By a massive margin (214 to 14) the Hudson community has decided to rename itself Jenkins and rehost on independent resources. I just hope Oracle decides to stay with the community and not try to keep a fork going.
Last week I broke the news that ForgeRock (where I work) had gained an architect for OpenIDM. Today is the last day of ForgeRock’s first year, and I’m pleased to say we have gained an architect for the open source LDAP directory product we work on, OpenDJ.
Matthew Swift comes with great experience, having worked on the OpenDS project before at Sun Microsystems where he was responsible for the core server (its performance; reliability; administration model and tools) as well as developing many new core features. He’s already dived in with ideas about how ForgeRock should contribute to the OpenDJ roadmap, including planning for a new v3 release of OpenDJ with a redesigned core server so that the v2 base can be kept as stable as possible for existing users, adding only usability features and mainly fixing bugs.
This is a great end to a great first year. Welcome to ForgeRock, Matthew!
I just got home from a week in Brazil, where I gave talks for IBM and for a large ForgeRock customer and also at the remarkable Campus Party. This is the second year I have spoken at Campus Party in Brazil and once again it was an interesting and overwhelming experience.
Campus Party started in 1997 as a LAN party in Spain (where people bring along their computers to connect to a massive network and play computer games) but has spread across the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world to become a global activity. The event in Brazil is held in a huge exhibition centre. Delegates pay to attend, then live on-site for the week, camping in pop-up tents inside the exhibition centre.
That was the source of one of the off-the-wall activities I participated in. Every delegate received a bath-robe from one of the sponsors, and near the end there was a bid to establish the Guinness world record for the largest crowd wearing bath-robes. Only a fraction of the Campuseiros participated, and there was still a dense crowd exceeding 1,500 people. Check the video:
The noise in the place is phenomenal and draining. There’s no daylight inside, just 24-hour activity. To get a flavour of the energy and variety, take a look at the Fickr photos. It’s now far more than a LAN party for two big reasons:
First, people are there for far more reasons. There is a Software Freedom camp (who were the hosts for my talk), a PC case-mod tournament, a group meeting to attack the digital divide, install-fests, live and electronic music – every aspect of the connected society as experienced by the 18-30 age group at which the event is targeted.
Second, there’s also conference content – and lots of it. Speakers this time included Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Wozniak – and those are just the English-speakers. There were government panels, star speakers and novel content of every shade and colour.
The most striking difference takes a while to dawn on you, though. Usually at a conference there’s a theme – a programming platform, a social issue, a research thread. But not here. Unlike any other event I have ever been to, there is no single theme bringing everyone together, apart from the uniting motif of being a young adult in the 21st century. What’s brought people together is the Internet and the future. That has to be the ultimate post-post-modern un-conference possible.
I have loved these paper-thin metal page markers ever since I first discovered them in the US over a decade ago. I’m delighted to find they are now available in the UK (and thus in plenty of Europe too) via Amazon. If you’d like me to send you one to try, just ask and I’ll mail one to you at the weekend.
Useful article from Brian about the language used in the European Interoperability Framework. The document is clearly confused and the result of diverse political pressures. On balance I think it’s a sign of progress, and that the language used indicates that terms applied to patents in standards must allow open source implementation, but there’s no doubt it could have been much clearer. Presumably it wasn’t clearer because the political cost of doing so was too high.
Congratulations to the Document Foundation team who have just released the first full version of LibreOffice. The key improvements are largely invisible to the user – creating a new build system that’s more usable, tidying the code to make it easier for community members to participate, simplifying the Windows installer and more. But they provide a sound base for future development and make it easier for the community to grow far beyond what was possible with OpenOffice.org before.
“This scheme was simply an attempt … to get-rich-quick in an exploitative scheme where the vulnerable were targeted with unfounded accusations and demands for cash in settlement of claims which had no basis in law.”
Brazil’s new License for Trademarks (Licença Pública de Marca, or LPM) adds additional rights on top of those delivered by open source. It ensures that any trademarks used in the software can be freely used by the community and means that control of trademarks can’t be used to chill the ability to exercise the four freedoms. Is the answer to trademark conflicts like we’ve seen around Hudson and LibreOffice?
A very astute move by Oracle here. They are proposing that the seat on the Java Community Process Executive Committee vacated by Apache should be filled by the São Paulo-based Brazilian Java User Group SouJava, represented by my charming and smart friend and former Sun colleague Bruno Souza (who incidentally also represents ForgeRock in Brazil and is a co-author here on webmink.com).
I think that given the circumstances this is the best outcome that could have been achieved and I hope Bruno and SouJava will be able to use their new position of influence to fix the broken things (like the opaque decision-making and the ability to have FOSS-hostile licensing terms on JSRs).
This is rather a long letter, but it conveys all the unease that was tangible at Campus Party among the software livre, digital inclusion and free culture camps.
You’ll recall that ForgeRock (where I work) launched the OpenIDM project back in October. One of the key control points in enterprise software is the provisioning or IDM software. It’s the point all the threads of directory, authentication, authorisation and provisioning come together and it’s the part that the proprietary vendors are least willing to surrender to that great deposer of control points, community-based open source software.
It’s already stimulated a great deal of interest and we already have a number of customers for it. We realised it needs a great engineer to act as ForgeRock’s lead architect for OpenIDM. So I am delighted to say that, starting today, Andreas Egloff is joining ForgeRock as Chief Architect, OpenIDM. Andi headed up OpenESB development at Sun and was the force behind the Fuji project that was creating its successor. His skills in identity management in general and in identity oriented enterprise middleware will be crucial in helping the OpenIDM project evolve quickly yet with architectural integrity.
Having Andi join the team rounds out an amazing first year wonderfully – welcome, Andi!
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
Brazil’s new License for Trademarks (
Wild Webmink 