Archive for July, 2007

Email Call to Action

Published by
jeremy
at July 30, 2007 in Firefox and Open Source. 2 Comments

Mozilla recently made this announcement regarding Thunderbird.

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus - delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services - is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a few different options. I’ve described them below. If you’ve got a different idea please let us know.

I agree with this post by glyn the more I think about it:

What’s worrying about this is that it seems to demonstrate a tunnel vision, where Firefox (and making money from it) are foregrounded above everything else. The fact is, email is a critical application, even if more and more people use Web-based mail (as I do - but I still use Thunderbird too). Moreover, Mozilla is a foundation, and that implies looking at the bigger picture, not concentrating - as a company might - on the success of its main “product”.

The open source world needs Thunderbird - indeed, the wider software community needs it. Although I accept that it lacks the community that Firefox has generated, that is not a reason to jettison it, and hope for the best. On the contrary: the very difficulties that Thunderbird has in firing up a community and in moving forward are precisely why the Mozilla Foundation should keep it under its wing.

It’s not the Firefox Foundation, but the Mozilla foundation. The Foundation having a big picture view is an important thing. It’s clear that Firefox and Thunderbird are much different beasts. The email space has way more competition than the web browser space. Add in the proliferation of web-based email and things get even more complex. It’s still not clear to me that completely dropping the project from the foundation is the best course of action though. It seems like something a corporation would have to do, not the Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell has outlined several options in her blog post. It will be interesting to watch which way the community leans as this moves forward.

–jeremy

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Truly Fair Disclosure

Published by
jeremy
at July 29, 2007 in Sun. 0 Comments

You have to hand it to Jonathan Schwartz and Sun. They’re doing some really interesting things. This time I’m not talking about ZFS or Dtrace, but rather this announcement about information disclosure:

We’ve got our fourth quarter (Q4) and full 2007 fiscal year earnings announcement coming up on Monday, July 30th.

I wanted to alert everyone to a change we’ll be making this quarter - related to how we publish those results, and going forward, other timely information about our financial performance. It’s a small, but exceptionally symbolic change.

I’ve asked our investor relations (known as “IR”) and press relations (”PR”) teams to gear up to announce our results via Sun’s web site and RSS feeds. We will announce our results to the general public via Sun’s IR web site before making that same information available through the third party news services that traditionally distribute such information to paying subscribers. We will simultaneously file a Form 8-K with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (for their redistribution).

Specifically, we will publish our results to this web site on July 30th at 1:00 PM (Pacific Time), which will in turn be disseminated via open syndication protocols (namely, RSS) to those who have subscribed to Sun’s news feeds. 10 minutes after publication to the internet, we will distribute this information via traditional news wires for dissemination to private news agencies and distribution vehicles.

Referencing a dialog we’ve established with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, and its Chairman Cox, this will place, for the first time, the general investing public - those with a web browser or a cell phone - on the same footing as those with access to private subscription services. In effect, driving an open dialog directly with investors, rather than routing information through proprietary sources. Open is as open does.

I believe this change will increase the transparency of our business, fulfill our desire to disseminate information on a fair and equitable basis, and allow the network to be used for what it’s intended - connecting people and information.

As noted, this is a first for a public company and Sun should be commended for the transparency shown here. Here’s hoping that others follow.

–jeremy

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Speed up your web pages with YSlow

Published by
jeremy
at July 29, 2007 in OSCON. 0 Comments

If you do front-end web stuff, you may be interested in a cool new tool from Yahoo! that I first heard about at OSCON:

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

* Performance report card
* HTTP/HTML summary
* List of components in the page
* Tools including JSLint

It’s not perfect, but I’ll be using it to sniff out any potential LQ performance issues at LQ. Just make sure you understand and research the information the tool gives you. I was already using Firebug, so this was a quick and painless addition. Thanks to Yahoo! for releasing this. While on the topic of Y!, the next LQ code revision is going to take advantage of the YUI library. Should be coming “real soon now”.

