Monday June 30, 2008 links for 2008-06-30
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MySQL founders engaging in philanthropy.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 30 2008, 01:30:38 AM PDT )
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Sunday June 29, 2008 Pot, Kettle and the required EULA
Having held fire for a few days to make sure I was cool-headed, I was about to go to comment on a poisonous little posting on a ZDNet journalist blog. I wrote a cool-headed reply and clicked "post".
Then I found that despite the appearance of openness (no hint on the comment form of all this), ZDNet has no interest in "community comment". They are actually cynically trying to capture reader data so they can "monetise" it.
To post a comment, I would have to go through a multi-step registration process and fill out the form shown over to the right (which requires personal information including a postal address, requires I accept their EULA and is set to "opt in" for spam by default - I have annotated the version on Flickr if you click through). There's no way I am doing that. I suggest you take the same attitude to them and avoid giving them any sort of support until they fix this cynical community attitude.
The most delicious irony though is they were criticising me for poor community skills...
Posted by webmink
( Jun 29 2008, 03:43:26 AM PDT )
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Saturday June 28, 2008 links for 2008-06-28
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The talk on Scala at Jazoon was fascinating - looking forward to the NetBeans support getting to a state where I can try it.
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Interview on Sun and Open Source I did yesterday in Munich.
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Amazon still whipping Apple's hide with their DRM-free MP3 store, not least with this page of reduced price albums. I haven't bought anything from iTunes in an age, it's always cheaper & DRM free at Amazon.
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MySQL's popular and bold "Unlimited" price plan gets extended to optionally include the Glassfish application server system as well. Smart move, in my view.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 28 2008, 01:31:36 AM PDT )
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Tuesday June 24, 2008 Old News - OpenJDK Still United
I'm not sure what it is that's making ZDNet treat the interviews I gave last month in Australia as new news, but to be clear, the comments they are reporting and that Slashdot and DZone have been trying to spin as divisive are nothing of the sort (if this all passed you by, please ignore - I'm not in the mode to give any of the above any link love). I note Rich Sharples is also helping tidy up. The work the IcedTea folks did to make OpenJDK 6 capable of passing the TCK have been contributed back to the OpenJDK community and are being integrated.
People are working together just the way one would hope they would. My previous comments about JDK diversity hold. And my delight that we finally have a Free, compatible Java implementation based on shared, open source code is still making me smile, as the audience here in Zürich for Jazoon saw this morning.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 24 2008, 09:41:26 AM PDT )
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Monday June 23, 2008 links for 2008-06-23
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This Java applet makes very pretty tag clouds that I am sure we'll see showing up in promotional materials. Added bonus: they print very well indeed.
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Summary of the event I spoke at last week in Utrecht. The venue was an adapted factory, maintained in a trendy state of suspended decay - I can imagine it making a great rave venue.
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This is certainly deserving of exploration, but like all attempts (including my own) to define the confluence of "open source" and "business" it captures only a part of the spectrum - OpenJDK, for example, seems outside this model.
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If you have been working on a submission, please remember that the deadline to enter is just a week away.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 23 2008, 01:31:04 AM PDT )
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Sunday June 22, 2008 links for 2008-06-22
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Just to be clear, this is exactly the same policy that the US has towards nationals of all other countries and the only reason it's not in the papers every day is we all realise that.
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SomaFM has been a favourite for ages, mainly Groove Salad, but they have some new stations available. This one seems to track my usual playlist very closely.
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Second new station from SomaFM, tracks my taste less accurately but will still be worth trying. We have digital audio throughout the house (using Airport Express) so everyone gets to play...
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Third new station at SomaFM - I seem to have a lot of these artists in my library already so I suspect this one will be a hit, but they now have so many that's it's hard to choose.
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Exactly how outrageous does this Shock-Doctrine abrogation of freedoms have to be before people stand up against it? Read John Murrell's analysis and weep. This is what David Davis is claiming to oppose in the UK. It's time.
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So let me just check this again - United really doesn't want any business travellers, right? They are a miserable airline to use and they are getting less desirable by the day. And I'm a 1k flyer with them; watch that stop.
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Just read those comments skewering the unspoken sophistry in the posting. The questions about unaccountable no-fly lists especially need an answer, and I have been through several airports lately where no ID is needed to enter.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 22 2008, 01:31:23 AM PDT )
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Saturday June 21, 2008 links for 2008-06-21
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If you're in the area please come along, I'd love to see you there.
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My Sydney Opera House photo gets some coverage on a C|Net podcast.
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Catch my keynote at Jazoon on Monday. I'll be exploring the adoption-led concept as well as celebrating the liberation of the Java platform.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 21 2008, 01:31:52 AM PDT )
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Friday June 20, 2008 NoLinkMink
For all of you who dislike my daily link postings, here is an Atom feed you can subscribe to (and a web page you can view too) that gives you all the Mink without the Links.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 20 2008, 07:31:57 AM PDT )
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Free, Compatible Java at last
Yesterday was a landmark that plenty of us have been working towards for nearly a decade. As MR and I have been indicating for a while now, the remaining obstacles to a fully compatible and Free implementation of Java SE have all been removed by efforts like renegotiating the terms for the source of Java 2D and various community members (Sun and others) re-implementing some of the other code.
But the proof is in the fruit of the process, and yesterday it was confirmed that the implementation of OpenJDK 6 that the Fedora community has packaged does indeed pass the TCK. This is a huge achievement for everyone who has been involved - the Fedora team that Rich mentions in that last link, the team that MR leads at Sun, the team that I lead, plus the many, many people who have worked for a Free Java for so many years.
