SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

Massachusetts Stands Firm

According to the Globe, the Government of Massachusetts has asserted that the policy to move to ODF and the deadline to do it by the start of 2007 remain unchanged: [Thanks, Bob]

''We are moving steadily towards that deadline and we expect no changes in those rules," Fehrnstrom said. Under the Aug. 31 initiative, the state would require all documents produced by the state's executive branch to be stored in a new, universal computer format, called OpenDocument.

Some commentators have been tying to make it seem as if that's not the case, so it's great to have an official clarification. To be clear, Massachusetts are still planning to only allow vendors with bona fides open data format support to trade with them. Peter Quinn's legacy stands firm and fair, with all of us gaining equal access to the State.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 28 2005, 10:04:34 AM PST ) Permalink

Casualty of the Status Quo?

I had a little flurry of e-mail over the break with news that Peter Quinn had resigned as CIO of the state of Massachusetts - not because of any internal disagreement, but because he's not a politician and isn't prepared to be treated like one. Pamela says:

... my sources tell me that it in no way indicates a change of policy there. And he was not forced out. Just that a decent man has no taste for the unpleasant tactics that one finds in politics nowadays and doesn't wish to be the focus of controversy. Can you blame him, after the sordid article in the Boston Globe?

I'm very sad to see such a smart and honest guy as Peter hounded from his job by the dirty tricks of the status quo. I only met him once, at the meeting in Armonk, but he impressed me as immensely fair and balanced in his business judgement. He just wanted the best for Massachusetts in the long run, and was brave and honest to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion, without protecting the incumbent vendors from the force of the logic. I think Massachusetts has lost a good public servant and that's to be regretted.

I also note that Andy is still awaiting a reply from the Boston Globe's ombudsman after Quinn was exonerated. I hope there's a decent answer. It's bad enough for public servants to have to work within the fiscal and transparency guidelines that have been applied to them. If they are also going to suffer a public hounding whenever they impartially investigate how to meet the real long-term needs of the government they serve then we can all expect the truly good men and women to work elsewhere. As Brian McMahon says:

It says a lot about what's happened to public life (and public service), if someone who is just competently doing his job can be hounded out of it, and it doesn't count as being forced out.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 27 2005, 04:20:27 PM PST ) Permalink

DebConf Session Accepted

I'm delighted to say that my Roundtable proposal for DebConf has been accepted. The subject is "OpenSolaris and Debian: Can we be friends?" and I'd welcome input from all interested parties from both Debian and OpenSolaris. So far the participants will be myself, Alvaro Lopez Ortega (an OpenSolaris participant), Don Armstrong and Greg Pomerantz from Debian. If you'll be there, let me know. Posted by webmink ( Dec 25 2005, 02:17:57 PM PST ) Permalink

The Heart of Open Source

Must one exploit in order to support? I've noticed people accusing Sun of not supporting "Linux", yet I've discovered (somewhat to my surprise, actually) that despite the fact Sun is hardly at the head of the pack of those exploiting GNU/Linux distributions, we are in fact a key contributor to all of them.

My attention was first drawn to this fact by the work that Glynn Foster does in the GNOME community, but the announcement of X11R7.0 was very enlightening. Not only is a Sun engineer at the heart of the community, but Sun is also hosting the upcoming X.Org conference.

As I have dug deeper I've found that hundreds of Sun staff are quietly going about the job of improving a whole raft of technologies that are key to GNU/Linux, not so Sun can make a fast buck from Linux hype (like some I could name) but because working on the community code is the right way to go about doing things for all Sun's customers, be they GNU/Linux or Solaris customers (yes, we do in fact sell and support both). It's just The Way It's Always Been Done at Sun.

For many people, all the software they see in a day on a typical GNU/Linux desktop is being actively maintained, at least in part, by Sun engineers (let's not even start on the server side). Sun employs people who are committers in GNOME, X.Org, Perl, Mozilla and many other packages that are central to whole Unix desktop experience in all its many flavours (*BSD, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX and so on). Without Sun's support in employing the engineers involved, there might be no accessibility in GNOME, no internationalisation in Mozilla. And of course, OpenOffice.org still depends heavily on Sun's direct support. We're obviously not the only contributor. But we'd be missed if we weren't there.

People accusing Sun of not supporting "Linux" are usually making a partisan point that misses the main strength of the free/open source movement - bringing together diverse interests to collaborate over what does not differentiate them from one another. People working to improve the commons we all share are supporting us all, regardless of what they are actually selling.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 23 2005, 02:24:31 AM PST ) Permalink

Closing the Experience Gap

I've just been reading Paul Roberts' comments about his SunRay workstation and reflecting on how times change. A few years ago, all I heard from Sun colleagues as I went round the world were comments about how much they hated surrendering their Windows PCs and using SunRays and Unix. Now people are almost universally thrilled by the liberation that their SunRay brings them. There are always gripes, of course, but now people have got used to them they've realised all the benefits that the thin client approach brings to the office-based worker (including, as Mary often comments, the home-office-based worker).

