Category Archives: open source

java, microsoft, open source, software development, Sun

The end of Sun’s bold open source experiment

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This is a sad day for Sun. It sought to re-invent its business through open source; and the experiment has failed, culminating not in a re-invigorated company, but instead acquisition by an old-school proprietary software company, Oracle.

It is possible to build a successful business around open source software. Zend is doing it with PHP; Red Hat has done it with Linux. These are smaller companies though, and they have not tried to migrate an older business built on a proprietary model. A further complication is that Sun is a hardware business, and although open source is an important part of its hardware strategy as well as its software strategy, it is a different kind of business.

Maybe the strategy was good, but it was the recession, or the server market, that killed Sun. In the end it does not make any difference, the outcome is what counts.

Reading the official overview of the deal, I see lots of references to “open” and “standard-based”, which means nothing, but no mention of open source.

The point of interest now is what happens to Sun’s most prominent open source projects: OpenOffice.org, MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris. Developers will be interested to see what happens to NetBeans, the open source Java IDE, following the Oracle acquisition, and how it will relate to Oracle’s JDeveloper IDE. These open source projects have a momentum of their own and are protected by their licenses, but a significant factor is what proportion of the committers – those who actually write the software and commit their changes to the repository – are Sun employees. Although it is not possible to take back open source code, it is possible to reduce investment, or to start creating premium editions available only to commercial subscribers, which already appeared to be part of MySQL’s strategy.

I presume that both OpenOffice and Java will feature in Oracle’s stated intention to build an end-to-end integrated solution:

Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

says CEO Larry Ellison, who also says nothing about open source. This will involve invading Microsoft’s turf – something Sun was always willing to do, but not particularly successful at executing.

The best outcome for the open source community will be if Oracle continues to support Sun’s open source projects along the same lines as before. Even if that happens, the industry has lost a giant of the open source world.

Some good comments from Redmonk’s Michael Coté here.

.net, microsoft, mobile, open source, software, software development, visual studio

SharpDevelop 3.0: everything .NET from Boo to F#

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I’ve been researching open source .NET and noticed that SharpDevelop, the free IDE for .NET on Windows, completed version 3.0 earlier this month. Congratulations to the team. Along with Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications in C# or Visual Basic, you get extras like support for F#, Boo and Python. Another welcome feature is built-in support for Subversion version control. There’s even an ASCII table in the IDE, which brings back memories: 15 years ago every programming manual had one at the back.

SharpDevelop has two major challenges. One is keeping up with Microsoft; right now there are discussions about improving WPF support, for example. The other is that Microsoft offers free Express versions of Visual Studio, which leaves SharpDevelop with those niche users for whom the Express products are unsuitable, but who do not want to pay for a full version, or who are wedded to some exclusive SharpDevelop feature.

In favour of SharpDevelop, it installs more easily and loads more quickly than Microsoft’s effort, and certainly proves the point that native C# applications do not have to be slow.

A more interesting though less complete product is the forked MonoDevelop, which is cross platform and targets Mono, the open source implementation of .NET. Mono now looks good on Linux; but the idea of WORA (Write Once Run Anywhere) has never really caught on in the .NET world. How many significant Mono applications for Windows have you seen? My guess is that if it happens at all, it will be in the form of Silverlight/Moonlight running in the browser.

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database, open source, software development

SQLite developer argues for quick bug disclosure and fixes, despite egg on face

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SQLite developer D Richard Hipp has posted to his mailing list to announce a third release in the space of a few days, to fix bugs discovered in version 3.6.10:

Some concern has been expressed that we are releasing too frequently. (Three releases in one week is a lot!) The concern is that this creates the impression of volatility and unreliability. We have been told that we should delay releases in order to create the impression of stability. But the SQLite developers feel that truth is more important than perception, not the other way around. We think it is important to make the highest quality and most stable version of SQLite available to users at all times. This week has seen two important bugs being discovered shortly after a major release, and so we have issued two emergency patch releases after the regularly scheduled major release. This makes us look bad. This puts "egg on our face." We do not like that. But, three releases also ensures that the best quality SQLite code base is available available to you at all times.

He goes on to say that an extended beta period would be unlikely to reduce the risk of bugs found on release, because most bugs in SQLite are found by internal testing rather than by external users. He also argues against withholding releases until they “testing is finished”:

The fallacy there is that we never finish testing. We are constantly writing new test cases for SQLite and thinking of new ways to stress and potentially break the code. This is a continuous, never-ending, and on-going process. All existing tests pass before each release. But we will always be writing new tests the day after a release, regardless of how long we delay that release. And sometimes those new tests will uncover new problems.

Anyone who has ever developed an application will know that sinking feeling when problems are discovered in code that has been distributed. Thoroughly implemented unit testing, as in SQLite, improves quality greatly. When bugs are found though, full disclosure and prompt fixes are the best possible response, so I agree with Hipp’s general approach here.

java, open source, software, software development, Sun

Sun’s financial problems – what comes next?

