corigin.com

By Tim O’Reilly

Sun Microsystems announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire open source database leader MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. (Disclosure: I am on the board of directors of MySQL, and O’Reilly co-produces the MySQL User Conference with MySQL. In addition, O’Reilly produces the java.net community site for Sun.)

This seems to me to be a great deal both for Sun and for MySQL. Anyone who follows this blog or has heard my talks will have seen me say “Data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of internet applications, the very heart of Web 2.0. And of course, most of those Web 2.0 applications are built on the LAMP stack, where M stands for MySQL, far and away the leading open source database.

Years ago, John Gage, Sun’s chief scientist, made the provocative statement “the network is the computer.” And bit by bit, the industry has been realizing that dream. What we didn’t understand when we first started thinking about that emerging network operating system was just how much it would be a data-oriented system, such that you might more accurately say, “the network plus the database is the computer.”

The acquisition is also a great fit because Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design. But even beyond those relatively recent moves, Sun was arguably the first great open source success story, co-founded by Bill Joy, who not only led the Berkeley Unix project but wrote the open source TCP/IP stack on which so much of the internet was built. And even leaving out other open source projects at the company such as openoffice.org and netbeans, Sun has long been the single largest corporate contributor to the open source ecosystem. (For further support for that claim, see page 51 in last year’s EU study on open source software [pdf].)

This has been a bit of a lightning courtship, and I haven’t had a chance to discuss yet with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz just how he plans to take advantage of MySQL’s leadership position in the open source and internet-connected database market, but I do think that there is great potential for both companies. With one bold stroke, Sun has reshaped both the database and open source landscape. We’re all going to be chewing on the implications for some time.

Update: Jonathan’s blog includes details on Sun’s plans for MySQL. Zack Urlocker, MySQL’s Executive VP of Products, has a blog post on Infoworld explaining the vision from the MySQL point of view.

Updated: Sun Microsystems is taking the plunge into the database market with the purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion ($800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assumption of approximately $200 million in options).
With the move, announced Wednesday, Sun takes a big leap into the $15 billion database […]

Windows/Linux: The first public beta of Spicebird, an attempt to combine all of Mozilla’s productivity apps into one Outlook-like package, has been released, and from first looks, its going to at least make fans of the already-converted Thunderbird crowd. While there are, to be certain, a fair number of rough edges, Spicebird makes it easy to migrate calendars, RSS reading, and task lists into one familiar interface. To see more of what Spicebird can do (and what still needs work), follow along to an introductory screenshot tour after the jump.

Once you’ve downloaded Spicebird for Windows or Linux, installed and fired up Spicebird, it hits you with two setup prompts: One standard Thunderbird/mail dialog, and a new Jabber/Google Chat option:

My first test at getting Spicebird working with my Gchat account was successful, but I didn’t realize this until after a restart and having it log on. I’m pretty familiar with Thunderbird’s setup dialog at this point, which asks you standard questions about your IMAP or POP mail account. Gmail users wanting IMAP access should follow Google’s Thunderbird guide, as well as check out Gina’s guide to making T-bird the ultimate IMAP client.

Once you’re done setting up, you land on the “Home” tab. Much like other personal information managers, Spicebird aims to give you “day at a glance” information on the tasks, messages and (in this case) feeds asking for your attention.

The heart of Spicebird, Thunderbird email management, is, well, pretty much an integrated version of Thunderbird. Each tab (Mail, Tasks, Contacts, etc.) has its own settings, and Thunderbird’s setup in Spicebird leads me to believe that it can accept standard Thunderbird extensions.

My favorite extension, however—Provider for Google Calendar—didn’t play friendly during my quick setup of Spicebird. That means I didn’t have bi-directional Google Calendar sync, although the one-way iCal import worked fine. I use the Thunderbird/Lightning combination right now to manage my mail and tasks, but I like how the calendar fits much nicer into Spicebird (and without cluttering Thunderbird with a “Today” or thumbnail calendar pane).

The “Contacts” pane is the home of both your standard address book and instant messaging. If the idea of keeping your IM inside the same window as your email appeals to you, great. If not, you might be a little annoyed at how the default double-click brings up a contact’s properties instead of sending them an IM.

That covers most of the basics, but you can check out more Spicebird functionality at the suite’s video introduction.

Spicebird is just a first-release beta right now, but it already does the good work of creating a Thunderbird-friendly all-in-one information center. The Synovel team has laid out its plans for the suite’s future, including:

• Blog posting through an email-like interface
• Many instant messaging improvements (huzzah!)
• Auto task-creation through smart email filtering (like Gmail/Google Calendar’s “Would you like to add …”)
• Document management
• Project planners
• A Microsoft Exchange connector, and many more tweaks and inter-operation fixes

What do you think of Spicebird from the screenshots or your own beta testing? What features (other than a Mac version, which will likely be coming) would you like to see? Share your thoughts in the comments.

I keep putting off this Ruby News Survey piece because there keeps being
more news, but hey, you have to pull the trigger sometime.

1.9

Check out Tor Norbye’s write-up on
using
NetBeans to migrate to 1.8.

Sam Ruby reported at length on
Porting REXML to Ruby 1.9
and, get this, check
what
happened to his patch.
Sam
hasn’t
stopped.

Rubinius

First of all,
it runs IRB; I remember the JRuby
guys having surprising difficulty there; thus this has to be a real milestone.

Engine Yard is Rubinius World
Headquarters, and they just
took
a butt-load of money from Benchmark Capital.
Frankly, I’m dubious about the value of most Venture Capital investments in
the modern Web economy; but if it keeps Rubinius moving along it’s A Good
Thing.

Rails

Shortly after I
predicted good times
for Rails, there was the infamous
Zed rant
which is worth reading, not for the morsels of truth possibly burrowed in the
billows of bile, but for the flame itself, which is monumental in its scope
and ambition. Sample: “Jesus fucking christ on a goddamned pike you absolute
mother fucking donkey dick sucking morons get a fucking grip!”
The production is so obviously staged that it’s hard to get mad at its
infantile drama-queen rhetoric; but I’ll make an exception for Zed’s dissing
the people coming over to Rails from PHP; it’s a good thing if people
who haven’t spent years on the theory can still build decent Web sites.

For the kinder, gentler, Zed, read Joe Gregorio’s
Tim Bray on
Ruby on Rails, which sees Rails as being in decline (but read Joe’s
commenters too).
I find that really hard to believe, since more or less everything Web-related
is growing, it’s the relative speeds that matter; but the January
Tiobe Index is interesting.
Python, you know, not much hype but lots of real work getting done.

