plan is to finally ditch my crusty old Red Hat installation on the gateway server at home and maybe give Asterisk a try as well. I find the whole Ubuntu pragmatic-but-participative attitude very satisfying - I just hope the distro is as inspiring!
Posted by webmink
( Oct 08 2005, 02:40:32 PM PDT )
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