Am I reading this wrong?

RedHat just announced a program where you can get JBoss App server (free as in beer software) running on an amazon EC2 instance for

"$119/month per customer plus $1.21 per hour for every deployed server, plus additional bandwidth and storage fees."

Putting aside the $119 and looking at published Amazon EC2 pricing, the $1.21/hr is a 50% markup on the $0.80/hour "Extra large instance", and a 1100% markup on the $0.10/hour "Small Instance", which I'd argue is enough for plenty of deployments. The $119 adds an additional $0.16 an hour.

Granted, you do save the costs of hiring someone to make a JBoss AMI for you, but still... amazing.

"...but for the grace...", I suppose.

This post is a RFP - "Request for People".

I've been meaning to announce that I've joined a new startup, 10gen. I'll write more about the change later. The upshot of 10gen should be well explained on the site (and if not, let me know so I can fix it), but in brief, we're developing a "platform" for what is very loosely called "cloud computing". I say "loosely", because the term encompasses a very broad range of technology and services, from basic grid computing to AWS to AppEngine to SalesForce to EngineYard to ... I'm working with some very smart and accomplished people (ignore the guy at the bottom of the page) and I'm lucky - we appear to all share the same views on code, agility, process, technology, product, etc.

What we're building is ambitious - an application server and a database that are designed for infinite scalability. In addition, we're building developer tooling, application libraries, and management infrastructure to help people develop, debug and deploy applications to said scalable application platform. A similar example is Google's AppEngine - it's an app server with a kind of database to which you can write applications, and those apps will run across the Google's resource grid. The 10gen platform is an app server with an object database (keep reading :), and this platform will run across a variety of resource grids - you can run it on Amazon's AWS, across standard managed hosting providers like Rackspace etc (even multiple ones, for geo and vendor diversity), or even run on your internal computing resources.

A key feature of our platform is that we're multi-language. We're focused on Javascript and Ruby at the moment for writing applications, but we have no religious or political convictions here - we're interested in supporting languages that people want to work on. (We are also dedicated to making such languages and related frameworks run fast.) The constraint is that we think that to get internet scalability, standard programming models have to change a little - you can't just toss a LAMP stack or Java EE server onto AWS and expect infinite scalability. While the benefits of AWS are clear - zero capex for infrastructure, dynamic resource availability, reduced operations personnel costs - you still have whatever scalability limitations you started with in your LAMP stack or Java EE server. Don't get me wrong - this isn't a ding on LAMP, EE, or AWS but just a recognition of the challenges we're all facing with our standard tools.

On the database side, yes Virginia, it's an object database. When I first heard this, I had what I imagine is the standard reaction by people that have only used RDBMSs - "huh?". But after playing with it, and thinking about the problem space, I'm convinced that this kind of database architecture is not only nice, but required. Clearly Google and Amazon think so too as their data stores are either object stores or tuple stores. Sure, you can run a RDBMS on at Amazon, but that's just as scalable as your current config. It's clear that an ODBMS isn't going to be the right database for all applications, but I think that what we have is very "fit for purpose", and the RDBMS isn't the right database for all applications either. (Think of how much time we all spend as programmers trying to deal with the RDBMS in a sane way via JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, Linq, ActiveRecord, ActiveTable, Django, SQLAlchemy, Storm, DataMapper, DataXtend, etc)

Anyway, we're looking for really good people to join the team. We're focused on hiring in our New York office on 20th Street in what is colloquially known as "Silicon Alley", but I'll consider other arrangements. We have some really big and interesting problems to solve, and we need people of all experience levels and backgrounds. The app server is written in Java, and the database in C++. There are all sorts of scalability, grid and management issues to solve. Our application libraries and frameworks are written in Java, Javascript and Ruby. We want to build tooling for Eclipse. We're going to be open sourcing major parts of our codebase. I need core appserver and db engineers, application library and framework engineers, Ruby and Ruby on Rails engineers, Eclipse plugin engineers, QA engineers, QA technicians, technical writers, community leaders and managers, developer relationship managers, etc. The list goes one. I could formally list the job specs, but I think that if you've read this far, our time would be better spent talking. Just drop me a mail at geir at 10gen dot com. If you have my phone number, call me.

