Friday August 31, 2007 links for 2007-08-31
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Absolutely fascinating to see these statistics - they cast a whole new light on OpenOffice.org for me.
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Bookmark-worthy explanation from the brains behind Glassfish.
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Profile of open source's Scarlet Pimpernel asks interesting questions and highlights intriguing potential conflicts of interest.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 31 2007, 01:24:03 AM PDT )
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Thursday August 30, 2007 The Wrong End of the Paint Stick
One of my better managers at Sun was John Loiacono - I worked for him around the start of the decade. Later, when I was working for then-CTO of software John Fowler, Loiacono was a figurehead for the release of OpenSolaris under the CDDL. By then he'd become way too busy to talk at any length to the likes of me, although he was as charming as ever on the odd occasions we met. And so, I never really got to discuss Free software with him before he left for Adobe.
Reading his recent blog posting, Innovate or Integrate, I start to wish I had. Despite claiming open source credentials, John explains why he thinks it has no place in Adobe's creative products business. From what the blog says - "Yes, clearly it's cheaper, but does it really save money in the end?" - it's clear this part of Adobe thinks of Free/Open Source software purely as a commodity and a way of cutting corners. That it's ultimately only about saving money. They seem to confuse Free with free, liberty with payment. In the process Adobe is missing a huge opportunity.
The thing is, the user-integrated/supplier-integrated distinction in the blog is a false dichotomy. The blog compares their products with existing Free graphics software - presumably things like The Gimp, Inkscape, Nvu and so on. It concludes their lack of integration makes them fatally inferior and thus the Free software from all open source communities is flawed. But that's missing the whole point.
As Stallman points out, software freedom is not about avoiding payment, it is about preserving and exercising liberty. I don't accept that pursuing profit and respecting software freedom are unrelated, much less that they run counter to each other. Profit and liberty are not orthogonal. I also profoundly believe that competing against software freedom provides (at best) a short-term advantage.
For a company like Adobe, to compete against software freedom is to ignore the inexorable progress of disruptive technologies and the Innovator's Dilemma.
Those Free programs aren't integrated and offer lower function than Adobe's product today, but through Adobe's neglect that will change. They'll find each other, start to define interfaces and integrations with each other, begin to penetrate the "good-enough" band on the chart. Worse, being outside their domain, Adobe will refuse to use the integration they define. This happened while Sun was neglecting Free Java implementations, for example. The Java Libre communities agreed interfaces to make VMs and JITs pluggable and today can plug and play VMs with relative ease - apart from HotSpot.
So what could Adobe do? Well, by opening up their source code, licensing it under the GPL, they would team with the open source communities gathered around the various Free software commons. It's not impossible - they do it elsewhere in their business (albeit with a different motive and competitor). Instead of competing against Free graphics software, their programs would become the leading Free graphics suite. It would have the tight integration the blog speaks of, but it would also deliver the freedoms that the software world is coming to expect, stimulating a new developer community emboldened by the guarantees of freedom. And perhaps most importantly, their software would likely become available on platforms Adobe is currently unwilling to touch. They would take a leadership position that their main competitor would be unable to assail.
OK, there are plenty of difficult unanswered questions about business models, community governance and so on (which I'd love to explore, by the way, they are not insurmountable). But the point is, the dichotomy Adobe paints is of its own making. It is not inherent in either Free software or in the open source communities which create it. And by trying to protect their short-term revenue, Adobe avoid affinity with some high-energy developers while pushing their customer base to increasingly attractive Free - and free - alternatives.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 30 2007, 03:10:33 AM PDT )
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Wednesday August 29, 2007 links for 2007-08-29
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Wow, I made the list. I'm amazed.
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Not to be confused with the deployer/user event that happened in Germany. I'm expecting this to be a hands-on event for the originating co-developers.
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Greg's had a run of bad luck - I hope this is the end of it. Great to have friends gather round for support, though.
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One of these would go beautifully in the trees at the bottom of our garden.
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Free Java going forward in leaps and bounds.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 29 2007, 01:21:16 AM PDT )
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Tuesday August 28, 2007 Community Roles
In considering the nature of open source communities that gather around various Free software commons, I often find I need to distinguish between the different roles people play. It's common to characterise community members as either "developers" (the "open source" worldview emphasises this) or "users" (the "Free software" worldview does this). But it's increasingly clear that neither approach is sufficient.
