Monday October 30, 2006 links for 2006-10-30
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Duh. "Copyright issues have, in the past, been steered too much by the music industry, the report said."
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That's this week. Looks like a great event, pity I'll not be nearby.
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A great list of applications to give your Windows-toting friends. You don't have to be a Unix geek to use open source software - the first step out of bondage is Firefox or OpenOffice.org, not a new OS.
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I'm not an expert, but I am pretty sure this is good news both for Brazil and for open source software.
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"Innovation is all about changing the way the game is played. Uninnovation is about playing the game safely at the expense of the user." Great posting compares MtvU and YouTube and finds DRM the culprit for MTV's failure.
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Another reason to break out that co-dependent relationship you're in, end the abuse and switch to OpenOffice.org - Free software doesn't need validation or policing.
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Mark Shuttleworth talks sense around the IceWeasel issue. Personally I think it is impossible for a trademark to be "Free" the way the Debian folks demand - not even the Debian TM is Free after all.
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"The draconian limitations I've discussed could only be enacted by a monopoly unafraid of alienating its users, as it feels they have no other alternative." Read, weep, then consider Ubuntu or Nexenta.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 30 2006, 04:28:53 AM PST )
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Sunday October 29, 2006 links for 2006-10-29
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BlackBox has a competitor.
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Bruce does a pretty good job logging the gist of my keynote at Colorado Software Summit.
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This is the conference keynote in Melbourne I did via video link from California - seems to have been well received, even though I had no sense of the audience reaction at all over the remote connection.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 29 2006, 04:18:12 AM PST )
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Thursday October 26, 2006 links for 2006-10-26
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OK, we need pelicans for our garden.
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Oracle decides to harvest Red Hat's income.
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Congratulations to the Harmony team on this latest milestone, and especially to Geir who has worked hard to reach this point. Having a completely independent Java SE implementation will be a great validation of Java's openness.
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Scott Mace has a podcast he recorded with me at ApacheCon. I'm actually quite positive about Microsoft's free cookie day, and I hope they are able to maintain the momentum and join the Freedom movement in the end.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 26 2006, 05:25:58 AM PDT )
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Wednesday October 25, 2006 links for 2006-10-25
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Geir spots the new page on java.sun.com and comments on the Java community names that appear there.
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The new page - at java.sun.com/opensource - with preview information on open source Java projects from Sun.
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Stephe Walli's take.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 25 2006, 05:24:58 AM PDT )
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Tuesday October 24, 2006 links for 2006-10-24
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The War on Non-Solids continues.
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IBM uses software and business method patents against Amazon. The temptation to tell a whole load of people "I told you so" is strong...
Posted by webmink
( Oct 24 2006, 05:29:16 AM PDT )
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Friday October 20, 2006 links for 2006-10-20
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First vulnerability in IE7 found in - ooh, 24 hours after release?
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Thi sis pretty cool - a NetBeans plug-in that helps you develop extensions to OpenOffice.org
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This is full of angles. A) Use of Visa Intl to attack a business model B) AllofMP3 betrays its base by going DRM C) How can something be globally illegal when some local law allows it? Worth watching.
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Great overview from Tom Marble.
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The best corporate blogs are open, honest and authentic, according to Debbie Weil. ... "Packaged, filtered, controlled conversations are out," Weil says. "Open, two-way, less-than-perfect communications with your customers and employees are in."
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Just found this band via 3Hive - well worth a try, pleasantly laid back but still with energy.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 20 2006, 05:22:52 AM PDT )
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Thursday October 19, 2006 Pioneer Perils
Solaris has deep roots. Indeed, Sun was founded in 1982 by the combination of a distribution of BSD Unix and a clever use of commodity parts to build industry-changing systems. You might say that Sun was the first open source startup company.
The downside of being a successful pioneer of course is that you have to invent your own infrastructure. The choices you make are always justifiable in context, but once the stuff you're working on turns mainstream, it's not at all unusual for the rest of the industry to make different choices. It's like the way pioneer homes look so antiquated in modern towns. They once stood proud and alone, but surrounded now by slick new housing they look out of place. Not that they are - they define the place, and they have stood the test of time.
This is all to say that OpenSolaris had an issue with version control systems when the community opened. The Sun team used TeamWare - venerable, historic, but only used by Sun. Being NFS-based, it didn't scale out to the sort of community OpenSolaris was becoming, so the community chose to select a modern replacement. After extensive evaluations, they picked Mercurial as the main VCS and Subversion as an option for individual projects.
Waiting for a public VCS has been a burden for the OpenSolaris community. It has meant that all non-Sun committers have had to work through volunteer proxies to "sponsor" commits back into the source. Plenty of people have used that path and it has been pretty successful. But there's no doubt that a public VCS would be better. A great team of people has been working hard to make this happen.