This is an exhilarating, terrifying space with exhilarating, terrifying problems to solve, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact. Life is too short to be bored :)

From a ZDNet article on Rails :

Divorce long running queries. Ruby on Rails typically serves one request at a time and that’s a detriment if there are long running queries that block other incoming requests, said Zygmuntowicz. The workaround is that you have to set up a queuing mechanism so your database isn’t overloaded.

Serving one request at a time is a detriment. Period.

One simple mechanism for queueing requests would be SMTP - have the Rails framework send request data via SMTP and then fetch the next request when the (!) thread is free. I'd recommend IMAP for that - better chance of not losing requests when the server crashes. Other benefits include being able to use Mail.app or Thunderbird in your ops center to gauge real time load - just check the size of your inbox. You could also ditch Google Analytics or Omniture and use something like MarkMail for traffic analytics. You could also let people mail your website directly - save them from having to fire up Firefox.

I'm using git quite a lot these days, and really like it. It's branch management is just beautiful.

However, I want to lock branches once released. We announce to the team whenever we release something, but people make mistakes and accidentally add things to released branches.

Linus mentioned adding a very practical solution - letting me mark a branch as "readonly" in the .git/config file - but I don't think that really works I'd want to protect it in our central repository.

Could I just do something like make gitroot/thing/.git/refs/heads/version read-only? Anyone have any "best known method" for this?

Erm. Why are the membership documents for ECMA in .doc format?

The Reg is reporting that Hans Muller left Sun for Adobe. Unfortunate, given Sun's apparent move of going "all in" in this area with the Java FX strategery. (Hey, it was the main subject of the JavaOne opening keynote two years running...)

While I'm confident that Sun still has enough remaining technical chops to deliver the core technology - some of the smartest people I know work there, and work on this - I think that Sun needs to modify it's DNA and get people that not only understand how to market to the development and design community, but also create tooling for designers as Adobe (clearly) and Microsoft (to some degree) - the two companies that Sun has decided to take on, head on - have at least a decade head start on them. Hint I - this will require investing heavily now, rather than trying to limp by on the cheap. Hint II - another walled-garden OSS community ain't gonna cut it because the best OSS tooling are tools that developers built for themselves. (Eclipse, NetBeans (sorta), gcc, ant, etc...). Designers don't build these kinds of tools for themselves.

This reminds me - given the sheer number and quality of Java engineering defections (I've lost track of the world-class rockstars that are just at Google, let alone Azul, etc)... I worry about the effect this will have on Sun's ability to deliver the next rev of Java SE...

This amazingly off-the-mark article appeared in The Register yesterday. Dalibor just joined Sun and surely is still getting his bearings and has never participated in the JCP and it's possible he was misquoted by Gavin. As a friend of Dalibor, I've suggested to him that he should get it corrected. As the Apache Software Foundation representative to the JCP EC, I sent the following to the Sun EC reps and chair of the PMO trying to figure out what Sun is up to here :

Patrick, Danny, Calinel :

Given that fact that the statements contained in

    http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/14/jcp_individual_representation/

are given by a Sun employee identifying himself in his job role, can I assume that Sun is interested in taking this discussion public? I think that is a really healthy approach. I think there is confusion about the basic facts and I think clarification will be useful for the community as a whole.

I think I'll wait to see what Sun's intention is here before addressing some of the problems in the article. After all, it could be a just a huge misunderstanding. Why do I care? Because openness, transparency and the equitable "rule of law" is inherent in the ASF's struggle in securing an equitable Java SE TCK license from Sun.

Hopefully Sun will allow me to publish their answer. Not being able to would be supportive of "A culture favoring closed-door meetings" :)

Just got an update to version "286u-7" via Cydia. Basically, this is a nice terminal for the iPhone that lets me do usual shell things, and the packages that come via Cydia make it very powerful. Full apt, for example. ssh, svn. (I can setup a tunnel to an internal JIRA server at 10gen so that I can use my iPhone browser...)