What's changed? Well, the technology is certainly more mature. The GNOME desktop has made the environment much more familiar and productive, and having whup-ass servers for the stuff to run on hasn't hurt. But essentially what's changed is that people no longer resent having something new imposed on them because they have actually tried it and found it delightful.

The thin-client vision was the early spark that has led to what David Berlind is calling the "uncomputer". Call it that or Web 2.0, or the read-write web, or whatever you want. The basic vision, though, of managing the state at the server while delivering a rich user experience, has been the same; all that has changed is that the gap between that vision and the experience of the average technology adopter is gradually closing.

Sun's bold experiment - switching all 40,000 or so employees to David's uncomputer - has shown that what really matters is the experience gap, not the technology. I hear this all the time as I travel the world and meet Sun teams in various countries. They tell me that the biggest barrier to adoption of desktop Unix (in whatever flavour you choose to use it, they all feel the same to the end user now) is not the cost - that's usually lower - or the software - that's no worse to migrate to than the next version of MS Office. It's the unfamiliarity, the experience gap.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 22 2005, 01:07:07 PM PST ) Permalink

Avoiding Disappointment

There's a common lesson that OpenSolaris, Glassfish, OpenOffice.org, Netbeans and the rest have taught me. There is definitely a lot of work involved in taking an existing commercial project and making it open source. I'd thus never do it lightly, nor would I expect it to be possible to always do it quickly. People who think you can just snap your fingers and - presto - the software is open source, are mistaken. But we'll be taking all the software we are able to and opening the source as soon as we can.

That's the sense of what I said to Peter Galli in the interview I gave him last week, which he's reported on eWeek. In an otherwise good report, there's a curious distortion added at the start of it. He says:

Those who hope Sun Microsystems Inc. will open-source all of its software products anytime soon are in for a big disappointment.

As the story goes on to say, exactly the opposite is true. We've already opened more source code than any other company in history, and there's more to come just as soon as we can make it happen. But we're not going to act irresponsibly. We have to make sure we know where every line of code came from. We have to make sure that a community can coalesce around the newly open code. We have to prepare the existing community (our staff) for the huge culture change that's involved. So I did indeed say:

"I am not going to allow us to do it too fast. We are not going to rush any of these things. This is not a token gesture. This is not the alphaWorks of 1999 where you throw it out and see if it sticks"¹

So in fact those who hope Sun Microsystems Inc. will open-source all of its software products anytime soon are in for a treat. That's just what we'll be doing. Except, if I have anything to do with it, we'll do it right too, creating or joining² transparent communities, establishing contribution-led, inclusive governance and using OSI-approved, re-usable licenses. No disappointment involved.

---

1. No slur on alphaWorks here, by the way - it was started by good friends of mine while I was at IBM and its purpose was indeed to "see what would stick" so that IBM could then productise the ideas. Heady, pre-open source days. No idea what its mission is today.
2. I mean that, too. The recently-announced Java DB is a distribution of Apache Derby rather than home brewed, for example.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 22 2005, 12:35:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

IBM blackballs Ecma TC45

Bravo Bob! According to ZDNet, IBM will not be participating in the new Ecma International technical committee that's being formed just to rubber-stamp Microsoft's Office 12 file format. I support that decision, Bob - Sun will not be re-joining Ecma either right now. Bob said:

"We think there are just too many open switches on this right now for us to go in and do something there. Given the charter, it's not clear what anyone other than Microsoft is going to be doing on this committee"

Indeed. The TC has a charter that only allows it to make a "standard" that's compatible with Office 12. Ecma itself has no membership category for individual members (such as open source developers). Ecma has at best a RAND IPR policy. It seems that only one member actually has a vote that can change anything on TC45, so why waste energy over it?

Despite being one of the earliest trail-blazers of standardisation, the organisation seems to have allowed itself to become a sham, allowing vendors to claim openness where none exists. As Stephen O'Grady points out, they even market themselves as offering "a safe path which will minimise risk of change to input specs" and "A safe haven for IPR". They are the "Swiss bank account" of standards organisations - expensive to use but necessary when you have something to hide.

While single-vendor "standards" may have worked in the old days of atoms, and are arguably still important in industries like the mobile telephony industry, they have no place in the world of software where multi-lateral, transparent, inclusive, open standards are becoming mandatory because of the participation age.

Update Dec 22: Pamela has a great suggestion.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 21 2005, 10:49:37 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

London OSUG sort-of-report

Well, I'm home at last - got back yesterday after the Gartner Open Source Summit in Orlando (which I have promised our Analyst Relations people I'll not comment on), ApacheCon in San Diego (where I spoke and we announced Java DB), a round-table on OASIS ODF in San Francisco (of which more tomorrow) and a party Friday followed bythe chance to see the Narnia film.

