March 2009 Archives

Went to the local Verizon store yesterday to look into data plans for a laptop broadband card.

Me: "Can you explain the cost and details of your monthly laptop broadband plan?"

CanYouHearMeNow: "Yes sir - it's very straightforward. The plan is $69 dollars a month for unlimited use, up to 5GB"

Me: "Er, then it's really not unlimited, is it?"

CanYouHearMeNow: "It is, up until the 5GB cap."

I can't hear him now.

No, this isn't about Sun. I like what Sun is doing w/ cloud.

You've got a serious problem when MSFT can call you out on openness and they - despite being MSFT - have a point.

Clearly, "interoperable" isn't the first word that comes to mind when I hear about Silverlight, IE8 and Azure, but it will be interesting to see where this goes.

First time I've ever seen this - project hosted at Google Code, but code at github.

I never thought of doing this to get the ancillary things a project needs, although to be fair, GitHub has everything but issue tracking, and if I were a betting person, I'd bet that's coming soon.

I've prayed daily to $DIETY that this would happen - not necessarily IBM, but someone that a) makes money with Java and b) understands that the benefits to be gained from ensuring that the Java ecosystem is really open outweigh any of the short term foolishness that Sun can't seem to avoid. I realize this deal wouldn't be about Java, but with change there's hope.

Love IBM or hate IBM, it will certainly shake up my little corner of the universe, and given the deadlock over the past few years, this is a good thing.

That said, this really saddens me on another dimension. I'm actually an secret admirer of Sun and was hoping to see it pull through. Sun played a significant role in shaping computing as we know it, and continue to provide some of the most colorful characters and interesting ideas in the industry. They still have some truly great engineers, and at least from the outside, a really great engineering culture. I can't see that surviving as part of IBM. (That's not judging IBM as "not great" - but it's different.) The world just won't be the same without the Sun we know today.

Github just keeps getting better. I'm not sure if they announce changes and I miss those announcements, or they just slip things into place, but to me it appears to just steadily evolve for the better.

There was a post and comment thread on Javalobby/DZone (Did Sun C&D them to get the name changed too?) regarding the ASFs ongoing battle with Sun to secure a test kit for Apache Harmony. It's interesting because of the confusion that still exists surrounding the issue. It's worth a read through. Be sure to read my comments at the end, as I try to frame the problem around the core issue of spec lead obligations, and how Sun's behavior is threatening the JCP's ability to deliver "open" specifications.

Anyway, I saw the thread late, and when I was traveling to London for QCon and jetlagged and tired, so I skipped over Dalibor's response (as I know he understands the facts) and tried to address the comments from others.

Yesterday, someone suggested I read his response, as it represents a really unique change in Sun's positioning of the situation. I think it boils down to the following (my interpretation):

Sun is withholding TCK licenses from those of us doing independent implementations for our own good. Passing the tests is hard, Sun is very concerned about us, and Sun don't want us to waste time and resources.

In the thread, Dalibor says :

So why does Sun restrict the OpenJDK Community TCK to 'substantially derived' implementations? I wasn't at Sun when the license was conceived, but I think the obvious answer is that TCK testing is a lot of (manual) work, even when one is starting from a feature-complete implementation, like OpenJDK 6, and just needs to focus on setup, testing and bug fixing.

I keep reading this over and over, thinking "he didn't really just say that, did he? He must mean something else..." Later on, he says :

So, in a world in which any compatible free software Java SE 6 implementation in the foreseeable future is likely going to be substantially derived from OpenJDK 6 for very simple, rational economic reasons (it works well, it can be done on a rational schedule, etc.) - do you just toss the TCK binaries over the wall, or do you nurture the community of free software, fully compatible Java SE 6 implementations and work on gradually having a sequence of doable success stories, while expanding the clout of the platform? The latter approach works actually much better in practice, as experience shows, and has already delivered several fully compatible, fully free software Java SE 6 implementations.

This is such utter, self-serving nonsense, it's hard to know where to start. Let me throw a few facts into this :

• The only logical reason why "any compatible free software Java SE 6 implementation in the foreseeable future is likely going to be substantially derived from OpenJDK 6" is because Sun won't allow any other free or open implementation to get a TCK license. If people can't get a license for the test kit unless they agree to add Sun's terms to the license under which the implementation is distributed, then of course you won't see any other open implementations that are compatible, because Sun's additional terms aren't open. Without the TCK, you can't test compatibility. If you can't test compatibility, you can't be compatible. Nice how that works out for Sun, doesn't it?
• Sun has made the mistake of underestimating what others are capable of doing before. When we started Apache Harmony, they were very gracious and welcoming publicly, as (so the inside baseball goes), they were utterly convinced internally we had no hope of succeeding. Their perspective changed radically a year later when we showed up at JavaOne with a functional implementation of AWT and Swing, and good progress with a virtual machine w/ a JIT and modern GC. (Ironically, the lore has it that Sun was running the TCK on Harmony to track our progress...) So implying that doing an independent implementation is economically irrational is either conveniently forgetting history, or willfully misdirecting the discussion.