The UI is half-screen of keyboard, and half-screen of terminal window. What's interesting is seeing how they are learning how to leverage the touch features of the screen. A terminal using the iPhone kbd is a little challenging, especially w/ the small screen for those of us where glasses are required more and more :) so finding ways of incorporating graphics and touch will make this tool all the more useful.

They are using single-finger touch to bring up a neat "grid" menu, short and long single finger swipe, and two finger swipe. I'm still figuring it out, but what I know is nice. For example, short swipes up and down gets you the up/down command history in the shell, just like an up/down arrow would. Short swipe up to the "northeast" is a ctrl-c, to the "southwest" is tab. "west" is backspace, and "east" is space. Two-finger swipe up ("north") is the conf page, down is hide/show keyboard, "west" and "east" flip between the multiple terminal sessions. When you touch and hold, a square "menu" of buttons comes up, and sliding to them either does the function (e.g. "clear"), or changes the "menu" to a set of variants. For example, sliding to the "ls" button - which is darker to indicate that there are options there - switches the rest of the squares to variants : "ls -a", "ls -al", "ls -s" etc.

The results are pretty nice - if you have experience working in a shell, you can go pretty fast. I've only used it for a few things so far - ssh-ing into a server at work, or setting up a tunnel so that I can control a Hudson instance running inside our firewall. The iPhone is an incredibly powerful little computer, and having a good command line makes it more so. I wonder when Android will run on it? :)

From an article on TSS :

"Most successful open source projects are using GPL," Mårten Mickos, former CEO at MySQL and now of Sun.

While "most" is debatable, I think it's interesting that it successful OSS projects either don't use the GPL, or don't just use the GPL alone, but have to modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.

OpenJDK has the Classpath Exception along with the strict requirement of having Sun have complete copyright (so they can relicense to something commercially useful), MySQL also does the complete copyright thing (how else could they be worth $1B) plus several exceptions including one which I think of as The "We want to use Apache's APR, and we can for our commercial licensees because the Apace License doesn't restrict what we can do, but it's a big problem for those taking MySQL under the GPL" Exception, which I interpret as saying the FSF's opinion on license compatibility should be ignored when it gets in the way. Linux supposedly has some sort of exception for modules (I can't find it), and of course the standard unix library under linux is offered under the LGPL.

So yes, there are a lot of successful open source projects under the GPL, but there are a few others (Apache Httpd (aka "the webserver running the inter-truck" [Apache License], Apache EverythingElse [Apache License], Eclipse [Eclipse Public License], Firefox [Mozilla Public License], etc) that seem to do ok despite their non-GPL handicap :)

Are there actually *any* major, successful open source / free software projects available under a pure GPL?

Last night, I was happy to accept the 2008 JCP Member of the Year award on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation. Congrats, all, and thanks to the JCP EC for the support.

As a bonus, Max said he'd ship it so I don't have to figure out how to explain it to the TSA peeps at SFO.

The following is really boring - but I want it out there so that someone plagued by the same problem has an easier time figuring it out than I did.

Interesting problem on Leopard. I had been having problems in the last few days looking at PDFs on my laptop, but was so busy - and I have a big honkin' 8-core Mac at work - I didn't think much of it. Until this morning, when I was trying to look at the CommunityOne pdf and then upload photos from my camera into iPhoto...

Symptoms were Preview.app starting, but not opening anything. Same with jpegs - double click or "open file.jpg" from command line, and Preview.app opens or becomes active, but no windows open. In iPhoto, I'd connect the camera, it would do it's thing for a bit, and instead of showing me the low-res thumbs on the import screen, I just got little rectangles. When I did hit import, it opened a dialog and said that either the images were of an unknown format (.jpg) or the data was bad. I knew the apps were ok - I had created a new user and tried both - so it had to be something specific to my user. I snooped w/ opensnoop for a while, but wasn't looking for errors correctly. Anyway...

