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20081126 Wednesday November 26, 2008

Link Roundup for November 22-26

Like London buses, you go for ages without seeing a story you want to link and then a load come along at once.

  • Lifestreaming in Obamaland
    Dan Farber notes how Obama's team is taking the initiative on even the trivia in the reportage, so that they are the ones framing events.
  • me@charlie rose (Lessig Blog)
    Excellent Lessig interview, well worth the 40 minutes to watch it all and understand where Lessig is heading next. The Obama discussion at the beginning is fascinating.
  • Neil Gaiman On The ‘Obscenity’ Of Manga Collector Christopher Handley’s Trial
    Come on, America, owning "Sandman" comics and their ilk is not a crime and it's unjust to use a paranoia-law to make it so. This is just the sort of consequence we're repeatedly told "can't happen" as a result of rushed-through paranoia laws and just the sort of injustice that keeps being perpetrated regardless.
  • Smut pop-up teacher case finally resolved with misdemeanor plea
    "Resolved" in the sense that the injustice has been reduced. She still loses her livelihood and gets a conviction by witch-hunters using an Ill-judged paranoia-law.
  • New laws against forced marriages
    Hard to believe this law has only been created in 2008.
  • Man found guilty of Hannah murder
    The relief to finally have a verdict is so strong that I weep, hopeful this is now over. This local girl, part of my own children's and church's extended circle, should be rich in life, like so many her age around me. I wonder whether her killer is capable of grief or sorrow? His televised confession says otherwise. I wept, again.
  • Bad bosses may damage your heart
    Yup. BTDTGTTS (or rather the candesartan)
  • 3hive: Blind Pilot
    I like this group.
  • Open document protocol
    This is an important and useful document that the southern nations have created for everyone to use. It allows any company, government agency, institution or other entity to declare they intend to use open formats, creating a positive indication within an ecosystem that it's feasible to switch because your trading partners are ready to do so too.
  • Welcome to FOSS.IN 2008 : Sun @ FOSS.IN 2008
    And this is despite everyone being told by the organisers that they didn't want outsiders involved this year. We have such a big investment in open source in India that the Sun India team has done all this alone.
  • JavaOne 2009 Call For Papers
    The CfP is now open, until mid-December. Looks like it's much more focussed on specifics this year - I would be interested to hear from open source community members whether their submissions are accepted, let me know.
  • The massive, monolithic JDK
    I remember sitting with the other JTC founders at IBM Hursley in 1995 as we considered the lack of versioning and modularity in the JDK and the problems that would cause. We decided Java was still brilliant even without it (phew) but it's good to see it's going to be addressed at last.
  • What Sun Should Do
    +1
Posted by webmink ( Nov 26 2008, 02:18:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
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20081122 Saturday November 22, 2008

Link roundup for November 19-22

Posted by webmink ( Nov 22 2008, 02:00:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
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20081119 Wednesday November 19, 2008

Link roundup for November 19

Posted by webmink ( Nov 19 2008, 03:07:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
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20081117 Monday November 17, 2008

Link roundup for November 12-17

Posted by webmink ( Nov 17 2008, 11:57:00 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]
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20081112 Wednesday November 12, 2008

Link round-up for November 11

Posted by webmink ( Nov 12 2008, 06:30:00 AM PST ) Permalink
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20081111 Tuesday November 11, 2008

Link round-up for November 8-10

  • OpenOffice.org Achieves Ten Million Downloads at the End of its Beijing Conference
    That's ten million downloads just from OpenOffice.org directly. Add on Torrents, mirrors and distro repositories and you have an enormous tide of demand for OpenOffice.org 3.0. Just amazing.
  • Full text: Obama's victory speech
    Because I know I'll be looking for it again one day.
  • Faust 2.0
    The average software end user license agreement is post-Faustian
  • Obama Cites Michael Pollan's Sun-Food Agenda
    I'd not noticed this anywhere in Obama's platform so it's very promising indeed. Pollan's assertion that corn has taken control of America's diet through the big agro-corporations and is advancing its genetic supremacy by burning fossil fuels is very credible and can only be fixed by executive action if he's right.
  • Turkish Proverb
    So many things around open source happening right now, especially sponsorships and bundling, make this one seem very relevant.
Posted by webmink ( Nov 11 2008, 06:08:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]
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20081110 Monday November 10, 2008

Phase 3 of the Sun Model

Liberty Staircase

I wrote recently about the Sun Model for open source business, my high-level overview of how Sun is working with open source.

To summarise:

  1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
  2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
  3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

I've had a number of comments and questions about that third phase. It can include all kinds of value-creation, depending on the product in question. Here are some examples of delivering value for people who have already deployed and are heading towards scale:

  • For Solaris and OpenSolaris, Sun offers subscriptions that include the updates, support and warrantly that allows deployers to get the maximum up-time and performance for the minimum cost. You can get the same results yourself by hiring experts to do the work for you, but the Sun subscriptions save money and time.
  • For MySQL,there is the same sort of deal with the addition of software features needed only by those between deploy and scale, such as MySQL Enterprise Monitor.
  • For Glassfish, again, there is a subscription offering that's perfect for those who have taken the decision to deploy and now want the greatest value with the least fuss.
  • ... and so on, across the portfolio.
Devlievering value can take many forms, and nothing is absolutely forbidden unless is creates a barrier between download and deployment in any way.