Finally, I'm just astonished that Dalibor of all people - someone I respect, with a very commendable track record of open/free software contribution and leadership - would be directly suggesting that instead of a free ecosystem where people are able to spend their time and effort where they choose (independently implementing a spec and testing it), that it would be better instead to artificially limit work only to [the Sun controlled] OpenJDK codebase and derivatives (why do I keep thinking of Bush's limitations on stem-cell research here?) for the "clout of the platform" (for the good of the State?).

This stinks. The beauty of the Java ecosystem is that there can be multiple implementations of a spec. This has served us so well over the years, I'm surprised that I have to bring this up.

Think about Java EE for a second. (BTW, we had the same knuckle-headed resistance from Sun when the ASF licensed the Java EE TCK for the first time for Geronimo.) The incredible choice we have had over the years - Apache Geronimo, JBoss, Sun's Glassfish, IBM's WebSphere, BEA's WebLogic, Oracle's appserver, JOnAS, etc - gave users options in licensing, support, performance and features. Without sacrificing compatibility (which was Sun's public motivation for the resistance). We've also had beneficial variety in the Java SE space - Sun, IBM and BEA all had competitive, compatible SE implementations. While all licensing Sun's class library implementation, they had independent or semi-independent virtual machines, which helped drive benefits in performance, stability and manageability to a degree that a single-vendor ecosystem would never have realized.

Think of the positive, constructive disruption that Google's Android platform (which is powered in part by Harmony's class library) is bringing to the phone/embedded ecosystem. Smart phones are exciting again.

I hope I'm just misunderstanding what Dalibor is trying to say.

I was at LHR the day that the BA 777 had a 'hard landing' there - it was the first time ever a 777 didn't safely complete a flight. For a bunch of reasons, the 777 is my favorite plane, and I've thought a lot about what happened - very little information came from BA or others - it was quite a mystery, I'm told.

So, it turns out to be a 21st century version of 'carb icing'? Really? This is something that Lindberg and Earheart had to deal with...

My first thought, after growing up trying to keep farm water pumps and carwash systems working in freezing weather, is "wrap heat tape around that sucker", but given it's going to take Rolls Royce 12 months to fix it, that probably isn't the optimal solution.

Reminder - CloudCamp London tonight. Agenda here.

I'm privileged to chair a track with Simon Wardley on "The Open Cloud".

Starts at 6:45pm. It's free. There will be beer and pizza. No excuses.

Update : this one seems to be a monster - 800 people registered....

Yesterday I gave my database talk at QCon London, and afterwards I talked to a few MSFT engineers who kindly corrected my understanding of MSFT's SQL Data Services for Azure.

MSFT is adding full RDBMS services to the Azure platform - aimed for "department-sized" databases (i.e. things that won't need to scale, since they can't...).

I think this is right - the "scalable" and "alternative" data stores (MongoDB, Voldemort, CouchDB ...) are all IMO an augmentation to the RDBMS, not a replacement. The RDBMS is here, it's very useful, and well understood. But new programming models and new scaling/size/deployment requirements means that we need additional data persistence technologies, and I think we'll see more architectures that synthesize a combination of one or more of these technologies with the 40-year-old workhorse, the RDBMS.

Chairing a track on "web as a platform" at QCon London. I had a nice flight over (my favorite plane, the 777). Walking to the conference center this morning, I passed the staff entrance. Pretty tough gig, it appears...

It appears that the OpenJDK project has created a second project to accept patches made by a third project .... for OpenJDK, the first project! Activity triples overnight! It's the CDS of community building, I guess.

Why not just merge the communities? And they claim the ASF has too much process...

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/03/03/Interesting-Times

I think it would be quite interesting for both parties. MSFT would do well to have Sam around.

Sitting on a train, I find it fairly distracting to have someone pounding and slapping keys when they type. Sat next to someone last night from the Frenetic Double-index-plus-a-middle-finger-sometimes school of typing, augmented with the advanced "I-believe-email-can-convey-emotion-when-I-type-harder" methodology.

I wonder what they'd say if I brought drumsticks and a small set of cymbals and started making random noise...