Monday June 29, 2009 ☞ Required Security Reading
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Deliciously direct and deep paper looks at the assumptions behind our security thinking and confronts them head-on. Still relevant after 4 years, which is good going for anything geeky.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 29 2009, 07:30:40 AM PDT )
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Monday June 15, 2009 links for 2009-06-15
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Uh-oh. Serious blow to the Sun folks working in Austin.
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I interviewed Liane and Glynn on the show floor at JavaOne about the new 2009.06 release of OpenSolaris.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 15 2009, 07:30:22 AM PDT )
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Saturday June 13, 2009 links for 2009-06-13
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Delighted to see VirtualBox showing up as a retail item. Yes, those of us who know can go get the free download, but having it on the shelves in stores is still the only way to reach the mass market for most things. It's time we had more Free software for sale like this.
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Another good, free sampler from Amazon MP3 in the USA. If only the UK store had some of these.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 13 2009, 07:30:34 AM PDT )
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Tuesday June 09, 2009 OpenJDK Board gets Google & Red Hat Members
Over the weekend, Mark announced he's updated the OpenJDK Interim Governance Board page to add details of the two new members Sun has asked to join the Board to navigate towards a permanent OpenJDK governance system. They are both well-known contributors to OpenJDK, and in fact when I asked Mark Wielaard to suggest the best pick for new Board members they were the names he suggested. They are:
- Andrew Haley, of Red Hat, GCJ co-maintainer and Classpath corner-stone, and
- Martin Buchholz, of Google, a developer of the JDK core libraries at Sun for many years.
I'm delighted they are joining the Board and, while there's no crisis to solve since the existing interim governance is mostly working fine, I hope their arrival will help us formalise arrangements at last.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 09 2009, 09:43:00 AM PDT )
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Monday June 08, 2009 links for 2009-06-08
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"A Comment on Notice of Inquiry, FCC GN Docket No. 09-51" -- If I was a US citizen I'd go sign this now. The semantic gap between "broadband" and "internet access" is just waiting to be exploited by certain reptilian corporations.
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I used to work with Dick when he was at Sun, and this principled stand is exactly what I would expect from him. Congratulations and bravo.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 08 2009, 07:30:30 AM PDT )
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Sunday June 07, 2009 ☞ Geek Atlas
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Currently reading the copy of The Geek Atlas that O'Reilly kindly sent me and I'm enjoying it. It covers places a geek would find interesting in destinations around the world. There are a lot of UK sites, then one or two per state for the US and one or two per country for most other places. Each chapter has a "popular science" explanation of the science area covered by the destination. Worth considering as the antidote to normal travel books!
Posted by webmink
( Jun 07 2009, 07:30:24 AM PDT )
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Saturday June 06, 2009 ☞ End of an era
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After 18 years, the world's best developer conference closes the shutters after seeing a huge fall in registrations. I have a decade of the very best memories of speaking there and I wish Wayne and Peggy the happiest retirement possible.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 06 2009, 07:30:23 AM PDT )
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Friday June 05, 2009 OASIS Protects Open Source Developers From Software Patents
Some of you may remember a fuss that was made a few years ago by some open source people over the copyright and patent policy used by OASIS, the computer protocols standards body1. OASIS seems to have taken it to heart, because it has today announced what looks to me like the perfect basis for technology standards in an open source world.
Their new rules2 include a new "mode" which standards projects can opt into using. In this new mode, all contributors promise that they will not assert any patents they may own related to the standard the project is defining. Contributors make this covenant:
Each Obligated Party in a Non-Assertion Mode TC irrevocably covenants that, subject to Section 10.3.2 and Section 11 of the OASIS IPR Policy, it will not assert any of its Essential Claims covered by its Contribution Obligations or Participation Obligations against any OASIS Party or third party for making, having made, using, marketing, importing, offering to sell, selling, and otherwise distributing Covered Products that implement an OASIS Final Deliverable developed by that TC.
That's deliciously simple, and implements close to what I have previously recommended as the basis for handling patents in open source projects. I've written before how patent non-assert covenants are low cost for the patent holder and low risk for the developer. There is of course a "patent peace" associated with it:
The covenant described in Section 10.3.1 may be suspended or revoked by the Obligated Party with respect to any OASIS Party or third party if that OASIS Party or third party asserts an Essential Claim in a suit first brought against, or attempts in writing to assert an Essential Claim against, a Beneficiary with respect to a Covered Product that implements the same OASIS Final Deliverable.
I think this is a wonderful development for protecting open source developers from patents, and I would like to see it replicated in all standards bodies. The only issue will be whether OASIS TCs choose to adopt this mode; we need to demand it and boycott the TCs that don't.
- I thought the fuss made was pretty unfair at the time, since it complained about legacy OASIS approaches to patent licensing just at the time when OASIS had fixed them - the essence of the complaint was that OASIS hadn't just blown away the old approach but had left it there so that older projects weren't harmed.
- There's a redline PDF document showing the changes - the new stuff is mainly in section 10, although other areas had to be changed to match as well, I gather.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 05 2009, 12:08:42 PM PDT )
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Wednesday June 03, 2009 TweetSwoop: Illuminata's Take on JavaOne
I ran into analyst Jonathan Eunice this afternoon. Jonathan's long experience following Sun and Java makes him a great person to ask for an insightful and impartial view of the news so I asked him about JavaFX, Java EE 6, JDK 7, Oracle and more.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 03 2009, 03:43:49 PM PDT )
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Tuesday June 02, 2009 TweetSwoop: Java ME Fragmentation Initiative?
I'm at JavaOne in San Francisco and this is a TweetSwoop, where I swoop on people who know the answers to the questions I've seen on Twitter.
This TweetSwoop asks Sun Director Simon Nicholson about the Java ME fragmentation initiatives launched this week at JavaOne by a group of key mobile industry companies, Java Verified and JATAF.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 02 2009, 11:58:00 PM PDT )
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TweetSwoop: US Only Java Store?
I'm trying something new today. Having finally given in to the desire to buy a personal video recorder (the Flip Ultra HD), I decided to use it to swoop on people who know the answers to the questions I've seen on Twitter.
My first TweetSwoop victim interviewee was Jeet Kaul, who I asked the question I'd seen from @The_Contrarian, who asked why the new Java Store was closed and under a kind of NDA and from a number of people asking why it was restricted to the US.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 02 2009, 11:00:19 PM PDT )
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