My article on learning from the Wikileaks experience and managing the risks of cloud computing is now available in the Essays section.
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⚡ Cloud Correction
Posted on December 11, 2010 by Simon Phipps
http://twitter.com/#!/webmink/status/13386464414924801
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☝ Non-Centralised Infrastructure
Posted on December 10, 2010 by Simon Phipps
After discovering BitCoin (where such a large number of people were kind enough to send small donations to 1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3 that I’m now considering paying for my VoIP with it) I’ve been accumulating a list of other non-centralised infrastructure that might evolve into something that’s both effective and Senator-proof. The list is posted on my blog over at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Cloud Computing, ComputerWorldUK | 4 Comments »
☝ The Risky Cloud
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Simon Phipps
It used to take a bailiff and a man with an axe for the door, but the cloud makes it so much easier. If I told you that your entire business infrastructure could be taken offline by a government employee, or even a commercial provider, without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse, perhaps because a politician has philosophical issues with your activities, would that worry you? Yet it seems that the most popular brands on the market for cloud computing and web services place you at that risk if you follow the trend to cloud hosting for business infrastructure.
Continued over on ComputerWorldUK…
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☝ The End Of The Road For Web Services
Posted on November 11, 2010 by Simon Phipps
The news is out that WS-I will now be absorbed by OASIS according to their PDF release. They told us back in July that it was going to happen. As far as I can tell, that’s the end of the WS-* family of specifications – there will be no more, and they are destined purely for “maintenance” at OASIS. They will be with enterprise developers for years to come, a kind of architectural COBOL.
In case your computer industry history is lacking, WS-I (“Web Services Interoperability Organization”) is the industry consortium that got together a decade ago to create specifications for Web Services protocols (note the capitals, so as not to confuse with actual internet services that use HTTP and REST for loosely-coupled data access). Formed mainly as a competitive action by IBM and Microsoft, they went on to create massively complex layered specifications for conducting transactions across the Internet. Sadly, that was the last thing the Internet really needed.
Read on over at ComputerWorldUK…
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☞ Good For Java?
Posted on October 12, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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]
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⚐ Gosling Webcast
Posted on September 3, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Image via Wikipedia
Next week JavaZone, the conference that brought you Lady Java and Java Forever will be held in Norway. To celebrate the opening of the new ForgeRock Norway office, we’ve arranged for a party just before the conference starts, on Tuesday evening. If you are in Oslo and would like to attend, please send an RSVP to the address on the web site.
As part of that, James Gosling and I will be “beaming in” via webcast to give short talks and maybe even answer a few questions. If you’d like to join the webcast (using DimDim), please register on our website.
Related Articles
- Gosling: Oracle Could Still Live up to 2007 Java Pledge (pcworld.com)
- Java daddy says Sun engineers ran ‘goofiest’ patent contest (go.theregister.com)
- Java founder Gosling launches T-shirt campaign for free Java (infoworld.com)
- Lady Java Video Marks Exact Point Where Geek Culture Jumped The Shark (techcrunch.com)
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✍ Did Open Core Trigger OpenStack?
Posted on July 19, 2010 by Simon Phipps
At the end of the Community Leadership Summit here in Portland people arriving for OSCON started to show up. They included one of the guys behind Rackspace’s announcement of OpenStack that was made today. He gave me a full rundown of both the news and the history behind it. The history seems to suggest it was the open core business model that lead to the creation of OpenStack. Read more on ComputerWorldUK.
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☞ Packaging Redux
Posted on July 7, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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This post, effectively a manifesto for the next generation of packaging, is well worth reading as Matt articulately describes the same issues that led the OpenSolaris team to develop IPS.
His solution differs – not one ring to bind them all, but rather a decoupling of cooperating package management approaches so that appropriate solutions can address specific needs. This is a call to order that deserves a serious, collective, non-partisan response.
Filed under: Open Source, Technology | 4 Comments »
Java Genius
Posted on June 25, 2010 by Simon Phipps
This is a work of genius:
The conference, JavaZone in Norway, deserves every bit of the attention it’s getting as a consequence.
Update: If the YouTube version fails again, you’ll now find the video on the JavaZone site.
Filed under: Java | 10 Comments »
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