Frameworks

You know, it’s not all Rails any more. Camping, Merb, and hey, here’s the
pretty nice looking
Ramaze which thoughtfully includes a list of
other Ruby Web frameworks.
I call that damn sporting.

Performance Picture

Check out the second graphic in Dion Hinchcliffe’s
Creating Open
Web APIs: Exploring REST and WOA in Rails 2.0. Dion deploys a few too
many words and pictures for my taste, but the graphic entitled “21st Century
Web Development” is thought-provoking.

By Allison Randal

The Linux Foundation published a podcast interview with Linus Torvalds this week, the first in a new series. The interview covers a broad range of topics related to Linux, but towards the end spotlights the subject of licensing. As I suspected, 6 months after the release of GPLv3, Linux shows no signs of adopting the new version of the popular license. The quote that hit Slashdot was, “at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3″.

There are two opposing forces here, touched on briefly in the interview. On one side is the fact that over time more and more packages distributed with the Linux kernel will be distributed under GPLv3. On the other side is the fact that the Linux kernel doesn’t have a single unified holder of intellectual property who could make an executive decision that the license must change. It has, instead, a whole collection of contributors, who each hold a piece of the copyright.

It will be years before enough packages are licensed exclusively under the GPLv3 to cause a problem for the Linux kernel. Most packages distributed under the GPL are flagged with “or any later version”, so there is no urgent need to change. Compared to the speed of technology advances in open source software, the legal advances are almost glacially slow. Given a pace like that, chances are that a number of work-arounds will be developed long before we encounter a GPLv3 package so critical and so well positioned that it forces a change in the license of the kernel.

And equally, though it would be quite possible for an entity like the Linux Foundation to collect contributor agreements from all Linux kernel developers and become the copyright holder, there isn’t any urgent pressure to do so. In many ways, the distributed nature of the Linux kernel copyright is an advantage. It’s a Matrix-like strategy of dodging bullets by simply not presenting a target for the bullets to strike.

In the end, what we have is a stable system by reason of inertia. It may eventually shift, but not anytime soon.

The second half of the interview with Linus Torvalds will be posted in February on the Linux Foundation’s Open Voices blog.

I just made my annual donation to
NeoOffice. If you want to deal with
MS Office and OpenOffice.org and ODF documents on the Mac and you don’t want
to buy any overpriced opaque binaries, it’s your best bet. The
new news
is that that the latest NeoOffice (2.2.2) startup is irritatingly slow on my
2GHz MacBook. Which, you see, is good news, because previous
combinations of older NeoOffices and older Macs started up painfully,
agonizingly, slow. For those of us who live on the Web, at this point in
history it’s hard to feel much love for office-doc processing software; but of
its kind, Neo is really not bad.

There’s a boring press release; and interesting write-ups from
Greg
Reinacker and
Brent Simmons.
(Oh, and why is it we need press releases any more?)
This is interesting on a bunch of grounds.

Why a Newsreading Client?

There are those, hardwired to Google Reader or some such, who genuinely
don’t understand why someone would use client software at all. Google Reader
is just fine, but I still haven’t seen anything that gets me the news anywhere
near as fast or as flexibly as NetNewsWire. Well, and it makes offline catch-up
very easy, but mostly it’s just about the speed. If you’ve got a job where
you need to soak up a big news-flow without wasting much time, and you’re on a
Mac, you really ought to give NNW a try.

Business Model

Why would you give away popular
software?
Quoting Greg Reinacker: “What we’re working to do is to saturate the market
with our clients.” Which makes excellent sense; because they’re really in the
server/service business.

Plus, they think they can do something interesting with attention data.
Not the first time I’ve heard that, and it’s sure plausible, although I’m not
sure anyone’s actually making much hay with it just yet.

But hey, thanks guys.

By Tim O’Reilly

I’ve been meaning to write for a while about MarkLogic’s awesome new search tool for trolling through open source mailing lists, MarkMail.

Let’s face it. While there may be a new generation that thinks that email is for old fogies, for many of us, email is a primary online tool, at least as important to us as the web. Many of us no longer file documents or attachments — we just search for them again in our email. Perhaps most importantly, email is a primary collaboration tool–and as many of us have figured out, collaboration is one of the internet’s killer apps. Searching our shared memory in a collaborative space is REALLY useful — with open source mailing lists being a great example.

Despite its importance, very little has been done to improve on email. The clients we use today are not radically different from what we used ten years ago (except perhaps in being web-based). This is why there was so much excitement when xobni showed how useful it is to expose the social network hidden in email.

MarkMail does something equally powerful. Imagine a tool that lets you see trends across thousands of email messages, saved over years. Imagine being able to find who is the most prolific poster on a given topic, and explore the histogram of their entire message history. Imagine being able to do instantaneous data mining against millions of stored messages, with a response time better than you get looking at your local mailbox.

MarkMail provides all this and more. MarkLogic has stored approximately 5.5 million email messages across over 700 plus open source mailing lists — all of the Apache, MySQL, Mozilla, and PHP lists, plus a smattering of others, with more to be added over time (hopefully soon) — and provided an interface that beats Googling. It’s as fast or faster, but more importantly, you have built-in data mining capabilities that, I trust, will eventually make their way into more traditional email systems.

Let me show you a sample search. I might be looking for actual message content — the answer to a question — but I might be interested in the big picture. As a publisher, my editors are often looking for trend data to tell us whether interest in a topic is increasing or declining. So, for example, let’s say we were thinking of publishing a book on lucene. (This is for example only — there’s already a good book from Manning, Lucene/oreillycom-20 in Action.) But let’s take a look at what MarkMail shows us:

I can immediately see that there’s a lot of growth in mailing list traffic for Lucene. Sounds promising. And I can see who are the most prolific posters. Possible authors? Well, Erik Hatcher, the top poster, is the author of that Manning book I already mentioned. But a few drill-down clicks show whether other top posters are still involved or not. (For an example where someone dropped out, search on Struts and then view the drill-down histogram for Craig McClanahan.) And of course, I can drill into the messages themselves to see who expresses ideas concisely and powerfully. (Yes, we do troll mailing lists for authors and conference speakers!)

