Steve's Seaside Life

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The Success of Open Source

By far it’s the best study in open source I have read. Starting from social, political, and economical views, he provides real and detailed insight into how Open Source works.  Unlike The Cathedral and the Bazaar which relies more on experience, this book relies on detailed analysis, and relates Open Source to well established political science thoery. He goes well beyond describing the origins and organization of the movement but also describing business models and roles that companies have been adopting to support and work with open source software. It’s a long book, and starts to falter towards the end but its well worth the effort if a thorough understanding is important to you.

“The Success of Open Source” is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what is open source and its relevance for today’s society.

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Sun vs Red Hat starts to get a bit bizarre

In this post I pointed to a remarkably frank interview where Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive explained their strategy to ZDNet UK.  Prior to this interview Jonathan had gone a bit over the top in one of his blogs articles where he said:

Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We’ll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy.

Not suprisingly if you read the post and the ZDNet article Red Hat must be feeling a bit miffed with Jonathan right now, but Michael Tiemann in his responce goes equally over the top on his blog where he says:

The open source community doesn’t do what you ask them to do unless either (a) they trust you, or (b) what you ask them to do fits into some larger goal they’ve already signed onto. Merely being pathetic doesn’t score a whole lotta points, even if you are an executive of a once-great company

There are some interesting …

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Sun’s strategy laid out for all to see!

In a remarkably frank interview Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive explained their strategy to ZDNet UK.  As I read the interview Jonathan’s blog entries started to take on a greater coherence.  I have extracted the guts of the interview here, and I have added links to a few relevant blog entries by Jonathan:

 

Step No. 1: Make the argument that Linux equals Red Hat. Linux has become a social force, with all of the free world supposedly cooperating to create an always improving operating system that is forever cheaper and more valuable than the old versions of Unix.

Sun’s view is that Linux is nothing more than Red Hat. The operating system is not about world peace and the charitable work of the world’s great programmers. It’s like every other operating system ever created: It’s about the foibles, greed, mistakes and engineering prowess (or lack thereof) of one vendor — in this case, Red Hat.

 

Step No. 2: Belittle Red Hat. By collapsing Linux into Red Hat, Sun now has a clear target. It can hammer away at a company, as opposed to …

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Blogware features

In her blog kathleen describes how she decided on blogware vs TypePad.  I use blogware to host this blog and I think its great.  One of the features I like is that I often use the public view of the blog when I am browing around, finding old articles etc.  As an author on of the blog, I see some extra options, see below:

For example I see the integration the POST ARTICLE and EDIT ARTICLE links and the POST ARTICLE link automatically sets up the category for you based on where you are in the blog at the time.

The edit link is also good because you can do a search to find and old article and then edit it with a single click. I particularly like this because often when I want to send someone a link to an old article I go to my blog, search for it and then see an error I want to correct :-).

I just wish I could buy it and install it behind the firewall as well.

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Tim Bray worries about WS-*

Tim and others are starting to worry that WS-* is getting out of control:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure

Now I want to make it clear that I am no expert on this, but I have followed the debate.  It seems to be that the reason that this stuff is getting so complex is so that developers don’t have to worry about it.  What the heck do I mean by that; well I mean that these spec’s are not meant to be implemented by developers, they will be implemented by the tools and libraries that the developers use.  At least that’s the impression I get when Don Box talks about Indigo.  I think he said something like, “I spent the last n years, before I joined Microsoft,  worrying about the plumbing”, then he said something like “Since I joined Microsoft I am working to make all that knowledge about the plumbing completely irrelevant”. 

My guess is that without a complete and comprehensive set of specifications, the tools …

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VMware ACE, I like it and use it

VMware have just announced ACE, this is how they describe it:

VMware ACE is an enterprise solution for IT desktop managers who want to rapidly provision standardized and secure PC environments throughout the extended enterprise. VMware ACE installs easily, improving the manageability, security and cost-effectiveness of any industry standard PC. VMware ACE enables IT desktop managers to apply enterprise IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create an isolated PC environment known as an “assured computing environment”. VMware assured computing environments are self-policing, protect enterprise data, and enable safe access to enterprise resources.

I like the idea, I have been using VMWare myself for exactly this requirement.  On one of my home servers that sits on my home network I have a Windows XP VM, configured with corporate firewall, AV products, locked down configuration and VPN client.  I use this VM to connect to the company network. 

This has two advantages, The company network is pretty well isolated from my home network and I am well isolated from it, (since its pretty big and represents a fairly large threat).  I would prefer to be able to just fire up a Windows Terminal …

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All the buzz about weblogs is really about one thing: Making publishing to the web as easy as writing an email

Or so says a really interesting presentation posted here http://www.37signals.com/blogprez/ but blogging for me means much more to me than that.  It’s about being able to craft for an external audiance, a view onto what I am doing, what I think is important, and why I think its important.  Even though my blog is essentially for an external audiance, I often find myself posting articles to help me shape my ideas, or as reminders of things that I want to work on in the future.  Its suprising the extent to which my blog has become a sort of personal reference library. 

I have never sustained a Journal before, but my blog is now probably the longest lived personal productivity tool, and personal development initiative I have ever used, so their must be something to its more than easy publishing.

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The more data you have, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why have data?

Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They’ve put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find all the data that people have sent to you, all the Web pages you’ve ever seen, and all the attachments you’ve ever forgotten to save. Its called Stuff I’ve seen and you can read about it here.

It’s an important concept in Personal Knowledge Management.  I personally have been using X1 for about 6 months and also use Lookout to seacrh my RSS feeds.  I find the two incredibly useful and routinely find things now that I would never have tried to even find before.  The level of re-use I am now achieving is significantly greater. 

I figure these tools probably save me an hour a week, thats one impressive ROI, and X1/Lookout don’t do everything that Microsoft are promising.

There is a downside though, I suspect that these capabilities will only work best when the products your use to create, manipulate, views and store the data all come from Microsoft. 

Not suprisingly the Open Source community are …

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Wondering what personality type you are?

ISTJ Serious, quiet, earn success by concentration and thoroughness. Practical, orderly, matter of fact, logical, realistic, and dependable. Take responsibility.


ISFJ Quiet, friendly, responsible and conscientious. Work devotedly to meet their obligations. Thorough, painstaking, accurate. Loyal considerate.


INFJ Succeed by perseverance, originality, and desire to do whatever is needed, wanted. Quietly forceful; concerned for others. Respected for their firm principles.


INTJ Usually have original minds and great drive for their own ideas and purposes. Sceptical, critical, independent, determined, often stubborn. (Thats me)

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An Architects Perspective on IT Programme Management

I have managed a lot of IT Infrastructure projects in my time, and a couple of smaller programmes.  I have also keenly observed the management of several large programmes as a Chief Architect.  This article is written from this perspective.

 

Some initial observations:

 

  1. IT Infrastructure Projects generally fail from at least one perspective and often more

  2. IT Infrastructure projects look superficially simple

  3. The programmes have been overly influenced by the personality and skills of the Programme Director

 

The following are a set of Article Titles that I intend to write over the next year or so; they give you a good idea of the issues I think are important:

 

  1. What does he do? The importance of top down Journal keeping to programme communication, coordination and team spirit

  2. The need for a balanced management team instead of Super Men

  3. Management information is a team resource

  4. The customer is not the same as the client

  5. Objectives and Requirements, why they are different and both important

  6. The importance of programme maturity reviews

  7. Conceptual integrity and how easy it is to loose it

  8. The lost art of estimating – take different perspectives

  9. How to plan a programme, top …