Problem? Well, it turns out that on Leopard (maybe earlier versions as well...) these apps use temp space in /var/folders/{2 char dir name}/{big ugly dir name}/.. so they need to write there. Somehow (I suspect via DiskUtil's fix permissions "utility" which I was using on wed trying to fix a MSFT Word problem) mine was owned by root, and thus as me, nothing worked. The solution was simply to sudo chown -R geir on the directory. Make sure you choose the right one - there is one for each user on the system, I think.

In retrospect, I might have gotten a hint faster if I had looked at the system.log, but that kind of "aha!" is always easier once you know everything :)

Also, there's a thread on this in Apple's forums.

I dropped my laptop. Twice. It was after a weeklong trip to Brasil and Argentina. 6 airplanes, a zillion bus and cab trips, 2 train trips, 1 talk at FISL, interview 5 companies for offshoring/staff augmentation. I was tired.

After the first drop, 10% of the screen was broken - the left side. Got another and was going to do a transfer when I got home. On the way home, it fell out of my bag again. Now over 50% of the screen didn't work.

Solution? Carbon Copy Cloner. Attached the two laptops together w/ a FireWire 800 cable, held option on startup to let me boot off the drive in my broken laptop, used CCC to clone the old drive to the new laptop.

4 hours later, had a complete clone, and got back to work. Perfect. Recommended.

Cydia rocks. APT based. Can search. Has that little alpha-thingy like the contact list for finding things fast, rather than the scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll approach of Installer. I can now use ssh and svn from my iPhone. Now looking for git :)

... by about 10 years, but ntop simply rocks. Took a bit to get it going on OS X (tried to build it myself, got into dependency hell, eventually threw up my hands and installed fink), but it was very useful to watch some of our live work yesterday at Joost.

h/t to ColmMac for the suggestion

11 WARN [main] openjpa.Runtime - The property named "openjpa.Id" was not recognized and will be ignored, although the name closely matches a valid property called "openjpa.Id".

My friend Tom Marble is leaving Sun.

Tom and I have been doing hand-to-hand combat over 'free' Java, open source Java, Apache's relationship with Sun, the TCK license battle for years now. He's a worthy opponent and I really respect him. His new things sounds great, and I can't wait until he reveals more publicly.

Darryl finds the core of the issue, as usual. (What took you so long, my friend? :)

I think this is one of the downsides of Sun's "Feudal" open-source model. All project models have strengths and weaknesses - I think that Sun's strengths are that they have many really smart people who really mean well, and they are also willing to just pump cash into something a la Microsoft (e.g. Netbeans) - but when the business plan needs projects to be a "walled garden" (e.g. OpenJDK) with statutory control designed or intended, things will get rough at the intercept with the natural ebb and flow of contributors.

The Java Trap

And while you are pondering the idea of not paying, don't forget Sun does aggressively defend their intellectual property in court...

I never could understand how Intel could let AMD get into OLPC. It was such a no brainer.

So today it was good to see that Intel and OLTP have made peace.

We are pleased to report that the Final Draft makes the Apache License, version 2.0, fully compatible with GPLv3. We are grateful to the Apache Software Foundation for working with us to achieve this long-sought goal.

Maybe they mean to say that the Final Draft makes the GPLv3 compatible with the Apache License v2? After all, the Apache License didn't need to change for this to happen :)

I saw an interesting blog post from Bob Sutor, Vice President of Second Life ;) at IBM regarding the new [broken] GPLv3 draft - he claims IBM is "pretty satisfied with where we are". That's odd. The big bug in the current draft is the surprise "not compatible with the Apache License" sucker punch from Mr Stallman, and that doesn't get even a mention from Bob. Either IBM *wants* to keep the GPL and AL incompatible, doesn't care, or Bob isn't paying attention. Which is it?