And in a feature that old command-line junkies will love, once you want to drill into actual messages, just type “n” to pop into message viewing mode, with “n” and “p” moving you forward and back through the message stream. It’s a really slick mail reading interface. As Jason Hunter from MarkLogic put it, their UI model was:

1. Search with a minimal constraint

2. Refine interactively until you’ve narrowed things sufficiently

3. Hit “n” to peruse the results

OK, so maybe most of you wouldn’t use this tool for trend analysis. But just imagine if you could use a tool like this for searching your own mail? I love the way MarkMail gives me a bunch of drill-down choices in the UI, and as I choose them, rewrites the command-line in the search box. I’d love to see features like this in my other mail packages. With Mail.app on Mac OS X, for example, it’s impossible to do a complex search. You can search for a text string in the from field, the subject line, or the entire message, but what if you want to say “I want a message on x, from Joe, to Mary, sent between April and June of 2006.” Even on Gmail, where I can do this kind of search with Search Options, I have to go to another whole screen, out of the search flow, to do it. You can construct that kind of a search in MarkMail just by navigating around. Yumm. How long before regular mail vendors start doing this kind of thing? This is a really sweet search interface.

Where MarkMail really shines is in managing large mail archives. And that’s why, of course, MarkLogic has put up MarkMail for free. They know that there are potential corporate clients who have huge mail archives that they want to mine. And the performance of their existing systems (not to mention their interfaces) just won’t cut it.

By Allison Randal

The call for participation for the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention is out. This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, of the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term “Open Source”, so a huge celebration is in order. OSCON will be in Portland, Oregon again this year, one of the key Open Source hubs in North America. It will be co-located with the 2nd annual Ubuntu Live conference, which is also currently running a call for participation.

OSCON will host talks on a wide variety of topics, from programming techniques and tools, to user experience and user-centered design, to mobile technologies, to system administration and security, to community building, to open source in business, to languages like Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, to various flavors of *nix (Linux, BSD, etc), to web application development, to database administration, optimization, and development. We’re especially seeking talks that not only cover the state-of-the-art in open source technology, but also look ahead to the future of open source. Submit your proposals by February 4th.

Upload and download files on your home PC from anywhere by turning it into a personal FTP server. With a home FTP server, you can upload and download files on your home hard drive from the office, your friend’s house, or to your laptop while you’re on the road using any FTP client. Setting up an FTP server may sound like a complicated undertaking only system administrators can handle, but it’s actually quite easy and free with open source software FileZilla. You’ve already heard of FileZilla’s FTP client application, but the FileZilla project also offers a server application for Windows. Today we’ll build an FTP server on your Windows PC with FileZilla for easy file transfers from any computer.

Note: Back in ‘05, guest poster Matt Haughey covered how to set up an FTP server using Serv-U FTP—which is a fine commercial application, but its personal edition limits how many users can log into your server. We love our open source software, which is why we’re taking a look at FileZilla, which has all the features, with none of the price tag or limits.

Install the FileZilla FTP Server

The FileZilla server installation is a regular Windows “just press Next” wizard, and for most users, the suggested default settings will work. However, let’s take a look at its initial settings anyway, since they’ll affect how you work with your server. Here’s how to get FileZilla going:

• Download the FileZilla server application. Even though the FileZilla FTP client is available for multiple operating systems, the server app is Windows-only (and works for Windows XP, Vista and 2000). Download it and kick off the installation wizard. As of this writing, the latest server version is 0.9.25.

• Run the server as a Windows Service. First FileZilla will give you the option of how it should start up: as a Windows service or not, automatically or manually. Windows services are processes that run on your PC which you can manage from the Services management pane. There’s more on how to manage that below, but at this point, running FileZilla as a Windows service that runs automatically is the default option. If you want your FTP server on by default, choose “Start as service, started automatically (default)” as shown. Otherwise, choose “Start as service, started manually.”

  

  In this pane you’ll also set the port for the admin interface to use. By default it’s 14147, and you’re most likely safe leaving it at that. If you do change that port number, make a note of what it is—you’ll need it to connect to the server later on.

• Set the server administrative interface to launch automatically (or not). On the final installation dialog, choose whether you want the server admin window to launch automatically when the current Windows user logs on, when any user logs on, or if it should be started manually.

• Run and connect to the server with the admin interface. As the installation wizard completes, set it to start the server admin interface. This is the window where you’ll configure your server and monitor its activity. The first time you run the admin interface, it will ask you for the server’s address and port. Since the server is running on your PC—the same one the admin interface is running on—its address is localhost, or 127.0.0.1. The default port is 14147 (or whatever you may have changed it to, as noted above), as shown:
  
  If this is the only FTP server you’ll be administering (most likely it is), check off the “Always connect to this server” box to bypass this dialog in the future.

Create Server Users

If all’s gone well, your server’s up and running—but no one can use it yet, since you haven’t given anyone permission. To set up a server user, from the Edit menu choose Users. In the Users dialog on the right hand side, hit the Add button to create a new user and assign a password. Then, on the left side, select “Shared Folders” to set what folders that user will have access to on your server. Here I’ve created a user named gina and granted read access to the C:\data\ directory.

Notice you can fine-tune file access rights for each user: grant read-only rights (download only), write rights (to upload files), and whether or not the user can delete files or create directories, too.

If you want to grant several users access to your server all with the same rights and directory access, instead of creating each one individually, set up a user group. For example, if you’re sharing your MP3 directory with friends, make a user group called “music fans” with access to the correct directory and add users to that group, which automatically gives them those rights. Then, if you move your music directory you only have to edit the group, not each user in it. To manage user groups, from the Edit menu, choose Groups.

Log into the Server

Now that the server’s up and running with users, it’s time to log in and try uploading and downloading. Using any FTP client (like the FileZilla client or FireFTP for Firefox) enter the server address, user name and password.

• Server address If you’re FTP’ing across your home network (like from your upstairs PC to your bedroom PC), you can reach the server by using its internal network address (most likely something like 192.168.xx.xx.) From the command line, type ipconfig to see what that address is. If you want to log into your FTP server over the internet, set up a memorable URL for it and allow connections from outside your network. To so so, check out how to assign a domain name to your home server and how to access your home server behind a router and firewall.

• User name and password This is one of the users you set up in FileZilla’s admin interface, not the server admin user name. If friends, family, and co-workers will be logging into your FTP server, give them each a their specific username and password to log in (along with the server address.)

Use your FTP server to fetch files stored at home from anywhere, share files with friends and family, or back up files across your network. (Free backup software SyncBack supports backup over FTP. Here’s more on how to use Syncback.)