Some may fear, as Fabrizio does, that this (and the many GNU/Linux, OpenSolaris and BSD packages that will follow) will lead to such a diverse set of Java implementations that "write once, run everywhere" is doomed. I don't agree.
What made Java so compatible, in my view, was the fact that almost all versions found in the wild were built with Sun's class libraries even if they used a different VM. With Sun opening the reference implementation and then the community taking it on and embracing it, we now have that same basic code-base at the root of Free implementations everywhere. And we now have the benefits of community diversity to ensure many eyes are making bugs shallow and that innovation is accelerated.
Free, compatible Java everywhere. That's exactly what we all wanted, and we have it at last.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 20 2008, 04:01:43 AM PDT )
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links for 2008-06-20
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My, how the Chinese have learned skills from the international arena. No self-consciousness at all about forming a cartel to conduct anti-trust actions, it seems.
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The cuckoo strategy as a demonstrated dimension of humanity.
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Not as rare as it may seem. My flight from Sydney to San Francisco was delayed becuase someone decided to have a swift smoke in the toilet during boarding. The rest of this woman's reaction seems calculated to get her arrested, though.
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Truly excellent news; congratulations to both the Red Hat team Rich names and also the key figures from Sun and the rest of the community who were key to this success.
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"ODF has clearly won," said Stuart McKee, ... Microsoft's national technology officer ... Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.
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If this does indeed turn out to become a series it will be awesome. As it is the introduction to tequila this gives is very good and well worth the read.
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This looks like a mini-Lulu. If they can sort out local production in Europe they could be fantastically successful.
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Very sad to see Erwin leaving the Sun family and moving on, but he remains a great friend and I wish him the very best in his new job.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 20 2008, 01:32:30 AM PDT )
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Thursday June 19, 2008 Simplifying OpenSolaris Governance
We've been considering refreshing the OpenSolaris community governance in the light of experience. During the OGB meetings, I have made the following proposal a few times, so thought it would be good to write about it and see what people think.
I think the OpenSolaris governance needs to be simplified. We should move to an approach of "drawing a line around existing practice" rather than trying to invent a new system and force-fit everything that is going on into it. This is the approach we're taking with OpenJDK and, barring a few problems every now and again, it seems to be working.
For Governance purposes, all the overall community needs to have regulated are:
- What the top-level structure of the community looks like
- Who gets to vote in plenary decisions (OGB elections, constitutional amendments, extraordinary general meetings)
- Who gets to consume resources (create new mailing lists, repositories, web pages and so on)
All other factors are local to a particular grouping of the community, and given the size and diversity of that community it's likely attempts to generalise in a way that effectively embraces all the groupings will be very hard. I therefore suggested that, for governance purposes only, we treat all entities in the community as "community groups" empowered to do whatever it is they are already doing, but coming to the OGB for approval when they do one of three things:
- Instantiate a new top-level entity
- I suggest that new instantiations be handled on a case-by-case basis by the OGB.
- Top level groups can then create nested groups any way they wish
- However, new groups must abide by points 2 and 3
- The OGB may wish to publish criteria for which groups it would be likely to permit and limit creation of top-level groups to one-per-type but I suspect writing rules for this now falls under YAGNI.
- Grant a member voting rights at the plenary
- I suggest that the OGB create a Board Committee with diverse composition to grant plenary voting rights
- I suggest that the committee ask groupings in the community wishing to have the power to grant plenary voting rights to members to submit a proposal for how they will decide to do that
- The proposed process should as a minimum:
- Be deterministic and repeatable
- Grant voting rights only to those who have already demonstrably contributed, not to those intending to
- Require those being given voting rights to publicly assent to the grant (either by nominating themselves or accepting the nomination of others)
- The committee should grant rolling annual permission to groupings to grant voting rights once their process is approved
- The committee should draft a default process for new groupings to adopt if they don't need special treatment
- Choose to consume resources in a new activity
- I suggest the OGB create a Board Committee for this too
- I suggest the committee also grant resource access allocation rights on a rolling basis to those groupings exhibiting bona fides
As plenty of people will agree, I am no master-of-governance but that seems sufficient to protect community-wide rights while leaving maximum flexibility for there to be Consolidations, an ARC, User Groups and more. Thoughts?
Posted by webmink
( Jun 19 2008, 03:35:49 AM PDT )
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Tuesday June 17, 2008 Firefox World Record
The clock is ticking until 19:00 European time today when Firefox 3 will be released. I'm planning on participating in the Software Download World Record attempt that the Firefox community is planning. I was going to get Firefox 3 anyway, but that's an added incentive to grab it today since I've never been part of a successful world record attempt before. Join me!
Posted by webmink
( Jun 17 2008, 05:13:14 AM PDT )
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links for 2008-06-17
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... and help me get this trademark issue made more famous!
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Watch out, America. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be lame - so much of the UK show depends on its hosts.
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This looks highly significant. Anyone got any tools for developing SproutCore applications?
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I met the team behind this down at FISL two years ago. Fascinating and worthwhile project. I'll try the book on my clan and let you know what they think.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 17 2008, 01:32:31 AM PDT )
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Monday June 16, 2008 links for 2008-06-16
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Amazon US has it for less than iTunes, complete with bonus tracks, and in non-DRMed 256k MP3 format. What's not to love?
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Rumours that Nokia may understand open source are greatly exaggerated if these comments reflect the company's actual position. DRM? SIM locks? What needs to change is the mobile industry, not open source.
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"Could David Davis somehow have stumbled across something the establishment has missed, an untapped anger with what the public sees as a snooping, heavy-handed ... that tramples its freedoms and makes sloppy mistakes with its private data?"
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New Pratchett childrens' book that I know everyone round here will want to pretend they are a child so they can read it when it comes out in September.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 16 2008, 01:31:39 AM PDT )
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