"Home", of course, just tells you the country, as I've been in London at the OpenSolaris User Group meeting there. We had a way-deep presentation on DTrace internals and then a tantalising glimpse of BrandZ running a Linux distribution, with Adam Leventhal showing how to DTrace into the running Linux applications. That's going to be such a hot tool for everyone, Linux developers included (and we have plenty of them at Sun actually). I had to leave early, but not before the ZFS discussion and demo showed me plenty of reasons why it's such a revolutionary file system - designed to work by reference rather than by value so that data integrity is assured, and virtualising just about everything to allow unparalleled flexibility.

Home-home again now, hopefully until the new year. All I need to do now is get so I'm tired before 3am...

Posted by webmink ( Dec 19 2005, 06:33:48 PM PST ) Permalink

Announcing Java DB

I'm sitting in Tim Bray's keynote at ApacheCon here in San Diego, and he just completed a career first - he made an official announcement in a keynote. I was surprised to find he'd never done that before. He announced that Sun will be including a distribution of Apache Derby in future releases of Solaris Enterprise System, and that Sun's distribution will be called Java DB (IBM's is called Cloudscape). There was a cool demo that showed Java DB running in a web browser allowing temporarily disconnected use of a database by a browser-based application, This could be just what Ajax is waiting for.

He also just recommended Bruce Tate's "Beyond Java" [US|UK], a fascinating if at times controversial book that considers where web-related programming is going in the future. I've been looking at it too, and while it's got some compelling ideas that everyone needs to see, it seems to focus too much on languages and not enough on the fact that programmers weave libraries together for a living.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 13 2005, 12:16:11 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Apachecon Slides

Just finished my opening talk for the shiny new Business Track at Apachecon here in San Diego. No-one threw anything, and people even asked for the slides so I've uploaded them here. I'll be down relaxing in the exhibit area during the afternoon if anyone wants to discuss them.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 12 2005, 11:54:20 AM PST ) Permalink

Reading between the lines

If you take the time to read the details of the newly-formed Ecma TC45, you'll be in no doubt what's going on, as David Berlind has seen. It includes this statement:

"Ecma International has created Technical Committee 45 (TC45) to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications that is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats, submitted by Microsoft."

That would have been fine up to the word "that" - but everything goes pear-shaped there. Ecma has decided, it its wisdom, not to "produce a formal standard for office productivity applications" - the constraint that follows negates the implied openness of the words. There's no reference to modification of the specifications to accommodate any other needs than Microsoft's. No reference to licensing requirements for open licensing. No call for participation by others. The intent seems clear.

Update: Seems it was clear to IBM too.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 12 2005, 09:31:11 AM PST ) Permalink

San Diego

Just drove from San Francisco down to San Diego and thoroughly enjoyed the ride. I was booked on a plane but the rental car company gave me a lovely convertible and I heard the open road calling to me. I'm down here for ApacheCon where I'll be kicking off the new business track here with a talk providing a framework for discussing open source and business.

It's already shaping up to be a geekfest - on checking in to the room, I fired up my wifi to access the in-room ethernet via my Airport Express and found eight other delegates within striking distance doing the same. Meanwhile I spotted a cluster of delegates using their laptops in the lobby. This was all after passing Cory Doctorow at the entrance, from whom Tim and I are under instructions to collect an autograph for a Sun executive whose blushes I will spare.

Meanwhile outside there is a Christmas parade with a difference. The floats are all - well, floating. Here's hoping the rest of ApacheCon is a varied and interesting as the first 15 minutes!

Posted by webmink ( Dec 11 2005, 06:40:26 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

IP Collision

As I've been tinkering at home with Asterisk, I've been considering the growth of the voice-over-IP software and service communities and it strikes me that there's a collision coming between the two worlds of traditional telephony and software-defined telephony. It's not just that there's a business model challenge and paradigm shift, though.

One is built on the concept of patent pooling, where all participants agree that innovation is best developed by contributing know-how to a pool for open selection by other vendors, on the understanding that the technology chosen will be used as a standard with payment of royalties to the contributer. The other is growing in a world where patents are anathema, where the old "patent pool" approach seems an unethical, closed aberation.

Whatever happens, as these two worlds rush towards each other, a messy legal collision seems inevitable. It seems to me inevitable that eventually, the nobility of the old world will turn up at the doors of the frontiersmen of the new world and demand payment of tribute in the form of patents royalties.

By the way, this is another space where a freedom mechanism - the compulsion to provide an emergency call service - is being used as a lock-in mechanism by the status quo.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 08 2005, 09:52:58 PM PST ) Permalink

Free iPod in The Aquarium

Nice new blog from the Glassfish community - lots of short, link-filled entries showing what's going on with Glassfish. The blog's called The Aquarium, naturally. And I notice there's a free iPod Shuffle on offer.

Posted by webmink ( Dec 07 2005, 11:21:46 PM PST ) Permalink