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Sun has today published a press release announcing that up to 18% of its global workforce is to be cut and that Rich Green, VP of Software, has resigned.

It has also formed a new business group called Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms, for advancing its cloud services efforts.

Sun is a fascinating company, with serious commitment to open source. It is also the steward of Java, MySQL and OpenOffice.org. Despite the software aspect, selling servers is a core part of its business, and its problems now (in my quick opinion) are a consequence of the economic downturn, a trend towards cheap-and-many in the server market, and a rush towards open source without any clear strategy over how to monetize it. No, I don’t believe turning runtime and application downloads into foistware and adware is the solution.

Somehow, Sun allowed competitors such as IBM and Oracle to benefit from Java without reaping equal rewards itself. It is great at innovating but less good at profiting from its invention. Java applets were the first browser-hosted client applications, but Sun did not see the need for something like JavaFX until Adobe Flash and then Microsoft Silverlight showed how this needed to evolve; now it is probably too late.

Another example is utility computing (one aspect of cloud computing), which Sun pioneered with its Grid initiative; but others such as Amazon are now setting the pace in this area.

What comes next – acquisition, recovery, or continued decline?

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microsoft, open source, Sun

OpenOffice to become adware?

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From Jonathan Schwartz’s blog:

An auction’s afoot … to see who we’ll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution – the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OpenOffice.org community and features, from which everyone benefits).

An alarming prospect. But OpenOffice.org is meant to be free and open source. What does Schwartz mean by “our binary distribution”? Note he says OpenOffice.org not Star Office, Sun’s commercial version.

I presume it will be possible for others to step in and offer branding-free distributions of OpenOffice. I’ll go for those, thanks very much.

Contributors to OpenOffice.org put their trust in Sun and even assigned their copyright, supposedly to protect the open source status of the code. If Sun commercialises the free distribution (it can do what it likes with Star Office), that strikes me as stretching the limits of what people understand by free software.

If Sun, by Schwartz’s own admission, is willing to “annoy” its friends in the free software community, OpenOffice.org will lose a lot of momentum – I foresee forks and anger. A good day for Microsoft Office.

Then again, I may have misunderstood. I’m seeking clarification.

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cloud computing, internet, linux, microsoft, open source, software

Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice.org in UK education

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Yesterday I took a seminar with a small number of people from schools and colleges in the UK, who had purchasing responsibility for software.

I talked about some of the history, differences between the products, the ISO standardisation wars, the ribbon, and the way Microsoft’s pricing escalates in order to charge the maximum to business users. I also mentioned online alternatives like Google docs and asked whether they could contemplate switching entirely to a web-based productivity suite.

It is always interesting talking to people with a real-world perspective, in contrast to the hothouse of Internet discussions and attempting to follow what is happening at the bleeding edge. What I found:

  • These folk knew about OpenOffice.org but none use it regularly themeselves; one had a reasonable number of students using it, but only because they were using netbooks running Linux. Not very encouraging for OpenOffice.org since the buzz is that netbooks are increasingly switching to Windows.
  • There was very little interest in ISO standards. On the other hand, there was real concern about interoperability, which is related. However, the best solution at the moment is to use Microsoft’s old binary formats throughout. Filters in MS office for OpenDocument, and in OpenOffice.org for Open XML, will be welcome.
    Incidentally, I used Office 2007 PowerPoint for the session. I tried to open the .pptx in OpenOffice.org 3.0; it worked, but there were extra borders round objects and some unwanted text. I saved from Office 2007 as .ppt, re-opened in OpenOffice.org. It was perfect.
  • Some had already rolled out Office 2007, and reported that the Ribbon UI was better for new users, but caused problems for some who were familiar with the old menus. Mainly a training issue.
  • Education gets generous pricing for MS Office. There was interest in saving money by using OpenOffice.org, but the sums involved are relatively small. We discussed the ethical issue – whether it is right to get young people hooked on a product that will cost them or their businesses dearly later on – but this particular group didn’t engage with this much. Little desire to change the world; focused on getting their work done.
  • I mentioned the negative Becta report on Vista and Office 2007, which I also looked at again in preparation. I was struck again by what a poor report it is, ducking important issues and giving a rose-tinted view of ODF, though I am in sympathy with Becta’s efforts to promote choice and open source in education. However, none of this group had read the report, or even heard of it. Becta is a government organization focused on technology in education.
  • There was little enthusiasm for web-based office suites. Interest perked up a little when I mentioned Google Gears and the possibility of seamless online/offline use. One person said his school was rural and could not get broadband at all.

My overall impression is that Microsoft Office remains dominant in the institutions represented by this group, and that seems unlikely to change soon. The web-based suites have more chance of breaking the habit, since they represent a more fundamental shift than simply moving from one fat desktop application to another.