As I've watched various community engagements by various companies and individuals, and discussed this with various people (most recently Luis Villa), it seems to me that there are four different roles. These are:
- Originators (originating co-developers) - people who co-develop a particular Free software commons using open source licenses and norms;
- Extenders (extending co-developers) - people who co-develop software that builds on or aggregates the work of Originators, for example making extensions, plug-ins, localisations and distributions;
- Deployer-developers - people who take the work of Initiators and Extenders and configure and customise them for deployment;
- Users - people who use - and often pay for - the work of Deployer-developers and put it to productive use.
This model for community roles has gradually developed over time for me. Naming no names, I have especially observed the following points arising from the model:
- There are four distinct roles, but people may play different roles in multiple communities. For example, package maintainers working on an operating system distribution may be Extenders with regard to the code they are packaging and Originators with regard to the distro. And many people in the other three roles are also Users.
- People may well play multiple roles within a community too. A Deployer-developer may well be contributing code as an Originator as they address problems during deployment, for example.
- The freedoms people need protected vary between the roles. For example, a User is likely to view being protected from lock-in as a primary freedom and to want a choice of Deployer-developers working on their behalf as well as the use of open standards by Originators. While the original Four Freedoms provide a baseline, I'm increasingly convinced there are more freedoms that need protecting.
- The way a commercial organisation engages with communities must respect both the role the organisation plays with respect to the community and also the roles of the people they wish to influence. Treating everyone as if they were, for example, Deployer-developers, will lead to negative reactions from all the Originators and Extenders.
I'll be using this model in the coming months within Sun to advise our engineering, marketing and management teams on their community engagements, so corrections, enhancements pointers to research and other constructive comments would be most welcome.
Update 31-Aug: There's an interview with me that discusses an earlier version of this and much else up on java.sun.com today.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 28 2007, 03:16:18 AM PDT )
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links for 2007-08-28
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Fascinating article on what happens when you take the OOXML spec at its word and go edit documents by hand. It seems MS Office is very intolerant of this sort of (valid) behaviour and that OOXML is insufficient for interoperability.
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Having 23 of your business partners sign up the day of the vote is probably not against any rules but it's ethically suspect to say the least. OOXML continues its track record as the dirtiest application for standardisation in recent years.
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Awesome new technique - watch the video.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 28 2007, 01:21:18 AM PDT )
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Monday August 27, 2007 Open Chips Wiki Open
You may remember that just over two months ago I wrote about Hardware Archaeology, the need for documentation for hardware features from Sun's past to be made available so members of communities such as OpenBSD and FreeBSD could include support for those features. Actually, it goes further than that - now that OpenSPARC and OpenSolaris exist, there's plenty of information for current products too, and I hope we'll be able to go even further in future.
Well, in the intervening time the engineering teams in Sun's Microelectronics Group have been hard at work digging out documentation, checking it for legal obstacles and then getting it published. The results are on Sun's new public wiki site on the FOSS Open Hardware Documentation page. We've worked with a number of people, especially David Gwynne of OpenBSD, to identify an initial set of manuals for publication, and we have more in preparation. If you have a genuine need for documentation that's not listed, please do request it as shown on the wiki. We can't promise to make it available (see my earlier posting for why) but we do promise to try and to tell you the result.
The wiki is intended as a collaborative resource. We'd like to see links to implementations as well as links to documentation, so if you know of source code that implements features documented there please do add links. Sun employees can log in as usual to wikis.sun.com, and others may create an account and then apply to the page owner for access.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 27 2007, 06:08:32 AM PDT )
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links for 2007-08-27
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Another total eclipse. This one will happen in daylight hours in the UK, but looks well timed for Australia where it happens just after sunset Sydney time. It's just before dawn in North America.
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The naming of this particular model in the i.Beat range shows that you can never get too much advice from naming specialists. Unless, of course, this was actually named by one.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 27 2007, 01:19:59 AM PDT )
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Sunday August 26, 2007 links for 2007-08-26
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A VR immersive interface may be part of the future of computing but I've been a SL sceptic from the first. Seems others are catching the scepticism too.
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More proof that the old 20th century model of charging for access to the software is fatally flawed in the 21st century. Microsoft brands all customers thieves until proven innocent. When a failure like this inevitably happens, every customer suffers.