A word about security: FTP is not a secure protocol; all the file transfers happen in the clear, which makes them ripe for sniffing. FileZilla does support encrypted FTP access, and we recommend using that or a VPN like Hamachi to secure file transfers over the internet. FileZilla’s secure FTP server setup is beyond the scope of this article, but you can go into the server admin interface’s settings area to configure it.

Starting and Stopping Your Server in Windows Services

Finally, to shut down or restart your FileZilla server running as a Windows service, from Control Panel, Administrative Tools, launch Services. Right-click on the FileZilla FTP Server item on the list to stop it, edit its Properties, or restart it, as shown.

Other home servers you can set up yourself include a home web server with Apache, a home SSH server with Cygwin and a home VNC server to remote control your computer.

How do you use the FTP servers in your life? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, likes to FTP just about any time of the day. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Monday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

By Jimmy Guterman

A little suggested Sunday morning reading…

We use this space, in part, to discern early signals of oncoming trends, and we’re especially gratified when those trends show up in the mainstream. In today’s New York Times you can read What This Gadget Does is Up to You (registration required), which covers the Neuros OSD, an intriguing open source media recorder. Not only does it run an open source operating system (it’s Linux-based), but all the circuit diagrams for the product are available online. You can change pretty much everything about it — and it’s still useful to self-identified “duffers” such as the Times’s Anne Eisenberg, who writes, “Thank you, hackers!”

The Neuros device was also the lead example in the December issue of Release 2.0. In that issue, we consider some of the key questions about open source hardware and look at some of the most important companies in the space, among them Chumby and Instructables, that are harnessing the DIY ethic to create innovative products, services, and activities. (Disclosure: both Chumby and Instructables are also O’Reilly AlphaTech investments.)

You can find out more about Release 2.0, download a sample excerpt from the new issue, and either subscribe (we publish six times a year) or purchase the new issue at http://radar.oreilly.com/r2/.

By Jimmy Guterman

During the end-of-the-year break, a traditional time for bad news since fewer people than usual are paying attention, The SCO Group was delisted by NASDAQ. It was the latest bump down for SCO, best-known in recent years for claiming it owned Linux, which lost a major court decision in August and filed for bankruptcy in September. As SCO slides closer to nonexistence — its website hasn’t been updated since we noted this back in November — it’s worth remembering that the company, under CEO Darl McBride, was once not merely relevant but feared. You may remember this cover story from FORTUNE back in May 2004:

The story itself was more sober than the cover shot, but there was a time, not so long ago, when reasonable people were worried about the viability of open source software in business. SCO’s many lawsuits, both real and threatened, forced the open source community to reconsider, at the most basic level, how we license open source. SCO didn’t gain much from the suit, at least not in the long term (its OTC stock trades between a nickel and a dime per share this week), but its actions did force the open source industry to get more serious (some might argue more professional) about delineating who has the rights to what.

With SCO apparently on the way out and even Microsoft warming up to open source, who will be the new bogeyman to unite the open source movement?

We’ll look for your nominations in the comments.

Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, should go public, cash in on its browser success and grab more resources to fight Microsoft. At least that’s Henry Blodget’s theory.
Blodget argues that Mozilla could be worth a lot on the public market and may go public this year or next. While acknowledging the perils of going public– primarily […]

Filed under: CES, Desktops

Considering the absolutely lackluster hardware present in the Everex gPC, it’s a tad difficult to get psyched up about the next revision of the gOS. Nevertheless, gOS 2.0 (or Rocket, as it were) is all set to launch on Monday at CES, and while there’s not much to phone home about, the inclusion of Google Gears is the most notable feature. The aforementioned bundle is an “online / offline synchronization technology from Google that enables offline use of web apps.” More specifically, users can look forward to gBooth (a browser-based web cam), integration with Facebook, shortcuts to launch Google Reader, Talk, and Finance on the desktop, an online storage drive courtesy of Box.net and Virtual Desktops, which is hailed as “an intuitive feature to easily group and move applications across multiple desktop spaces.” Additionally, Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux will come preloaded, and if you’re so inclined, you can download the package yourself on January 7th.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Repeat after me. The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project is designed for kids. Why bore yourself with that mantra? If you don’t you may find yourself griping about something that wasn’t designed for you in the first place.
That’s one of the big takeaways from my two weeks with the XO (see […]

Over the course of the year, in browser tabs, bookmarks, and
del.icio.us, I’ve built
up a huge list of things that I felt I should write about, at least
at the time I saw them. Well,
dammit, I’m not gonna let 2007 end without at least making a try. Here
goes. Categorized, even.

XML

Jelliffe
on the awfulness of XML Schemas.

CMSMCQ has a klog.
Which is to say, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen has a blog that he calls a “klog”
for reasons described
here. Michael and I
wrote
the XML 1.0 specification; he’s smart and writes well.

The eleven-act OOXML high opera
trundles
on.

Ruby and Rails

Ola Bini on
JtestR;
code in Java, test in Ruby. Sounds like a step forward.

Reg Braithwaite on why
Ruby needs to be self-extending. Not the first time this point has been
made.

Oh, and
Ruby
1.9 is out.

I’ve written before about Rails and ETags and how they’re important and
Rails probably can’t Solve The Whole Problem, but could do better, and while I
haven’t gone deep (because I’m not actually running any Rails at the
moment) it
seems that Assaf Arkin’s
if_modified
probably does do better. If so, it’s important

Dave Thomas:
Pipelines Using Fibers in Ruby 1.9.
Oh my goodness gracious.

Programming

A nice
commencement address by Bruce Eckel.

You’d think that regular expression processing would be a closed book after
all these years.
You’d be wrong.

_why, in
This Hack Was Not Properly Planned,
says “You could blame Stallman, but I just don’t think that gives entropy
enough credit.” and a whole lot of other wise and surprising things too.

The Web

Ka-Ping Yee explains
Why PHP should never be
taught. Ouf. And then follows up with with
Why PHP should never be
taught, Part II.

I contributed to the
Architecture of the World Wide Web
document, and mostly I’m proud of that work. On the other hand, it may be
true that, as
Noah
Mendelson suggests, its advice that data formats version themselves is,
well, wrong. I spent some years of my life helping design
The Atom Syndication Format,
which emphatically does not do versioning, and I agree with
that decision. Hmmm.

There’s this guy named Bob Aman whom I’ve only met once, but I’m a
fan. He’s maniacally determined that Ruby shall have the world’s best
URI-handling library, so he’s building it, and it’s called
adressable, which is
a good name. I was sitting on the floor talking to the RSpec guys at the last
RubyConf and Bob plunked himself down and started wondering out loud about the
best way to manage his many thousands of test cases. Someone who’ll write
thousands of test-cases for URI wrangling is totally OK by me.