Catching up w/ the universe on the train this morning, I noticed that - to my utter lack of surprise - the FSF is again declaring the new version of the GPL to remain incompatible with the Apache License. I'm not really surprised that they did this - just more of the same - but I sure think it odd they didn't realize this until now, and didn't appear to bring it up to the ASF, which has been participating in the GPLv3 process.

Now, I don't believe there's a problem there, and it's hard to believe that they think there's a problem either. The text where they explain it is really unconvincing, since they agree with the idea that upstream contributors have zero liability due to a downstream distributor's deal.

It will be fun to figure out where this came from.

Stuck my head up for air this weekend, and I find out that Tangosol is being bought by Oracle!

This couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

Congrats Cam, Rob, Alex et al!

http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/charting_the_next_25_years

I suspect that Tim won't be thrilled about getting a new meme competing with "Web 2.0"...

in the ODF Alliance Newsletter (ironically not available in ODF).

A free-as-in-beer tool that arguably frees users to choose ODF natively from Word is mentioned on page 3, just after "Alacos' Lettos Beta Online Conversion" (whatever that is)....

And people wonder why ODF is apparently such an uphill battle for the industry. I just don't understand ODF politics.

Update : 2006-03-10 : I got beaten about the head and neck with a stick by someone who felt that me pointing out that the newsletter wasn't available in ODF was somehow wrong, because PDF is an excellent format for "final documents", and having it in an editable format like ODF would be bad. I don't disagree, actually, but still - having the document also available in ODF is a good example of eating one's own dogfood, as well as a demonstration of the fidelity of the alternate format.

I thought I understood Sun's OSS strategy. Create closely-held, managed communities around open source codebases (i.e. NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, Glassfish), allow partners and customers into the creation process, and service them where and when they need it. Makes perfect sense to me. Jonathan Schwartz is reported to have stated in 2005 that "Everything that Sun produces will be open source and free." Great. As I said, makes sense.

I figured that the obvious outlier, StarOffice, is simply an anachronism that will be brought over time in conformance with this strategy, as business considerations allow. Also makes sense.

But then I see things like the new, very cool ODF plug-in for MSFT Word. (Start here , click on the "Click here" to take you to it, and read more about the background here and other places.) It's not open source. Just to be sure, I read the terms of the license (but didn't agree, because as the license defines itself as Confidential Information, I couldn't write about it if I did...), and yes, this is a proprietary license.

To be clear, I think that it's fine for Sun to do this - they made the investment in creating the software, and it's theirs to license as they see fit (which appears philosophically orthogonal to their recent embrace of all things GPL, but hey, we know they had other reasons for that...). But as the world's leading purveyor of alternative-to-MSFT office suites via StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, I'd have thought that letting this beastie out in the wild would be in line with their OSS strategy. Curious...

My mac corrupted it's disk wednesday morning while at a SOA conference in NYC. In the snow. (Uphill, both ways. Without shoes. Barefoot. Feet? You had feet?) Thankfully, I also carry a Thinkpad running XP... Who am I kidding - it was a disaster.

It happened when the mac overheated - it closed it's lid, put it in the bag at the Starbucks before going to a meeting earlier that morning, and when I pulled it out, it was still on, very hot, fans madly clacking and screaming. It was still running (try that w/ the Thinkpad and see new and interesting BSODs). However, both CPU cores were pegged and the machine was sluggish. I did initiate a shutdown, and when it seemed to hang on the way down, I shut it down hard. Big mistake. Next time booting I saw the dreaded "file-folder w/ question mark" icon, which means both "system unable to find bootable operating system image" as well as "you're *beep*ed" (this is a family-friendly blog..)

So, beep-ed I was. I called Apple, made an appointment at the "Genius Bar" at the 5th Avenue Apple Store, and at noon, caught a cab and got up there. (Amazing how easy it is to catch a cab in NYC during snow storms....) The "genius" told me that yep, I was beep-ed. He was happy to reformat the drive for me. Given I've been a subscriber to the "faith-based computing" paradigm lately (aka no backups), that wasn't going to happen except as a last resort (after forensic data recovery, for example, although I hadn't quite worked out how to explain *that* on my expense report...). He was then happy to sell me DiskWarrior, set me up at the end of the bar with power, and wished me luck. He also let me take out my Thinkpad and use that for email while waiting for DiskWarrier to boot and do it's stuff (45 min!) but only on the condition I kept the mac in full view at all times.