–jeremy

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More OSCON licensing announcements

Published by
jeremy
at July 29, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

(I briefly mentioned these in a previous post, but here’s a bit more detail. As I catch up on things that happened while I was at OSCON, you’ll likely see more frequent posts that are a bit more terse than usual.)

Microsoft wasn’t the only one to make a licesning announcement at OSCON.

First, SugarCRM announced that the next version will be licensed under the GPLv3. This has been a long time coming and Sugar has gotten a lot of criticism in the past for not being “Open” enough. Kudos to them for burning the boats.

Next, the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) that Socialtext submitted was approved by the OSI. For those of you unfamiliar with the CPAL, it’s an attribution license. It was interesting to hear Ross talk about the approval process and all that was learned along the way. The license went though a number of iterations, and in fact started out as a vanity license. To me, that’s an indication that the OSI approval process is doing what it was indented to do. How it will handle the recent Microsoft submissions will offer a fascinating insight into that process, as I’m sure it will be scrutinized even more than normal.

–jeremy

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Microsoft to Submit Shared Source Licenses to OSI

Published by
jeremy
at July 29, 2007 in Microsoft, OSCON, OSI and Open Source. 3 Comments

From a Radar post:

In his keynote at OSCON, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf announced that Microsoft is submitting its shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative. This is a huge, long-awaited move. It will be earthshaking for both Microsoft and for the open source community if the licenses are in fact certified as open source licenses. Microsoft has been releasing a lot of software as shared source (nearly 650 projects, according to Bill). If this is suddenly certified as true open source software, it will be a lot harder to draw a bright line between Microsoft and the open source community.

Bill also announced that Microsoft has created a new top level link at microsoft.com, microsoft.com/opensource to bring together in one place all Microsoft’s open source efforts. Bill sees this as the culmination of a long process of making open source a legitimate part of Microsoft’s strategy. Open source has survived Microsoft’s process of “software darwinism” and is becoming an ever more important part of its thinking.

To expand on the announcement, it’s the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) that will be submitted, as the other Microsoft shared source licenses are fairly closed. I vaguely remember the FSF saying that these two licenses appeared to satisfy the four freedoms, so it’s at least a possibility that they will be approved by the OSI. So, what does this all mean? I’m still digesting it myself. It would seem that at least part of Microsoft is willing to accept the importance of Open Source in the future of software. It also means that at least parts are willing to join the conversation in a legitimate way. By going to the OSI for approval, Microsoft can no longer point at Open Source and say it’s cancer or will eat babies. I’m sure it took a lot of work internally to get this accomplished. Kudos for the effort. Will it matter? That remains to be seen. If they continue spreading patent FUD, then moves like this have far less impact than they otherwise would. It’s impossible to trust a company, even one that uses an OSI-approved license, when the other hand is doing many harmful things. It also remains to be seen how some developers will react if these get approved. Will either license get any usage outside of Redmond? If they don’t, then what’s the point of yet another Open Source license? More questions than answers in my mind right now, but this will be really interesting to watch play out. Stay tuned.

–jeremy

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Open Source and the Future of Network Applications

Published by
jeremy
at July 29, 2007 in Google, OSCON and Open Source. 0 Comments

There’s a lot to see at OSCON, so it should come as no surprise that you won’t be able to personally see everything you’d like to. I seem to have missed one of the most talked about events though.

“Tim has a television show under production where we get told in advance what we are going to say and how it will reflect Tim’s underlying idea,” Moglen told us. “I decided not to go with the program.”

Moglen’s performance turned into the stuff of legend.

Regrettably, we missed the assault. Stories needed to go out, and we assumed the chat would follow familiar, boring lines. After about ten people later asked if we caught the spectacular show, The Register contacted the OSCON audio staff to obtain a recording of the session. “No problem,” they said, “It will just take a couple of minutes, but you need to get O’Reilly’s permission first.” O’Reilly corporate refused to release the audio, saying it would cause a slippery slope. (We’re still trying to understand that one.) They, however, did add that Moglen appeared to be “off his meds.”

So what exactly happened?