From
gloriajw at
devchix,
RESTful Thoughts on a Web 2.0 Python Project.
Mmm, very very tasty, one of the better why-REST statements ever.

Things Open

GlassFish, the Open-Source instantiation of the Sun Java Application
Server, has gone from boring and corporate to kind of interesting. As witness
its
showing up
in Debian, with the Maven dependency amputated. Gotta like that. As far
as I know, Sun didn’t even know this was happening. Gotta like that.

There’s an internal Sun mailing list I’m on that’s concerned with
government technology policy, and I keep seeing stories go by about
governments liking Open Source and Open Data Formats, often confusing the two
laughably, but still, it’s a real trend. One particularly tasty example is
Arve Bersvendsen’s
Norway mandates open formats.

Hardware

I exist at the airy, arm-waving level of the Web Tier. Descend
twenty-three levels of indirection and you end up with silicon and the people
who build it. There’s some
serious
churn happening in that world.

User Interfaces

The famous Tog explains in parts
1,
2, and
3,
why the mouse is always faster than the keyboard. He’s wrong. Why is left as
an exercise for the reader.

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed

John Perez is a college Freshman who is doing an argumentative paper on Open-Source applications. He sent me a list of questions that I am going to answer in simple terms. Also, we’re using our GoToMeeting to allow you to follow along with everyone as they use Open-Source applications.

What do you think Open-Source stands for and signifies? It’s a fundamental shift in how we think about software, its use and development. Unfortunately, I’m not a Developer. The mainstream still believes that you must walk into a store to buy software. That simply isn’t the case. There are tremendous alternatives to major applications that are available legally for free, via Open-Source.

What would be the advantages or disadvantages of adopting standards? Imagine you had 1000 people in the same room, all with different great ideas. How impossible would it be to get them all to agree on ONE idea? I look at things differently than most standards committees. There are politics inside the Open-Source community. But, for the common good, coming together to agree on a set of standards would be amazing, and make the community stronger.

For businesses, what do you think would be the effects of adopting standards? It depends on the business model. I am able to exist as a business online largely due to Open-Source programs and applications. Much of this is accomplished using Apache.

In the US, many Universities have made a switch to Open-Source. What do you think caused them to make the switch, and what will it take to get others to follow? I think it boils down to cost. Universities have lost large amounts of money from the government. One way to help keep tuition costs down, is to obtain good software alternatives for free. You also have to look at the education factor, by being able to turn the Open-Source applications into learning tools.

What would be the effects of using Open-Source in homes? We’re seeing a lot of lower-cost computers. Instead of having to pay a licensing fee, you can get an Open-Source Linux Distro. You can also obtain software for almost any type of program you need, from image editing to web browsing and email applications. This will save household consumers quite a lot of money.

Are there there sufficient Open-Source alternatives to proprietary software suites? Absolutely!! Open Office can replace your existing office suite for free. The Gimp can replace your image editing software. FireFox can replace your web browser. For 99% of the population, Open-Source is a GREAT alternative.

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0qNrj3aOGhU"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0qNrj3aOGhU" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

Related Content:

• Who Loves Open Source?
• Weekly Show 02 June 2005 - Hour 2
• Weekly Show 02 June 2005 - Hour 1
• The Most Amazing Conference Keytone
• Weekly Show 02 June 2005 - Hour 3

There are countless arguments for using open source applications, but one of the strongest is having a single interface to learn when working on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. Web site directory Open Source Living helps you find just those kind of programs. It’s not an extensive, all-in-one directory, but it seems to narrow its choices based on quality and widespread acceptance. And while not every application listed at Open Source Living is entirely cross-platform, a good deal of them are. For more free or open source applications, check out a Windows and Mac free software bonanza.

Windows, Mac and Linux: A preview release of the highly-anticipated, cross-platform, open source personal information manager Chandler is now available for download, and while it’s still got kinks to work out, it looks as promising as its vision. Called the PIM “for people who use their Inbox as their task list, Chandler picks up where your Inbox leaves off.” Chandler’s essentially a combination calendar, email inbox and task list for the individual, as well as a collaboration tool for small groups. The Chandler developers say:

Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.

Ever since I read Scott Rosenberg’s book, Dreaming in Code, I’ve been dying to see Chandler get released. Dreaming In Code is a chronicle of Chandler’s early stages, documenting its development from inception through much of its often painful evolution, which reads like a familiar story to anyone who’s ever tried to build software. (Programmers and software designers, read this book.) I love the open source ethos behind Chandler and the vision for its use, which is tightly tied to Getting Things Done.

As for the preview release, well, it has some ways to go. I was unable to get my Gmail account to sync with it via IMAP, for instance, which kept me from doing any real-world testing. So while it’s not stable software ready for primetime, the Chandler preview IS an exciting tease at a unified inbox/calendar/task list that keeps all your stuff in one place while offering decentralized sharing capabilities. If Chandler’s final release delivers on its promises, it will also deliver users from the evil of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server. Until then, you can tinker with the preview and hope. The Chandler Preview is a free download for Mac, Windows and Linux.

One of the best parts of getting a new computer for the holidays—other than that new computer smell—is setting up a fresh, clean system exactly how you want it. Your customized productivity apps, your favorite media players, and maybe even some of the software tools you’ve seen on one blog or another.

But searching out, click-click-click-installing, and keeping all those programs updated in Windows can add up to some serious time. We’ve covered automation apps like InstallPad and AppSnap, and updating tools such as FileHippo, but I’ve found that Appupdater, a Linux-like command line tool, can handle both functions, automatically, with just a little tapping in the command line.

Follow along after the jump and we’ll get started on keeping a number of ultra-useful Windows programs up to date and making them easy to load on a new system.

Note: Appupdater is a free, open source program maintained entirely by one man, Neil McNab, who provided gracious guidance for this walk-through. It’s technically in beta at the moment, and while it likely won’t mess anything up on your system, it shouldn’t be installed on a machine with sensitive data, just to be safe.

I’ll start off by showing how to install Appupdater and keep a working computer updated. If you just want to set up a freshly-installed system, skip down to the section labeled “Create your applications list.”

Installing and updating

The first thing you’ll need to do is grab and install the latest version of the Appupdater program. Make sure to keep the “Windows Service” and “Add to System Path” boxes checked—they make running Appupdater easier and let it check for updates once a day (at 2 a.m. by default, but we can change that later). That’s all you need to start scheduled updating, but let’s get a bit more familiar with this tool.