I would likely have got a better attendance for a seminar on rolling out Office 2007.

eclipse, open source, software development

Death of Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework good for vendors, bad for customers

It’s a shame that the Eclipse ALF (Application Lifecycle Framework) project has closed:

… given the level of community participation, the appropriate course for ALF is to close down the project. Unfortunately, our recent efforts did not identify potential contributors willing to justify keeping the project active.

says project lead Brian Carroll. The project aimed to enable interoperability between ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools from different vendors. Here’s the problem statement from the project page:

Application development today is achieved through the use of numerous tools from software vendors, open source communities and some are even home grown. Getting these tools to work together is an integration problem that has never been solved. Each vendor and open source project creates their own API standards and many hours of effort are required to create even the most straightforward of integrations.

The problem is real, so why the lack of participation? Of the major ALM vendors, only Serena gave it serious backing. The project could not succeed without either IBM, or a solid alliance of IBM’s competitors.

My interpretation: those ALM vendors will have considered whether it was really in their interests to help customers integrate their tools with those from rivals. Good for customers, yes, but vendors want to keep you hooked on their product suites. “Buy more from us, it integrates with what you have already” is a great sales point. Since only the participation of those vendors could make ALF work, the project was doomed.

It is another manifestation of what Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff calls “an aspect of our industry”.

Everyone loves standards, right?

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open source, windows 7

WordPad in Windows 7 supports Open XML, OpenDocument

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Interesting twist in the document format wars. Early builds of Windows 7 have extended document support in WordPad, the word-processing applet in Windows. WordPad will now read and write both Microsoft’s Open XML (docx) and OpenDocument (odt). The latter is the native format of the open source OpenOffice.org. I was sceptical about this since the support is not in the Milestone 3 build given to journalists here; but the builds running on stands in the Pavilion area do have this support, so it is real. I’m guessing that it is based on the the OpenDocument support coming in Office 14. Of course, this is pre-beta, so subject to change.

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eclipse, open source, php

When will PHP Developer Tools be mainstream at Eclipse?

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I’ve been doing a little PHP work and enjoying it; I like PHP 5.x much better than earlier versions. My PHP development setup is based on Eclipse and the PHP Developer Tools project, or PDT, and one thing I noticed when I set this up is that it is awkward to use PDT with Eclipse 3.4, or Ganymede. I ran into problems again when I updated my Ganymede Eclipse to the latest releases, this time on Windows as it happens. PDT stopped working, and I had to download a newer “integration build” of PDT as well as an update to the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK), using a manual download and import process instead of the built-in Eclipse online update. I also had to remove the Ruby Development Tools as these relied on an earlier version of the DLTK; there might be a way round this but my priority was to get PDT working.

I’m getting this pain because I want to use PDT 2.0 and Eclipse3.4, instead of the older PDT 1.0.3 which has an all-in-one download based on Eclipse 3.3. “All-in-one” means that you download a bundle which includes both Eclipse and PDT, and treat it as a separate standalone IDE. The question though: why wasn’t the PDT properly integrated with Ganymede, which brings together multiple Eclipse projects with the promise that they will all work together?

I looked in the Eclipse PDT newsgroup and found some discussion on the subject. Apparently the PDT team felt it was just too difficult to manage the dependencies. More depressing is that apparently the team feels the same way about Galileo, the follow-up to Ganymede expected in June 2009. It means that the PDT stays outside the mainstream of Eclipse projects, reducing its visibility.

Conspiracy theorists might surmise that major PDT contributors like Zend, which has its own commercial IDE called Zend Studio which uses both Eclipse and PDT, might enjoy keeping the free version low-profile. That (or some other reason) might also explain why Zend Studio uses a 1.x version of PDT along with Eclipse 3.4, which is not meant to work. It turns out that Zend Studio uses PDT 1.0.5, whereas the latest public download (unless you go directly to the source) is 1.0.3. If 1.05 works fine with Eclipse 3.4, why isn’t the public all-in-one based on this combination?

I like the PDT, and my patched together Ganymede + PDT 2.x works very well. Debugging seems more stable since I updated it. Personally I’d like to see PDT get more prominence within the Eclipse community, and for it to be packaged as part of Galileo rather than being left on the sidelines.

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open source, Sun, web authoring

Sun’s Tim Bray declares end of Enterprise Software

In a dramatic session here at FOWA in London, Sun’s Tim Bray tore up his talk and spoke on life after the economic crash. While giving a near-apocalyptic prediction of tough times ahead, he said that certain technologies will be winners and losers. Winners: open source, agile development, web applications, cloud computing. Losers: enterprise software:

I do not see much future for enterprise software … you are not going to get any purchase orders

On the subject of cloud computing, he added that he is not sure what model is best – hosted applications, virtual servers on demand such as those from Amazon, or what. The main risk, he said, is lock-in.

Ironically his talk is being followed by one from Salesforce.com, where lock-in is real.

Clearly, and as Bray admitted, the ideas he is recommending are the same as what he would recommend anyway. That doesn’t make them wrong, of course. His dose of reality, despite his pessimism, won applause here.

There are a few more snippets from his talk on my twitter feed.