Magically, DiskKeeper was able to rebuild the directory tree, with a loss of only a few OS files (resulting in an unbootable system, of course). I figured I was safe, and left the Temple of Steve, and went back to the SOA conference, and then home to continue the work. By the way, the 5th Ave Temple of Steve (59th and 5th) is simply stunning :

You walk in the front of the cube and down a circular staircase to the big store floor. If you are in NYC, it's worth a look if you find this sort of thing interesting. (The one in SOHO is nice too...)

Anyway, that night I bought a 260G LaCie firewire drive ("designed by F.A. Porsche" who I assume is a specialist in simple square metal boxes with a mirrored front), and backed up the entire laptop hard disk. I tried to fool the OS X installation disk to simply upgrade and archive OSX, saving my user prefs, but due to disk space limits and damage to the OS, it didn't work. Yesterday morning, I did a full wipe of the drive, fresh OS install, created a new personal account, and then replaced my home directory with that from the LaCie backup.

I'm amazed how much was restored. The only things missing that I've discovered so far is a driver for Parallels (I simply need to re-install), my license key for Keynote, and I'm guessing my license key for QT Pro, and my QT MPEG-2 playback component, all of which I can get back from the online Apple Store w/o a hassle. My ControlPanel enhancements (like Growl) all came over w/ that home directory copy. It's utterly amazing. As far as I can tell, there's been no loss. I hadn't saved two OmniOutliner documents (I use it for todo list management and time tracking), and it was able to recover from its own periodic background saves.

Oh, and one more thing :) This experience validated my decision last year to go "all in" with IMAP (hosted by Tuffmail). While doing the restore yesterday (which took a while), I was able to pick up another Thinkpad running Ubuntu, fire up Thunderbird, and see all my mail, and all my archives. No interruption. No loss. And full confidence that any email work I did on that thinkpad would be reflected on the Mac once I got back up. If you tend to be multi-client, or don't backup like you should :) consider IMAP. Good support on Thunderbird (so you can use the same client on Windows, Linux and OS X, and the OS X Mail.app has good support as well (that's what I use, for aesthetic reasons...)

A few days ago, for reasons I can't explain in retrospect, I posted this asking the FSF to fix their license page. A commenter helpfully suggested that I simply send the webmaster at FSF a note. I did today, and a kind soul from the FSF just wrote to me to tell me it's fixed, and it is. Thanks FSF :)

IDEA is my favorite editor, but I've spending time in Eclipse lately because it's convenient for using alternative JREs for debugging and running (i.e. Apache Harmony).

Anyway, I was impressed to see that IDEA will have a RubyOnRails plug-in soon. I can't remember if I blogged about this before, but I've always thought that this was the basic strategy Sun had in mind for NetBeans when they hired the two JRuby guys - get good Ruby support in NetBeans, and then when/if RoR users need to integrate with existing Java systems, or need the features of Java EE, they are already working in an environment they are at home in - a page from MSFTs playbook.

Anyway, this is cool - another example of how JetBrains (the maker of IDEA) keeps a laser-sharp focus on the end developer. When I lived in IDEs 12 hours a day (I've been an IDEA user since v2.x) I always thought they were a leader in the space. Good to see they still have 'it'...

It's been an interesting week for us amateur Sun Kremlinologists, watching the stream of "stuff" coming from the Sun analyst summit, and the brouhaha surrounding GPLv3-ing OpenSolaris.

There are a couple of interesting bits in Ed Burnette's blog on ZDNet. First, of course Sun's reasons for embracing the GPL aren't "as pure as you think". Sun is a publicly-traded company, is allegedly ;) run for profit, and Jonathan Schwartz is a smart guy - there is an agenda, and it serves Sun's business interests. This is normal and expected. It's hard to imagine why anyone would ever think otherwise.