Head to your Windows command prompt (usually by typing “cmd” into the “Run” box in XP or the “Start Search” field in Vista). Once there, enter this command:

appupdater --update

This searches your system to see what compatible programs are installed and checks with an updated file hosted at the creator’s web site to see if newer versions are available. If so, your next step is to run a similar command:

appupdater --upgrade

This will set your system to downloading and installing newer versions of any apps needing an upgrade.

Appupdater also lets you install programs individually from the command line. Whether this is faster for you than downloading and installing an executable depends on your feelings toward that blinking prompt. To install the Opera browser, for instance, you would enter:

appupdater --install=Opera

Use quotes for programs with two names, like “Google Earth”.

If you leave your computer on all the time, Appupdater will keep you up to date automatically, running those “–update” and “–upgrade” commands at 2 a.m. every day. To change that time, you could either load the graphical version of the program (appupdaterw.exe, in Appupdater’s folder) and change the value in Tools->Options->Index Hour, or open the config-sample.txt file, change the “INDEX_HOUR=” value and re-save the file as appupdater.ini. Or, if you’re familiar with Windows’ built-in scheduling programs, you could simply have it run the twin commands whenever you’d like.

Create your applications list

If you’re starting fresh with a new system and you know the programs you want installed, fire up a text editor (Notepad works fine) and cruise to the list of supported applications. Type or copy-paste just the names of programs as they appear, one per line, and save the file as myapps.txt or whatever you’d like.

You can also set up a system with the same programs you have on another computer. There’s a bug in the latest version that blocks an easy list creation tool, but there’s a work-around. Open a new command window and run this line:

appupdater --list

With the command window still open, right-click inside the window, select “Mark,” then use the mouse cursor to select just the left-hand list of program names. Now hit either Ctrl+C or right-click on the window title bar and choose Edit->Copy to grab the app names (here’s more on that). Paste the text into an editor, adjust as needed, save it as a text file and you’re on your way.

Setting up a new system

All you need to get a new system auto-installing your favorite apps is the text file you just created and the ability to download Appupdater again. If you really wanted, however, you could run Appupdater from a portable drive—just copy the program folder whole from a computer (after installation) onto the device. Either way, copy your text file onto the new machine, open a command prompt and navigate to where you put it. If you placed it on your desktop in XP, for example, type:

cd c:\Documents and Settings\Your Username\Desktop

Once you’re there and ready to start installing, type the following command (substituting the name of your file):

appupdater --load=filename.txt

That’s it—Appupdater will quietly go about installing everything. You can also perform this function from the graphical version, but it requires clicking through each of the programs’ install screens, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Lifehacker Pack, Appupdater version

Much like Gina did in her InstallPad feature, I’m throwing together a few of the Lifehacker team’s favorite apps in an easy-to-install text file for Appupdater. Download the list and run the same “–load” command as above to get a stiff shot of great apps. If you have some of them already installed, don’t worry—Appupdater will skip them and head for the new ones.

Lifehacker pack

• 7-Zip (multi-format compression utility)
• Audacity (All-purpose audio editing)
• Firefox (Extensible browser)
• Google Earth (3D maps and search)
• IrfanView (Light and fast image viewing/editing)
• Notepad ++ (Code-friendly text editor)
• Pidgin (tabbed, multi-protocol IM client)
• Thunderbird (email client)
• VLC (all-purpose media player)

Appupdater uses a dynamic XML file, or repository, maintained by its creator to stay up to date. It isn’t perfect, but it allows you to stop worrying about whether you’re missing an upgrade (and avoid groan-inducing pop-up reminders). The best part is that it runs silently in the background, installing all the programs you want so you can spend time tweaking and discovering the coolest parts of your system.

Got your own new system building techniques or time-savers? Written your own uber-efficient script? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

Kevin Purdy is an associate editor for Lifehacker who won’t have to shun his family to install applications this Christmas. His weekly feature appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

When former Delta Airlines chief operating officer James Whitehurst takes over as CEO of Red Hat on New Year’s Day he’ll face the worst kind of doubters–the quiet ones. But Whitehurst could very well take Red Hat to the next level.
Aside from the blogosphere (Techmeme), you won’t hear much questioning about the choice of Whitehurst. […]

Red Hat on Thursday named former Delta Airlines executive James Whitehurst CEO effective Jan. 1. Current chief Matthew Szulik continues as chairman.
Whitehurst was most recently the chief operating officer at Delta Airlines and helped navigate the airline’s bankruptcy restructuring. Whitehurst joined Delta in 2002. In a statement, Red Hat said Whitehurst will bring “a combination […]

Dell is adding Ubuntu 7.10, also known as Gutsy Gibbon, to its consumer Linux lineup in the U.S. The company has also expanded its Linux offerings abroad.
First, the Ubuntu 7.10 announcement. Dell on its blog Tuesday said that Ubuntu 7.0 will be preinstalled on the Inspiron 530 and Inspiron 1420. Ubuntu 7.10 will also be […]

Our engineering team put ZDNet blogs through a cloud tag blender to render a weighted list of top topics for 2008. In an age when the consumer and enterprise worlds are colliding (but no exploding), Google, iPhone, Apple and Microsoft captured the big buzz of the year in our blogs. It was also a year […]

Three years ago, Doc Searls discussed the idea that “it’s far more important (and interesting) to make money because of our blogs, rather than with them.” The elephant in the room for that particular conversation was advertising, the implicit question being should the blog be a profit in and of itself, or merely a means to enable profit.

While the issues therein are of great interest to those, like me, that blog on at least a semi-professional basis, its ultimate resonance is limited by its self-selection of an audience. What I’m beginning to wonder, however, is whether there isn’t a lesson therein for those authoring software rather than blogs.

More specifically, is it advisable to make money because of software rather than with software? The question is largely rhetorical, because for every arguments for, there’s one against.

