Posted on October 24, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
Florian Effenburger steps down as OpenOffice.org marketing project lead. He has always been the model of leadership in that role, patient, tolerant and firm when necessary, and I am sure he will be missed. His replacement
Peter Junge is from Red Flag 2000, a Sun/Oracle partner in China developing the Red Office distribution of OpenOffice.org, and used to work in Sun’s Hamburg team on StarOffice.
-
Just when you thought the abuse of customers and prospective customers of media products couldn’t get worse, this proposal for debt collectors to be deployed to collect money with menaces before any legal judgement is obtained comes along. Where are our legislators? Are they ignorant of the abuse, misinformed or corrupt? I can’t see a fourth explanation.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ More Change
Posted on October 23, 2010 by Simon Phipps
[An expanded version of this posting can be found on ComputerWorldUK]
-
Another of the key Solaris guys quits. A key figure in the development the ZFS storage appliance as well as of DTrace in Solaris kernel engineering, Mike was also the guy that shut down OpenSolaris for Oracle. I’m not sure there’s anyone left from the team of superstars whose new inventions made Solaris 10 so great.
-
“I believe that the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body, and there is no remaining useful role for an independent advocate for the academic and research community on the EC.”
-
James Gosling calls Steve Jobs on a serious untruth he’s spreading about the Java port. Truth is we always preferred platform providers to manage the port of Java as it led to a much better developer and user experience all round to have all the twiddly bits (especially the UI) done by the platform owner.
-
“LibreOffice is, after all, and until proven otherwise, a downstream version of OpenOffice.org, and as such deserves inclusion into the OpenOffice.org community. As for the fork itself, and because we’re still a downstream version of OpenOffice.org, forks become forks only when one of the boys refuse to play ball with the others; and the Oracle team of OpenOffice.org just did that.”
Charles leaves the OO.o Community Council and leadership of the national language team. As someone once said, Rehost And Carry On.
Also:
-
I completely rely on TripIt to gather all the diverse information about my travel schedules, and the Pro add-on makes them monitor the flights automatically and keep track of all the points on the frequent travel programmes. Even if they weren’t offering me a miniscule incentive to write about it (which they are – entry in a draw), I would recommend anyone who travels once a month or more to splash out on Pro for TripIt. This link gets you a discount until the start of November.
Filed under: Links | 9 Comments »
Posted on October 22, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
Apple has finally lost patience with Java and tossed it from the Mac. The update that just happened is the last they’ll bring out, and OS X Lion won’t include Java support.
It’s been an off-and-on relationship for quite some time, rescued by 1:1 contacts each time the end has been threatened. This has to be a big negative for all the many developers who prefer to use a Mac than Windows to develop their Java code. Looks like the future for Ubuntu as a developer desktop just got several degrees brighter – does Steve Jobs ignore the Ballmer Imperative at his peril?
It’s hard to see how this can be recovered unless Oracle can sweet-talk Apple the way Sun used to each time someone screwed up. Having Oracle take over the development would be hard for several reasons:
- First, the Java port in use includes a lot of Apple know-how that is not generally available (such as private UI interfaces) to make Java integrate well rather than using just X11.
- Second, it belongs to Apple, so Oracle would either have to receive a copy of Apple’s implementation or start again with all the UI and platform native code.
- Third, distribution would move outside Apple’s update mechanism so keeping it patched and secure would be difficult – a new installer and update mechanism will be needed.
- Fourth, the new AppStore rules will make sure there’s negligible demand for consumer Java on the Mac.
It’s possible that an open source implementation could step into the breach, but I still have my doubts. OpenJDK for example is actually developed largely by Oracle, and after that (a long way after) by Red Hat, so the community would need to magically gain some hard-core Mac experts. I think this is actually bad news for everyone and that Apple’s pursuit of platform control in this specific case harms their customers. [Expanded version at ComputerWorldUK]
Also:
-
I was actually surprised to find Amazon didn’t have a sandpit for AWS, so this new offering really doesn’t surprise me. They still have no easy-start developer environment that I have found, that’s a serious lack and an invitation to try Node.js
-
This has to be a candidate for an IgNobel Prize.
Filed under: Links | 11 Comments »
Posted on October 21, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
“Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans.”
Despite promises from both the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems during the election to end the surveillance state, the crazy, abusive idea of making ISPs keep records of every UK internet connection and phone call for at least a year so that they can be used for investigations have been revived. Their earlier promises are still there on the web, and we still remember them, yet they have absolutely no shame. I am disgusted at these hypocrites.
-
“Once again, then, it is clear that the only fair and practical solution for open standards is RF: Restriction-Free licensing.”
-
Given how well-funded the pernicious hydra FSFE (and the rest of us) are fighting actually is, I remain amazed that meaningful opposition is even possible. Huge kudos to FSFE (of which I am a proud member) for keeping this battle going against all odds, even despite Quislings.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Who Will Watch The Watchmen?
Posted on October 20, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
“When a company says which of these conditions it will accept, that will show you how far it plans to depart from the principles of free software.”