Ed gets to the heart of the matter :

The ultimate goal is nothing short of replacing GNU/Linux with "GNU/Solaris".

Ya think? :) This has been my theory for a while. But I think Ed misses an important point in the next paragraph. It wasn't "suspicion" that kept the "thought leaders" away from OpenSolaris. I think it was two things - first, the license was declared to be incompatible with the GPL by the FSF. Second, the OpenSolaris project doesn't have it's own distro. You can choose one of two quasi-open source distros from Sun (Solaris Express, Solaris Express Community Edition), and elsewhere there are other variants, such as BeleniX, marTux, NexentaOS and SchilliX. This is all well and good, but I think that given how closely Sun is holding onto OpenSolaris, they'd be well served with an open source distro maintained by the OpenSolaris community.

As I said before, I think that it's a reasonable strategy to move OpenSolaris to GPLv3 to try to take advantage of the rift that may happen if the Linux kernel stays on GPLv2, and let "Solaris/GNU" take on "Linux/GNU" on a level license playingfield. However, I think that Jonathan's and Rich's attempt to get this to happen backfired this week, and it will be interesting to see what happens going forward.

There's one more thing that deserves a comment. In the next paragraph, Ed says something that I think needs to be clarified :

By contrast, Sun's decision to release Java under the GPL (v2) was warmly received, except for those parties such as IBM and the Apache Foundation who would have preferred a more permissive license such as ASF (Apache), EPL (Eclipse), or BSD.

The Apache Software Foundation made no statements regarding the license Sun chose for their implementation of Java SE. The ASF has it's own open source Java SE project, Apache Harmony, that predates Sun's announcement of OpenJDK by a year, and will probably be 3 years old before Sun actually gets OpenJDK operationally off the ground. But the ASF doesn't really care what license people use for their own intellectual property. Now, it would have been nice if Sun chose a license that wasn't known to be incompatible with the Apache License that we use in Harmony (FD, I'm the PMC Chair of Harmony), but it was their choice to make, and they made it. Having another open/free Java implementation is good. Period.

I've been beta testing Joost (neé The Venice Project) now for some time, but only on Windows. The Windows experience was pretty funny, and was a good illustration why I simply can't stand the platform - there were endless problems caused by subtle differences in video drivers, the cure (upgrading) being worse than the disease. For example, after upgrading to the MSFT-recommended driver on a 1 year old ThinkPad T43, the machine would never come back from sleep. Just BSOD.

Anyway, today I got a copy for the Mac. Naturally, it just worked. And it was really nice.

I'm Joost!

Sun has pre-announced an ODF plug-in for MSFT Word. This is cool. Apparently we can play with it later this month. Will it be open source? Seems like it's coming from StarOffice rather than the OpenOffice.org project (home of the ODF Toolkit Project). According to the PR, the plug-in will use OO.org to do the work - I wonder why they didn't use the toolkit?

I like the slickness of the Word UI and prefer it to OO.org (and on a mac, there is no OO.org, just the NeoOffice/j port, IIRC), but I resent the file format. Kudos, Sun. I'm looking forward to trying it.

On Tuesday, Miguel de Icaza wrote a defense of OOOOOXML, Microsoft's "open" office file format. I was really startled to see him doing this. Lets face it - a spec that has directives like "autoSpaceLikeWord95" which mandate emulating a proprietary, 10 year old, closed-source product is more like a product requirements doc than a spec.

However, as I really don't know a lot about either spec, nor am interested in wading too deeply in what is very complicated political theatre (hey, Bob Sutor, when will you blog about the ODF Tools project at OpenOffice.org?), there was one thing that I'd like to talk about.

Miguel argues that in the area of formulas and functions for spreadsheets, the ODF spec is incomplete :

Depending on how you count, ODF has 4 to 10 pages devoted to it. There is no way you could build a spreadsheet software based on this specification.