That said, it is self-evident to me that software houses will increasingly seek network revenue streams to augment or even replace the traditional software income derived from licensing, support, and maintenance. I make this argument based on the following:

• Customer Conversion:
  The difficulty that open source software vendors have had in the monetization of their wares is well known and understood; roughly 1 in 1000 MySQL users, for example, becomes a paying customer. What’s less acknowledged is that closed source vendors suffer from exactly the same problem. Whether their software is pirated or users simply switch to freely available alternatives, the software market has never been more competitive - and thus difficult to convert customers in - than it is today. Augmenting traditional offerings with network based complementary or stand-alone services potentially offers the ability to convert a higher percentage of would-be customers into actual customers.
• Customer Demand:
  When Microsoft feels compelled to introduce software that over the longer term potentially impacts the sales of one of its two licenses to print money, it’s a good bet that there’s demand behind it. Because even strictly client products are increasingly competing with online counterparts, it’s necessary to add online or network components to the offering to remain relevant to customers from a demand perspective.
• Lower Barriers to Entry:
  Tim Bray, as is so often the case, says it best:

  The reason the Web worked so well is that nobody had to ask anybody’s permission to build a browser or a crawler or a search engine or an auction site or a dating service. Anything in the system that requires central authority, that’s something that holds you back.

  While the friction involved in the usage of network applications and services varies widely - compare, say, Amazon’s new SimpleDB service to something like Gmail - the lesson of the web is that the ubiquity of network access and availability trumps client installation in many if not most cases. Ergo, introducing additional functionality and exposing it via a network interface is an obvious win.

• Higher Retention Rates:
  Under appreciated at this point is the potential of value add network services to help retain current customers. Consider an offering like Canonical’s Landscape; while I might, at some point, be incented to defect to RHEL or SuSE or another distribution for cost, compatibility or other reasons, those distributions would have to replicate the functionality currently available to me in Canonical’s offering. While it can be done, it requires effort and disincents me from switching.
• Network Effect:
  Most important, perhaps, are the implications of the network effect. Enterprise software in particular massively underleverages the value of the network effect, but it’s a failing common to software generally. For example, Splunk’s Splunkbase adds significant value over the the pure client, harnessing as it does the collective intelligence of the software’s users. While efforts to incorporate this and other user telemetry are merely in their infancy, it seems clear that over time this will become standard practice rather than a differentiator. As Google proves with its “did you mean” function, even the most basic pattern matching can produce useful functionality: such is the power of the network effect.

Beyond the direct monetization of network services, it’s also likely that we’ll see additional creative models emerge that subsidize the cost of the software via other means. Spiceworks, for example, is able to provide its systems management software application to SMBs at no cost, monetizing it via advertising. Much as Google does with search.

It would be the height of folly to predict the end of traditional software revenue streams, of course, but it seems equally illogical to contend that network revenue will be anything but an important part of software economics going forward. Particularly in cases where direct monetization is a challenge, vendors should consider making money because of software rather than with it.

Disclosure: Canonical, Microsoft, MySQL, Spiceworks and Splunk are RedMonk clients, while Amazon and Google are not.

Share This

By Tim O’Reilly

This morning, the New York Times published my op-ed about the need for an open phone ecosystem under the title Static on the Dream Phone. I had originally titled it Openness is not a fig leaf. In it, I argue for Verizon (and by extension other major cell carriers) to embrace the vision of Google’s Open Handset Alliance:

Verizon announced last month that it will open its network to “any application and any device” by the end of next year.

But while Verizon’s pledge sounds promising, the language in which it is couched makes me wonder whether Verizon understands what a true open platform looks like. The announcement states that … “devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab.”

…Tim Berners-Lee did not have to submit his idea for the World Wide Web in 1991 to a “state-of-the-art testing lab.” All that he needed to unleash a revolution was a single other user willing to install his new Web server software. And the Web spread organically from there.

I go on from there to talk about ideas that will be familiar to readers of this blog, namely that open systems don’t mean the end of competitive advantage, but instead simply move the competition to new ground.

For the current generation of Internet applications, sometimes referred to as “Web 2.0,” the data collected from users is the true source of competitive advantage. And the first movers, the companies that understand and apply this insight, have services that get better fast enough that their competition never catches up.

The power of a social network like MySpace or Facebook isn’t in its software or its control over which applications get on its platform. It is in the critical mass of participating users. Ditto for eBay, Skype or YouTube. Even less obvious cases like Amazon, where user annotation makes for the best product catalog in the world, and Google, whose search index and ad auction are both driven by user participation, show the power that comes from harnessing the collective activity of everyone who uses the service.

Cellular carriers need to embrace this insight. Winner-take-all profits can be achieved by opening up their networks and then harnessing community contributions (including the contributions of software developers) to improve — or invent — new services.

There was one very important bit that was, unfortunately, cut from the printed piece, which opens:

THE Internet and the cellphone are on a collision course.

In the future, the cellphone and similar wireless devices, not the personal computer, will be the primary interface to the cloud of information services that we now call the Internet. The demand for Internet-style applications on the phone — e-mail, maps, photo and video sharing, social networking and even Internet telephony — is exploding.

The next two lines in my original draft, which didn’t make it into the final version, were:

This is why Google’s announcement that they intend to bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction and their launch of the Open Handset Alliance are among the company’s most important strategic initiatives. If the internet model, in which any device, application, or service can be brought to market without restriction or approval by the network provider, does not take hold in the wireless ecosystem, the growth of internet information providers like Google will eventually grind to a halt.

Whether or not the open cellphone model takes off is important not just to cell carriers like Verizon. It’s critical to every Web 2.0 company as well, which is why Yahoo!, Amazon, and the host of innovative web startups ought to be on board with the open handset alliance as well.

Finally, I wanted to make a note about my assertion that IBM “published the specifications for a personal computer that anyone could build,” since the NYT fact checkers probed me on this point. Technically, the PC was not an open system — in fact, cloners had to reverse-engineer the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) in order to make PC-compatible computers, and IBM sought to protect part of the design with patents — but it was open enough. It was built largely with off-the-shelf commodity parts, but most importantly, came with detailed specifications that made it easy for people to extend and copy. Perhaps I’m showing my bias as a publisher, but I’ve always thought that detailed, transparent documentation is one of the key factors that make open systems work.

There’s a great summary of this point in a short history of the IBM PC that was published as part of the burst of 20th anniversary reminiscences back in 2001:

One of the best parts of the IBM PC—its Technical Reference manual—went unmentioned in the press release. This manual provided a wealth of information that exposed the PC’s hardware and software to scrutiny by developers. Release of such a cache of data was unthinkable for a company based on closed systems and proprietary hardware and software. Yet the Technical Reference manual provided 362 pages that laid bare the PC, from 82 pages of assembly-language BIOS listings to 50 pages of schematics. By using the Technical Reference as a guide, almost anyone with a grasp of software and digital electronics could produce an add-in board for the PC. And many people did just that.