Moglen attacked O’Reilly for wasting his time promoting Web 2.0 darlings, when he should be focusing on the core issues crucial to free software.

“I decided to say that we’ve reached a stage where we ought to be able to tell the difference between daily business news – X is up, Y is down – and the stuff that really matters, which from day-to-day is not racehorse X is running faster than racehorse Y.

“I think what time has done with this forum in general is to emphasize the trivial at the expense of the significant.”

According to published reports, Moglen described O’Reilly’s current approach to open source software as “frivolous.” He also chastised O’Reilly for chasing money, billionaire chums and “thermal noise” like Facebook.

“We still have serious problems to correct in public policies made by people propping up business models that were dying and wasting time promoting commercial products,” Moglen said, during the session.

As Stephen O’grady points out, you may not agree with the tactics Eben used (I also don’t), but the conversation is an extremely important one.

First and most obviously, this is a call to arms. Join us, pleads Joyent, before we trade one dictatorship for another. Underlying the recruiting attempt, however, are a set of implicit assumptions worth extracting.

1. Microsoft’s desktop dominance is threatened
2. The primary source of the threat is free but non-open source SaaS offerings from Google, MSN, Yahoo
3. The predicted outcome will see users forced to trade one dominant provider for another
4. Open source is the last, best defense against that future

Speculative and reactionary though these comments may be, they are reasonable enough in my opinion to be warrant further debate. But not here, and not now.

Suffice it to say, for time being, that the Joyent folks are not the only ones concerned by the prospect of future technology landscape dominated by the likes of Amazon, Google, eBay, Yahoo, et al. As evidenced by developments like Joyent’s decision and the GNOME Online Desktop efforts, it’s increasingly apparent that open source and Web 2.0 are on a collision course.

While these two dominant technical trends or directions have much to learn from each other, the convergence is likely to have its painful moments if OSCON is any indication. Indeed the talk of the conference was the somewhat shocking public swipe at Tim O’Reilly by one of the GPLv3’s chief architects, Eben Moglen. As documented elsewhere, Moglen absolutely dropped the hammer on Mr. Web 2.0, arguing that “that the FSF has ‘done the heavy lifting’ and ‘carried your water’ for the last decade, and that the era of Web 2.0 distraction (buzz about who is making money, who will get acquired, etc) will need to be replaced by a serious conversation about freedom.”

We’re still in the early stages of this discussion, but it’s encouraging to see that the right people are paying attention and the issues are slowly being iterated through. The right questions are starting to be asked. There’s still a lot to decide and much debate will surely follow, so if this is a topic that interests you (and it should be), make sure to join the conversation.

–jeremy

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Back from OSCON, LinuxWorld coming soon

Published by
jeremy
at July 28, 2007 in OSCON. 0 Comments

I’m back from OSCON, but still feeling the impact of what was another great event. It’s not just the great parties that leave you drained, it’s also the massive amount of learning, discussion and information. It’ll likely take me a couple days to recover. The thinkpad death means I blogged a little less than I’d have liked to. I just ordered a new thinkpad - an X61. Hopefully is arrives before I leave for LinuxWorld in San Fran next week.

–jeremy

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More from OSCON

Published by
jeremy
at July 26, 2007 in OSCON. 0 Comments

My laptop has really gone from bad to worse, so blogging will be extremely light until I get home. The N800 has been filling in nicely. It’s a shame I have been unable to live blog the sessions, as they have been really interesting. I was able to take a few notes and will include them here:

More Than Licenses: The Legal Policy of the Free World in the Age of Web 2.0 Eben Moglen
* Choosing certain licenses will result in a more cohesive community.
* The GPL didn’t originally take into account the economic importance of community.
* We have built a good republic, not just good software.
* Freedom of speech includes the right to not talk..translated to code this is were the GPLv3 walks the line in regards to the “ASP loophole”.
* Regarding ODF: no commercial entity should have the ability to intermediate between a government and its people.

Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means? Michael Tiemann, Brian Behlendorf, Danese Cooper, Chris DiBona, Ross Mayfield, John Roberts
* SugarCRM 5 will be GPLv3 and will be available in a couple weeks.
* Most people take the OSD as the final word on what defines Open Source, but some do not.
* Attribution is still a hotly debated topic. It gets especially hairy when you take into account logos and trademarks. It also gets interesting when you are talking about aggregating small bits of code from many projects that require attribution.
* The OSI has approved the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) from SocialText.
* Someone asked how far the OSI was willing to go to “defend” Open Source. Luckily it usually doesn’t go beyond a simple polite email.
* The question was asked whether as new licenses get approved whether some old ones will be retired. Hopefully.

Some random notes:

* Microsoft will be working to get multiple licenses approved by the OSI.
* You can carpet an entire floor in a parking garage and throw a party (Thanks Sun).
* Dtrace really is phenomenal

To be honest there has been so much interesting discussion that it’s hard to be able to blog it all. You really should consider attending OSCON. More later.

–jeremy

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OSCON Opening Keynote

Published by
jeremy
at July 25, 2007 in OSCON. 0 Comments

As usual, the opening OSCON keynote was extremely interesting. Tim talked about which Open Source is on the Radar. There was a lot of talk about parallelism (Intel) and concurrent programming (Microsoft). Tim also interviewed Mark Shuttleworth. I had planned on live blogging the event, which contained a bunch of great quotes and facts. Why didn’t I? My laptop has broken. Badly. Every once and a while (and especially if not firmly planted on a flat surface) the display just goes blank. Once it happens, the only fix is to shut the machine off, fiddle with the lid for a while and then restart. It’s going to be a real pain and I’m going to have to get a new laptop ASAP. This one is a bit old anyway. One tidbit from the keynote that is laptop related. After Intel released powertop, they got a ton of info from the community and as a result were able to increase battery life by almost an hour. Linux now has the most efficient power consumption of any OS on the Intel platform. Awesome.

–jeremy

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OSCON Executive Briefing II

Published by
jeremy
at July 24, 2007 in Linux, Linux Foundation, MySQL, OSCON, Open Source, Ubuntu and maemo. 0 Comments

(live blogging, so forgive the grammar and lack of proof reading)

Always Better

Matt Asay (Alfresco) and Mike Olson (Oracle via SleepyCat) discuss the value of source code. Mike argues that zero cost frictionless distribution is more disruptive than source access. A response from the crowd asked why he doesn’t close BerkleyDB. He didn’t get a chance to answer the question, but did give Matt a book.

The Path to IPO

Marten Mickos discusses how he hopes to grow MySQL AB to a billion in revenues. He covered how much the company has matured in the last few years (including items like: “we now invoice customers and have prices”). MySQL really aligns with PHP, but is “promiscuous when it comes to programming languages”. “Moore’s law will continues, but doesn’t apply to people” - MM. “The company you keep matters in Open Source” - TO. MySQL data seems to once again confirm that many people test OSS on Windows and deploy on Linux. Open Source will accelerate what is already happening to a product - bad ones will die quicker and good ones will get better faster.

Managing Linus Torvalds and other small challenges

Jim is covering the reasons that FSG and OSDL merged. He is also reflecting on what he sees as the future responsibility of the Linux Foundation, including what directions they should take and what pitfalls they should avoid.

Why Free Software values work for business

Mark discusses the relationship between the commercial Canonical and the non-commercial Ubuntu community. Mark sees collaboration as one of the key Open Source strengths. Launchpad is meant to take advantage of this and leverage collaboration as much as possible. Freedom of data is becoming increasingly important and Ubuntu/Canonical is committed to free data not only in launchpad (which will be Open Sourced soon), but throughout the project/company. “Driver support in Linux is probably one of the biggest reservations in Linux adoption” - MS. The following question was asked: “Can Ubuntu become bigger than Mark”. In essence, if Mark went away for whatever reason, would Ubuntu survive? This is clearly a question Mark has really thought about, up to and including Will provisions meant to ensure financial viability for the project.

–jeremy

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