I'm betting he's right. That in a vacuum, with just that spec, you don't have a hope of building a complete, inter-operative implementation. He reports MSFT took over 300 pages to describe that area, and if it contains silliness comparable to "autoSpaceLikeWord95", it's probably not enough either.

However, we don't work in vacuums. Good specs should have reference implementations (RI) that you can examine for correct behavior - for example, it's impossible to implement Java SE without testing what he RI does, because like all specs, there is vagueness and incompleteness. Even better, having an RI or other implementation in open source means you can not only see how the code should behave, but give some insight into how or why it behaves that way. As far as I can tell, there are 3 open source implementations to look at for ODF (OO.org, GNumeric, KSpread) and one proprietary one, Lotus Workplace. What are your choices for OOOOOOXML? A $400 closed-source product from MSFT that probably restricts how you can use the software in it's EULA?

Ubuntu Live at OSCON. I wish I had something to talk about...

I want to admit a secret. I always thought the SunRay was actually a good idea, but a touch ahead of it's time in terms of both technology as well as market acceptance.

Seems like others are starting to see the value of the model....

In a discussion about OOOOOOOOXML (or whatever it's called this week), Sam puts some wood behind the definition-arrow for "open standard". He says, correctly IMO :

I prefer simpler definitions. A standard is one that has multiple, inter-operable, independent implementations. An open standard, at least in the software world, is one where at least one of those implementations is open source.

I'd like to augment this by pointing out that the term "open source" implies the usual set of freedoms that accompany the copyright license, such as freedom to use in whatever context an end-user wishes without requirements to engage in a transaction or contract of any sort with any other party. Therefore, an open standard must allow such freedoms for users of open source implementations. If not, the implementation isn't open source, and therefore, according to Sam, not an open standard.

Someone at the ASF pointed me to this Sun ad, because if the gratuitous use of "Apache". (You know that the C&D printer in Menlo Park would be out of toner and paper if someone used the word "Java" that way. Anyway...)

What caught my attention was the other thing it says :

"Solaris 10. Free & open source software from Sun"

What does that mean? Clearly Solaris 10 isn't free and open source software, because it's also proprietary. Does the ". " after the "10" and before "Free" mean something ? Not "is". Maybe "contains"? How about "will eventually completely be (as we position it strongly against Linux)"?

Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of Sun removing the religious and political barriers (aka "CDDL") to OpenSolaris adoption, and the much theorized prefixing w/ "GNU" (as in "GNU/OpenSolaris") is a very smart move as well. Is Solaris also was completely open source, that would be icing on the cake.

But they ain't there yet...

Not long after I became an IBM employee courtesy of the Gluecode acquisition, pigs flew with the return of IBM as a platinum sponsor of JavaOne. Sun and IBM. IBM and Sun.

Now, about a year after I joined Intel, this happened. Who would have guessed?

Clearly, this isn't my fault. And, honestly, in both cases, I think it's great.

Now, time to send that resume to SAP...

I noticed a rumor in eWeek reporting that Sun would use GPLv3 for OpenSolaris. (I think that the idea of the CDDL-ed OpenSolaris also under GPLvX is a good idea, actually - remove religious objections for rejecting "OpenSolaris/GNU" distros, and let the two kernels compete on their technical merits.)

Anyway, Rich Green, EVP of Software at Sun, recently corrected the public record - they are still evaluating, which is wholly consistent with their position on GPLv3 for their implementation of Java SE, OpenJDK. Makes perfect sense.

Good software tools are those that are an extension of you - that you use naturally and stay out of your way. I used to think about this only in the domain of programmers tools - the editor was clearly the most important simply because that's where I spent the most time - but every little bit of the whole process is important. Of course, it really applies to all software, from the OS on up, which is why I'm a mac user - no other platform I've used seriously has ever been so "out of the way" for most things, making it easy as possible to focus on what I want to focus on. Visual and operational serenity :)

I stumbled across WriteRoom via some new friends in the Boston area.

It's an editor that goes into full screen mode on the mac. No windows, no menu bar, no bouncing icons, nada. Just a clean pla