An interesting discussion by Richard Stallman that indicates he is still willing to tolerate copyright aggregation by corporations. The fact is no corporation will accept these extra clauses he has written, so unless they include them in their standard agreements by default, he might just as well say (as I did) “avoid copyright aggregation.”
-
“lobbyists have attempted to put the focus on “mixed solutions with open and proprietary code” and have FRAND licenses declared compatible with open software”
The people involved definitely should know better than this. While it is possible to build specific cases of FRAND licensing that can be considered compatible with open source licensing, the class in general never can be and the voices saying otherwise should be ashamed of themselves as they attempt to sell everyone’s freedoms in exchange for corporate marketing dollars.
Also:
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Gaming The System
Posted on October 19, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
If anyone has forgotten why RAND and RAND-Z terms are a defect awaiting exploitation to undermine software freedoms, this article – from 2005 – ought to jog your memory.
-
You can tell the world has changed when there's a malware alert about a massive rise in malicious exploits of Java flaws, and it's raised by Microsoft. Is the problem here that there's no automated update mechanism for Java on Windows for most users (or it's turned off), I wonder?
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Plus ça change
Posted on October 18, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
Stephen Colebourne articulates what I am sure has been on many people’s minds – that it’s time for an independent JCP, and that the only way Oracle would tolerate such a thing would be to remove core Java from the JCP. This is the start of a great proposal and I hope it receives recognition, serious consideration and a response from Oracle.
-
While I agree with the article which I beieve is a well observed reflection on politics and society, I disagree with the title as a general statement as I believe open, meriticractic oligarchy to be the proven and true pattern for open source governance.
-
Mendelbrot is someone I would have loved to have met. We were both at IBM at the same time, so it might have been possible, but we never did. His work has profoundly influenced me. I believe he discovered a new fundamental aspect of reality that we will continue to discover allows us to objectively explore and explain things previously thought to be purely subjective. One of the greats of the 20th century has left our community, and left it immeasurably richer.
-
This could be a profound health breakthrough for men.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Monday Links
Posted on October 17, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is still in play, and despite attempts by companies like Microsoft to "own" interoperability and neuter it to become a concept defining a preference for proprietary monocultures, there is still a chance the EU will enact procurement legislation that attacks their de facto monopoly and brings long-term software freedom benefits to European administrations.
-
The fact the BSA supports ACTA tells us more both it in a moment than large quantities of analysis could do in a day. I predict BSA will be a key user of ACTAs provisions in their pursuit of closed software by proprietary vendors and their oppression of those vendors' customers.
Filed under: ACTA, Links, Patents | Comments Off on ☞ Monopolies and patents
Posted on October 14, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
It was a long session, but the conversation flowed between me, John Newton and Luis Sala of Alfresco and FLOSS Weekly anchor Randal Schwartz.
-
Nothing new to people who understood software freedom from the beginning to mean open collaboration between equal participants, but all the same it’s good to see an analyst saying it. Given previous analysis latency this presumably means we’ll hear Forrester saying it in 2014, VCs investing on the basis of it by 2015 and Gartner inventing it for the first time around 2017 😉
-
Excellent summary of the situation from O’Grady (as usual). The only thing lacking is speculation about the new power distribution in the community. With Oracle winning the bet that might would defeat right, there seems space for some analysis of whether the Java community just became sharecroppers.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Turning Point Discussions
Posted on October 12, 2010 by Simon Phipps
-
“IBM will work with Oracle and the Java community to make OpenJDK the primary high performance open source runtime for Java. IBM will be shifting its development effort from the Apache Project Harmony to OpenJDK.”
As always in these corporate mating dances, the real meat is in what’s not said, especially about the Google lawsuit, the future of Apache Harmony without IBM, the licensing arrangements, the governance of OpenJDK and the carving-up of control of the JCP.
Will IBM actually join the community or is this a corporation-corporation deal like with OpenOffice? What else was agreed in the deal between IBM and Oracle that made this happen? Where does this leave open source developers in the software patent wars? There’s plenty to explore, but sadly none of the articles so far have asked any of these questions.
-
Tim Ellison is the chair of the Apache Harmony PMC, so his comments here are very significant – one might even suggest they amount to calling for Harmony to be wound up, not that that’s one person or company’s decision.
-
Repeat after me “pragmatic”, “pragmatic”, “pragmatic”
Sacha Labourey pretty much nails the issues here. The Java community needed clarity over whether it was an open, level playing field or whether they were just sharecropping someone else’s property. Clarity is clarity, whether you like it or not.
-
Mark Reinhold focuses as I’d expect on the technical collaboration. But the comments highlight that the announcement has been made with the details of the OpenJDK governance still unresolved.
-
List of the people working on Harmony. Not only is the list apparently out of date, it has such a strong IBM contingent (I wonder how many of those “independents” are actually IBM or Intel contractors) that I am amazed it has escaped Apache Board scrutiny for so long.
[Also on ComputerWorldUK]
Filed under: Java, Links | 2 Comments »
Wild Webmink 