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A load of lawyers who should know better are having a fair-use food fight.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 26 2007, 01:19:43 AM PDT )
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Saturday August 25, 2007 links for 2007-08-25
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OOXML continues to be the dirtiest game the standards world has seen in a long, long time.
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Yep, Java for Mono, using code Sun wrote. How the world has changed
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"I think Sun's name change is more than just playing up Sun's best-known brand. I think it's symbolic of the company's complete transformation from server and workstation OEM to open-source software vendor."
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The masters of the art are watched and outed by Joe. Includes OOXML features.
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Another life wasted by the ethically corrupt prohibition policy on drugs. You can't control what's illegal, you can only ruin more people's lives.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 25 2007, 01:29:48 AM PDT )
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Friday August 24, 2007 links for 2007-08-24
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Pantone matching for the perfect tea of coffee. I think we need a set of these in the new kitchen.
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Interesting set of calculations suggests there are about 18,000 active open source projects.
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Seems JTC 1 SC34 has appointed Alex Brown from the UK as convenor of the ballot resolution meeting for OOXML.
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Sun changes its ticker symbol at the stock exchange. Hmmm.
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Guest blog from Geir's evil alter-ego.
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Amazing turn-round here, it looked like Microsoft's tide of partners had it all stitched up a few weeks ago.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 24 2007, 01:21:40 AM PDT )
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Thursday August 23, 2007 links for 2007-08-23
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Fully Free OpenJDK packages now available for *Debian
Posted by webmink
( Aug 23 2007, 01:25:12 AM PDT )
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Tuesday August 21, 2007 links for 2007-08-21
- Monkcast #12: IBM HW group OEMs Solaris to chagrin of SW group & a fly in VMware’s ointment
Interesting discussion in the text - not had time to listen to the podcast yet. - How OpenJDK Can Become GNU Classpath
Insightful commentary from Andrew on how OpenJDK needs to evolve. - Minibar, London - August 31st 2007
Looks like a good evening out - pity London evening events are so hard for me to attend. I'll try, for this.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 21 2007, 04:15:16 AM PDT )
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Monday August 20, 2007 links for 2007-08-20
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The answer, of course is "no, not completely" and "not if they fear patent and copyright actions" - this short and tidy paper sums up the evidence.
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Wow! Very interesting, Peter.
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The intellectually bankrupt "war on drugs" claims another victim. How long does this farce have to continue before legislators remember history and realise prohibition doesn't work, and it's unintended side-effects are grevious?
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Of which of Richard Nixon's policies is George Bush most proud? The War on Drugs. "We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing" And it's the breeding ground for other woes.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 20 2007, 01:20:08 AM PDT )
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Saturday August 18, 2007 links for 2007-08-18
- Why GPL v2 For NetBeans?
Is NetBeans heading for GPLv2 licensing? - Sun, IBM Ink Solaris Distribution Agreement for Servers
Nice analysis that recognises the role OpenSolaris played in this deal and looks ahead to more. - GNOME COMMUNITY CELEBRATES 10 YEARS OF SOFTWARE FREEDOM, INNOVATION AND INDUSTRY ADOPTION
Despite the shouting subject line this is actually something I really appreciate. GNOME has created an effective collaboration between many partners of different size and motivation. Happy Birthday, GNOME! - iPhone + AT&T = Dead Trees & Giant Fees
iPhone owners - don't even think about roaming with that thing turned on... - FSFE, SIUG File Official Objections to Switzerland's Vote on MS-OOXML
The letter FSFE has sent seems to me to make very serious accusations about the Swiss process. Will OOXML go down in history as the standard established by the dirtiest process ever? - I Am Making a Difference
"Rather than purchasing goods made by overseas laborers—who are often forced to work in unsafe conditions for low wages—I have..." - Sun set on server business?
The news IBM will sell Solaris could lead to many possible conclusions about Sun or IBM's businesses but the one Dana B has decided to promote is laugh-out-loud crazy. C'mon, Dana, what on earth are you thinking? - Feds Pay $80,000 Over Anti-Bush T-Shirts
A welcome reminder that the First Amendment still applies in the US. - Hotel mistakes Nobel laureate for bag lady
Cancun's five-star Hotel Coral Beach proves it's "classy" image is actually designed for Daily Mail readers. One to avoid.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 18 2007, 07:50:13 AM PDT )
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