techno.blog("Dion")

Bob the Despot of Codehaus has a new venture called OpenXource.

He is a great position to come to the business world and discuss open source strategy, and help build community (which is the #1 element of open source IMO).

He has started some interesting topics called Crossings

E.g.

What Should You Release as Opensource?

Anti-Pattern: Everyone is a Maintenance Coder

Open Source Consortium

Apple’s Abundant Community

It is interesting to see the growing interest from the corporate world. I hope to be working with Bob on many of these issues!

The Apache DB group voted on a new JDO proposal. The new proposal spells out a place for some serious JDO work to happen.

It has been brought together with leaders in the Apache, other open source, and JDO worlds:

• Abe White, SolarMetric, JDO expert group member
• Brian McCallister, OJB committer
• Craig Russell, Sun, JDO Specification Lead
• Dain Sundstrom, GlueCode, Geronimo committer
• Erik Bengtson, JPOX committer
• Geir Magnusson, GlueCode, Geronimo committer
• Michael Bouschen, JDO expert group member
• Michelle Caisse, Sun, JDO TCK developer
• Patrick Linskey, SolarMetric, JDO expert group member
• Victor Kirkebo, Sun, JDO TCK developer

There are six initial subprojects envisioned:

• JDO 1.0 API
• JDO 1.0 Reference Implementation
• JDO 1.0 Technology Compatibility Kit
• JDO 2.0 API
• JDO 2.0 Technology Compatibility Kit
• JDO 2.0 Geronimo integration

I witnessed a lot of good talk at ApacheCon, and I am happy to hear that it is coming to fruition. With these fine blokes behind it, I am hopeful for a top notch JDO implementation with an Apache brand.

Someone already asked “Doesn’t OJB support JDO?” to which Brian McCallister replied:

OJB supports a JDO interface via a plugin to the JDO 1.0.X reference implementation (which is SCSL, non-commercial variant) so is basically useless right now. This same RI is part of the initial codebase for this project, so the OJB JDO 1.0.X interface can actually become useful =)

Wow. Laszlo Platform Goes Open Source.

This is really cool news, and is smart from Laszlo in my opinion. Before this they were competing with traditional app development, and more expensive frameworks such as Macromedia Flex.

Now that their platform is open source, many more people will take a look and find out how good the platform is.

It is interesting to watch companies make the move from:

“We provide commercial software. Pay us per seat”

to:

“The software is free. But we can help and add value that way”

I really hope Laszlo is successful. If you want to check out the wave of Rich Internet Applications give it a try.

Oleg Dulin has an interesting view point in: The New Methodology: Agile can take advantage of open-source.

The rise of open-source commoditized components freely available on the Internet minimizes the construction cost by effectively automating it. The job of the

I had a chat with James at JavaOne, and we discussed the whole open source Java topic.

My biggest frustration about all of the talk in the industry has been that it didn’t seem like anyone was giving any actually information on what THEY considered an open source Java to mean.

Why do you want open source Java?
What don’t you like about Java as it stands?
What do you want to open source?
What license?
Who has access / power?

James has thought about the various scenarios that we currently have, in which the current Java model gets in the way. He then has cut to the chase on what would need to happen to help these scenarios out, and the solution ISN’T to open source all of the Java source code, the JVM, etc etc.

He basically wants to create an open source project (JRT) which is the rt.jar. Note that this isn’t a Java brand thing, and would mean that the poor GNU Classpath guys could focus on other things :)

Check it out. What do you think? Why Sun should open source Java and how – a new proposal (not open source Java but JRT)

I thought it was cool that SourceBeat (open source, new age publisher) have joined the ObjectWeb consortium.

There are lots of good products under the ObjectWeb umbrella, and they never get enough attention. Hopefully we will get some good content out of them via SourceBeat and people will see what is good.

The world of marketing is always tough. It is always hard for a european company to break into the US (especially French ;). In fact, I was just talking to Erik Thauvin about that fact! (we are both aliens living in the US ;)

Jonathan Schwartz has said:

“I don’t want to say when that will happen,” Schwartz said in a press conference in conjunction with the company’s SunNetwork conference. “But make no mistake: We will open-source Solaris.”

If they did this a few years ago it could have been huge. Time has moved on, and I wonder how much of an impact it will have. Solaris is a good OS, so it can only be a good thing for everyone.

Of course, not only do we not know when it will happen, but we don’t know how. It won’t just be “here is the source code. go wild”. They want to keep Solaris “standard” as well as open source.

Read More:

Sun warms to open source for Solaris

Sun COO Schwartz Promises Open Source Solaris

Havoc Pennington has written an interesting article on the future of open source desktop development.

He talks about projects like GNOME, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, and Evolution. His discussion surrounds the (at least partial) desire to move away from the traditional C/C++ development environments, and moving to The Next Thing.

Havoc puts his thoughts on the competition (the usual suspects: Java, .NET, Perl/Python/Ruby).

I think that going with a platform makes sense. I doubt everyone is going to agree to work on GNOME using Perl. However, if Parrot really existed in the real world…. it could compete with Java and .NET the platforms.

I am feeling better and better about Java recently, as if a project was on the JVM I could choose to program in Java itself, OR something else such as Groovy, BeanShell, Jython, Rhino/JavaScript, .

This is pretty powerful, and although Swing still gets a hard time, I think it is solid in 2004 (and getting better). WinForms isn’t a silver bullet.

I enjoyed getting together with Dain Sundstrom (Core Developers Network) and N. Alex Rupp the other day at an Irish Pub. There were some non geeks there, so “open source” was explained with the metaphor of community barn raising by Amish folk!

Apache Geronimo sounds like it is really coming along, so it will be good to see what really comes of it.

I was surprised to see an open source (LGPL) Java clone of iTunes has been put up on SourceForge.

JTunes uses JRendezvous from strangeberry and javalayer as mp3-player from javazoom. (The DAAP-part is from the iLeech Project.