After making a valiant attempt to negotiate an amicable outcome with Oracle, the Hudson community may well decide to rename itself Jenkins, move off Oracle infrastructure and build open governance underwritten by the Software Conservancy. Naturally Oracle will still be able to participate and co-develop the code it’s using for java.net within the Jenkins community (they are even invited onto the leadership team) but the one thing open source communities cannot and should not tolerate is a participant that regards itself as worthy of extra rights that are beyond question.
I’m on the agenda for the Java dev-room at FOSDEM, speaking about the lessons open sourcing Java taught me. (Thanks, Tom!) I’ll likely be staying Friday-Sunday so let me know if you want to meet up.
Excellent initiative that deserves to be emulated all over the world. If you have any kind of meeting spaces at your company, you could run a similar event for local teenagers in your area.
The proposed trademark policy for MariaDB is worth reading; they are keen to receive comments. Despite the policy being very well balanced, it lacks a matching implementation document to make all the statements have concrete consequences. Take a look and add comments for them.
Apologies for the silence over the weekend – we’ve been taking a break in Helsinki. Because of it being the darkest part of the year, the city has a week-long night-time festival of light-related art installations, Season of Light, now in its third year. It’s not unlike the “nuit blanche” I saw in Paris earlier in the year, but the 0ºC temperatures and falling sleet onto packed snow made the crowds a little smaller! We were able to tour the closing evening of the 2011 festival, walking snow-covered streets and encountering ambient music and shifting colourscapes.
One favourite was the stunning LED-lit cross in front of the cathedral, which showed a blazingly colourful sequence of abstract images accompanied by rich and full ambient music, shifting strong colours cast onto the building and the snow-field around it and candle-lights in all the windows of the buildings in the square surrounding it. You’ll find more and better photos of the installation at the cathedral on the event’s Facebook page.
Another was the fire dancing, held in a building courtyard north of the cathedral. Full of energy and gentle humour, the agile fire-juggling dancers were clearly having great fun despite the sleet falling on them and were warmly appreciated.
Dave Neary is always a good person to involve if you’re trying to build an open source community, and this article of his is especially good. By the way, he’s a member of FossAlliance along with me.
You almost never hear about IBM’s patent shakedowns (and there are many of them) because former VP Marshall Phelps (now at Microsoft) invented such an efficient machine for doing it that victims rarely attempt to publicly defend themselves. Looks like they have now patented the process itself in this curious business method meta-patent.
And rightly so. They are as bad as Guantanamo, punishment without end for people accused of being a threat without conviction and with secret evidence. The fact the Lib-Dems have not done away with them as they promised shows their presence in the UK government is a sham and that we are actually governed by old-style Conservatives with no respect for anyone but their rich friends.
Setting up broadband really isn’t rocket science, so it would be exciting to see more communities take matters into their own hands the way this one has done.
Yahoo Messenger is the only IM network I use where I am bothered daily by spam-porn-bots attempting to add me to their contact lists. Some days there are as many as 10 requests waiting when I log in. I don’t know what it is about Yahoo that makes their service so scummy, but it’s not stopping and I’m tired of it.
I don’t remember the last time anyone I actually wanted to talk with used Yahoo Messenger, so this blog posting is a request to anyone who knows me and uses Yahoo Messenger to make sure you have an account on something else – pretty much anything else, actually 🙂 – so we can stay in touch. I plan to remove Y! from Pidgin, Adium and the rest on Tuesday.
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.
Wild Webmink 