And of course, it was first add-in boards, and then complete clones, leading to the commoditization of the entire computer hardware industry, the rise in the importance of software, the fertile ground in which the internet model took hold, and all the other themes that I have written about at much greater length in The Open Source Paradigm Shift. It’s time for the phone to go through the same paradigm shift, and become a first class internet citizen.

We’ve got an exciting development bubbling that I hope to be able to announce in full detail at FOSS.IN in Bangalore on Friday when I speak there.

Just to give you a glimpse of what’s happening, Sun will be announcing a multi-year award program in support of fostering innovation and advancing open source within our open source communities. We’ll be providing a substantial prize purse and working with the communities involved to develop the approach that works best.

I’m announcing it in India because that’s where I expect the greatest open source community growth to come from in the near future - the FOSS.IN programme committee relaunched their CfP a while back with this in mind. If we can play a part in catalyzing the emergence of India as a key international open source power-house, the effect on the software industry will be huge. Not to exclude others in the region of course, so much is going on there.

This year’s participants include OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org. This is a great opportunity for members of these open source communities to take their passion and creativity and push the innovation boundaries - and get paid in the process!

Update: I’ve added more detail as well as information responding to questions in the comments here to a new posting.

I just left India after speaking at FOSS.IN where I announced details of the Sun Open Source Community Innovation Awards in the context of a talk [20Mb PDF] about the challenges the Free/open source community-of-communities faces from success and growth. There’s no question that India is a ‘waking tiger’. The energy and enthusiasm I have found here has been without peer on my travels - apart, perhaps, from that of Brazil.

I have been considering with interest the reaction to my posting last week foreshadowing the awards. The awards were widely applauded, although as I’d expected there was also no shortage of people wanting to attack the program. I feel that some of the adverse reactions illustrate only the biases of their authors, and others were the result of of incomplete information. So I’d like to clarify a few points.

Programme Structure

The press release for the Open Source Community Innovation Awards uses the word “prize”. As anyone that has tried to construct a similar program will know that to pay grants in this manner, laws surrounding prize-bearing competitions in the USA and elsewhere may be applicable. We’ve actually made no detailed decisions about how the $1 million US fund will be distributed beyond believing it will be divided equally between the communities.

Instead, the six communities involved will each devise schemes that fit their members and bring the proposals to us, for us to knock them into a shape that complies with the laws in the places the communities want to address. We are wanting to recognise and reward innovation, which we fully expect to come mainly from existing community members including the many already employed to work on software (though not Sun employees since Sun is the sponsor of the awards). It’s about sharing the wealth.

Yes, this may incent some people to join communities, but frankly I’m well aware that developers are motivated more by their own goals with the software than by this sort of award. And I’m therefore astonished to come across the notion that Sun is looking to attract “cheap labour” with these awards. In my opinion, people that subscribe to that kind of view of open source fundamentally don’t understand what community development is all about - they’re either confused, or trying to confuse somebody else, to borrow a phrase.

I hope that the communities will devise a variety of programmes that include “innovator of the year”-type awards, “feature bounty” schemes, “internship”-style project sponsorship and other styles. The awards will be annual and if they work out well I hope we’ll be able to expand their reach. For the first year, we’ve picked a small group of communities that Sun knows well since the legal and administrative details turn out to be pretty complicated. However, by their very nature, open source communities are networks of interests. OpenSolaris, for example, includes work in a range of communities including GNOME, X.org, Mozilla and many others. The 2008/9 scheme will learn from the experience of the 2007/8 scheme and hopefully be even better - we all have to start somewhere!

Global Reach

The communities are welcome - encouraged - to apply the fund globally. The fact I announced the scheme in India doesn’t imply it’s targeted only there. However, I have personally seen that places like India, China, Brazil and Malaysia (which I also visited on this trip) have an enthusiasm and energy about FOSS that is raw and fresh, and I fully expect so see the people of this region well represented on the list of beneficiaries next year.

The next step will be for the communities involved to form proposals for their individual use of the $175k US or so they will be distributing. If you’re a member of one of those communities, expect to see details of how this will be done coming from your leaders soon. I’m expecting to be able to join them in announcing the schemes early next year. If you’ve other questions, please ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

This scheme has proved surprisingly challenging to put together, and only goes so far in rewarding FOSS developers. I still think the best way to do that is to hire them, and indeed Sun does that to the tune of more than $200m US each year. But this scheme (and the others like it) is a useful addition and I hope the innovative features that result from it will greatly enrich the world of Free software and the open source communities that develop it.

I’m a dedicated WordPress supporter. The fact that this particular blogging software exists as an open source offering is, indirectly, paying my bills. You see, most of my income is from designing WordPress themes (and leeching The Blog Herald of course), and that would be pretty hard if WordPress wasn’t free. Still possible, but I sincerely doubt that the system would be this widespread, hence I would have a harder time finding clients that needs to prettify their blogs and sites.

When I was getting started with WordPress quite some time ago, pre-1.5, the community was a great help. The WordPress support forum answered my questions when I needed it to, although most of them was actually already out there, on the forum or in the WordPress wiki, called Codex nowadays, a great resource.

(more…)

Novell reported its fourth quarter results and its Linux business continues to post strong growth. However, the growth characteristics are changing. What used to be Microsoft-fueled growth–courtesy of an interoperability and cross-selling arrangement–is now broadening via other partnerships with companies like SAP, Dell and Lenovo.
Putting a hard number on what was dubbed a Microsoft halo […]

By Nat Torkington

(Updated: fixed the links. Sorry! Having one of those weeks –Nat) Recently a group of 30 people who work towards open government met at the O’Reilly Campus in Sebastopol. I love what they came up with. Carl Malamud was the convenor, so I asked him whether anyone had written up what transpired. Here’s his list of web sites about the meeting, and some thoughts on what they came up with:

Here is my summary page and the convocation.

Dave Orban put together a web site.

Somebody else put together a google group.

Lessig, Karl Fogel, and Josh Tauberer all had Wikis going,
which we consolidated here.

Aaron Swartz whipped up a mailing list and a logo.

We also encouraged the attendees to pour whatever meaning they
wished into the principles, providing a “gloss” on the basic
pieces. You’ll see links under each of the words, plus here
are some blog reports:

• John Geraci
• Ethan Zuckerman
• TechPresident
• (new@200712121840) Bradley Horowitz
• (new@200712121840) Joseph Lorenzo Hall

BTW, FWIW, I view the low number of words in the basic principles
as a definite feature … several prominent techies were pretty
impressed that we were able to boil this down to a set of basic
concepts. Very much like writing legislation or an Internet
standard, less is always better than more.