...and hardware too

But it would be a mistake to believe Sun's open source strategy is only about software. As has been frequently explained, Sun is a systems company, and the news last week and today underlines that fact by showing two new ways Sun is offering value for those between deploy and scale:

  • Systems for MySQL

    Recently, the first database servers optimised for MySQL were made available. For MySQL users who have moved beyond initial deployment and are now looking for high performance servers with rock solid support at great price points, these are excellent. They are optional, but I'd wager most people will save money and create more value by graduating to them for some applications.

  • Unified Storage

    Today's huge news is the release of the new Sun Storage 7000 Series. These new storage appliances create value by combining open source software with commodity hardware and very clever programming and hardware design to deliver low cost storage appliances with great performance. And the use of open source means the extra access protocols other storage vendors try to charge for are included free.

There's plenty more to say on this subject.  For Sun, open source is not a matter of warm statements of alignment while we carry on with the same old business or keep our core products proprietary. I hope it's becoming clear that the Sun Model is a directional matter.

Posted by webmink ( Nov 10 2008, 02:30:00 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [7]
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20081107 Friday November 07, 2008

links for 2008-11-07

Posted by webmink ( Nov 07 2008, 01:44:00 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [4]
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20081105 Wednesday November 05, 2008

ODF Toolkit Union

Another milestone on the Open Document journey was just announced. Sun and IBM are joining together to sponsor the new ODF Toolkit Union, a collaborative community to develop the tools software developers need to support ODF in their applications. The goal is to make it very easy for any application to embrace ODF and to do so with a collaboratively-developed codebase so that it's really easy to make interoperable documents.

There's a substantial initial code donation there from Sun, including an ODF DOM and a .Net ODF library, all licensed under the Apache License v2. There is also an ODF validator, to help developers check the documents they create are correctly constructed.

Hopefully this will catalyse participation by a very wide range of developers, and promote the spread of document creators and consumers that work smoothly together. If I can clarify things for any organisation wanting to join the Union, get in touch by e-mail (details at the foot of the page). And if you're at ApacheCon, come and find me today and ask.

Posted by webmink ( Nov 05 2008, 08:03:29 AM PST ) Permalink
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20081104 Tuesday November 04, 2008

links for 2008-11-04

Posted by webmink ( Nov 04 2008, 10:05:04 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
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20081103 Monday November 03, 2008

Public Procurement and FOSS

Alcatraz

I gave an interview to a journalist last week in response to the research that the European Commission's Open Source Observatory publicised in Malaga last week and the corresponding draft procurement guidelines (thanks to Roberto for the pointers to the Malaga news). I was at the conference but a scheduling conflict prevented me attending IDABC's session, which I regret.

Good News

I very much welcome the guidelines; as I have been saying for well over a year now, the first step to encouraging the use of Free/open source software in the public sphere is to facilitate the adoption-led model in addition to the procurement-driven model, at the very least to the extent of encouraging two-phase procurement. As Rishab pointed out (although not with the same words), there are also the issues of substitutability and the freedom to leave, which I believe it's fundamental for a public administration to consider.

Substitutability guarantees citizens access to government without being forced to trade with a single vendor in order to do so, and the freedom to leave ensures public administrations always have the negotiating power to get the best deal for taxpayers. The guidelines begin to address those issues as well - great news.

Concerns

The journalist went on to ask me about all the documented procurement violations. It seems that:

Of a sample of 3615 software tenders that were published between January and August this year, 36 percent request Microsoft software, 20 percent ask for Oracle, 12 percent mention IBM applications, 11 percent request SAP and 10 percent are asking for applications made by Adobe.

That's bad enough, and likely illegal in most cases, but then it also turns out:

According to Gosh, software tenders often have either implicit or explicit bias for software brands or even specific applications. Of a thousand government IT organisations, 33 percent said compatibility with previously acquired software is the most important criterion when selecting new applications. Ghosh: "This implicit vendor-lock in means that a tender, meant to last for only five years, leads to a contractual relation lasting ten, fifteen years or more."

Most concerning of all, however, was that despite this all being completely transparent and public, the Commission is doing nothing about it. They regard the problem as being one that the competitors of the favoured companies should address through the courts. That would be fine if the market was largely functional and there were only rare cases of abuse.

But it's not. The improper procurement activity is endemic, and until that's addressed any competitor attempting to act through the courts is likely to find themselves discriminated against even further. It's never good to sue your customers (as the music industry is finding), and in a market where the customers can specify you out of the running with impunity, it's suicidal. Moreover, it can take years for the courts to make a ruling, which means even more lost opportunity for competing companies - assuming they can survive the wait. Until the European Commission takes adequate corrective actions to address this disease, there is no step in the current software market condition that any competitor is likely to take to address it.

Recourse?

Given the scale of the disadvantage already present, why would any player want to make their position worse? In the report of the interview the Commission representative says: "There are sufficient ways for companies and other organisations to protect their rights." He may be right, but they aren't being used by the FOSS community and the reason is that the abuse is too extensive for anyone to want to make the first move.

I'm delighted by the fact the new procurement guidelines exist, but personally I want to see direct action to establish them - it can't be left up to those already disadvantaged. I wonder if anyone has the stomach for it?

Posted by webmink ( Nov 03 2008, 05:22:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [4]
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20081101 Saturday November 01, 2008

links for 2008-11-01

Posted by webmink ( Nov 01 2008, 10:05:00 PM PDT ) Permalink
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