So I've been delighted this past week to see both Subversion and Mercurial instances starting to spring up across OpenSolaris. The main ON repository (that's the heart of OpenSolaris, the kernel and networking systems) has a beta Mercurial instance open for testing, and the JDS Subversion system (with the desktop environment) is now live. As public VCS spread across the huge OpenSolaris community, the opportunity for participation will grow and the artificial barrier that has hindered participants will be gone. Excellent news, and great work by the teams building the VCS.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 19 2006, 09:44:03 AM PDT )
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links for 2006-10-19
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Yes. From Sun.
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New offerings for OpenOffice.org from Sun suggest a change in direction that bodes well for the community.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 19 2006, 05:29:27 AM PDT )
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Wednesday October 18, 2006 Birthday Presents
I bumped into Steve Gillmor at the BlackBox unveiling and he told me he can tell when I am up to my ears in Bay Area work because I stop blogging. I admit it - work around open sourcing Sun's Java implementations was all-consuming last week. While that's good - yes, it will be real open source real soon - I missed an important birthday.
When I joined Sun I was lucky enough to go to OSCON in Monterey in 2000, and I was able to witness the launch of one of the most important projects for Free and Open Source software - OpenOffice.org. So that means this year it's six years old. The birthday was last week, and they celebrated with the 2.0.4 release. An exciting aspect of that release for me as a Mac user was that, for the first time, the Mac X11 release of OpenOffice.org came out at the same time as the other platforms - a very positive development.
As if that wasn't enough of a birthday present, Sun also had two small but important gifts for the community. The first you can see on Digg (and maybe vote for) - it's the page offering commercial support for OpenOffice.org from Sun. So now you have a choice if you want full support - either buy StarOffice 8, or get support on OpenOffice.org, both from the team with the greatest experience of writing and supporting that codebase.
The second is even more interesting. In our first venture to fund Sun's OpenOffice.org developers through an add-on product, we've released Sun Weblog Publisher, a plug-in for OpenOffice.org or StarOffice 8 that turns it into a full-featured blog editor. At only $9.95 it's exceptional value, and it directly supports our efforts to keep OpenOffice.org development rolling.
Both of these should give you a taste of where we're going with OpenOffice.org - watch out for further developments.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 18 2006, 10:35:01 PM PDT )
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Tuesday October 17, 2006 Thinking Inside The (Black) Box
"Your new datacentre is here, sir."
I had the chance to prowl around the new Project BlackBox datacentre-in-a-box today in the car park at Sun's offices in Menlo Park, and I must say I'm impressed by it - it's not just a load of gear thrown in a container. Danny Hillis has done a stunning job designing the optimum use of a shipping container as a computing unit.
All you have to do is connect three-phase, networking and chilled water
and you have a working, 250-U data centre up and running in just a few minutes. The internal packing density is incredible - by aligning the servers front-to-back in two racks along the sides,
water-cooled air is blown through them and that combined with their already low heat dissipation (it's packed with Sun low-energy servers) is enough to keep them happy. The detailing is great - lots of creative thinking on environment, management, contingency (fire, particle contamination, water and shock are all allowed for) and flexible yet efficient space usage.
I can easily imagine this thing providing end-of-year computing to a business, or an emergency datacenter in a disaster
or a drop-in facility for a special event. What's more - and I think the point the designers were getting at - it makes the value of utility computing clear. This is unit-compute-power; big unit, yes, but as Nick Carr points out, just the same sort of unit power as was Edison's business in the transition from bespoke electricity to utility electricity.
This was a market that did not know it existed until today. Now it does - the phones have been hot all day and the market is alive. Just think of these pre-loaded with a full stack of open source software, waiting to be switched on on-demand. Seems plenty of people can already imagine that.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 17 2006, 10:56:18 PM PDT )
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links for 2006-10-17
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Fascinating experiment by James Gosling to get the Java documentation collaboratively translated.
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"Red Hat sells free linux licences ... while Sun actually does give away Solaris licenses but then offers various levels of add-on support - the key difference being that Sun is honest about the real deal while the other two are not."
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I went and looked at this outside - it's pretty impressive. The equipment inside is packed as densely as you can possibly imagine thanks to the low heat emissions of the systems, and the design is clever and effective. Very cool.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 17 2006, 05:23:09 AM PDT )
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Friday October 13, 2006 links for 2006-10-13
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Dave Johnson's book gets a good review on SlashDot.
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Review says OpenOffice.org now loads much, much faster and has other performance improvements.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 13 2006, 05:22:27 AM PDT )
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Friday October 06, 2006 links for 2006-10-06
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I've often shown this at conferences and been asked for links - it's the video about a group of friends who use IM instead of talking.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 06 2006, 05:22:41 AM PDT )
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Wednesday October 04, 2006 links for 2006-10-04
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US ex-pats cans till vote in the upcoming election. Althoughh his site is run by the Democrats it will still help anyone to vote!
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Sun Labs open sources their code for OpenSolaris on PPC.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 04 2006, 05:19:10 AM PDT )
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