Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Futures

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IBM and Linux, – but what about Sun?

Jonathan Schwartz, provides a very interesting perspective on the pickle that IBM have got themselves into over Linux.  Whats even more interesting is that he does not discuss Sun’s simillar predicament!  Maybe thats because his series of blogs on this and related topics is building up the background for Sun’s position which is likely to see a return to the promotion of Solaris as a viable alternative to Redhat which is gradually being positioned by Jonathan as a kid of “proprietary solution”, certainly one that locks you into RedHat.

Update: I am not the only one who is puzzling over what Jonathan is up to with his blog.  Look at this eWeek article that pulls lots of opinion together, it appears Jonathan is playing a pretty risky game.

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Open Solutions or Open Source?

Although not strictly contradictory, it makes for a nice title.  This article is about one of Microsoft’s reactions to Open Source and one way in which it is delivering on its “integrated innovation”, marketing strategy.  

 

The basic concept is that Microsoft takes a collection of their products, and applies them to the solution of a particular business need.   They publish for free standard architectures, processes, templates etc.  You can populate these architectures with some products of your own choice.  In a way whilst this is not Open Source it’s a sort of Open Solution. 

 

The concept is quite interesting to me because one of the challenges with Open Source software, due in the main to the way it is created, is how to build a coherent solution from the many different components, without some over-arching architectural vision.  Where does this vision get created in the current Open Source development model?  It happens within IBM, Red-hat and Novel etc and it probably happens in a proprietary way.  Even if all of the source for the components in the architecture are Open, the architecture itself is likely to evolve in …

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How does Open Source Software come to be?

This may seem like a simple question to answer, i.e. is written, just like any other software!  It also might seem a strange sort of question to ask, but you will hopefully get my point if you read on!

 

NOTE: No thorough analysis supports the observations I report here.

 

It seems to me that the vast majority of the important Open Source Software comes to be through the following mechanisms:

 

  1. Cloning or reproducing in some way an existing design specification or similar.  Examples of this route being Mono(.NET), Linux(Unix) and Wine(Win32).  This technique is usually to force a product or interface into the open, by creating an alternative.

  2. Donating, i.e. some third party gifts pre-existing Open Source to the community, examples of this being OpenOffice, Zope and Niku.  This route is often taken by closed source product companies with an old product that is not generating much revenue.  The closed source community uses this old product line to, improve their image, generate services revenue, stimulate demand for optional closed source products, kill off a competitor etc.  In some cases the original developer continues to have some involvement in the development, …

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Solaris and Linux

Johnathan Schwartz writes a nice article about Sun’s dilema, now resolved, about how to compete against Linux.  Linux is not a product, its a social movement that Sun applauds, so how can they compete?  He goes on to explain that in reality Linux is delieverd as many incompatible distributions, and...

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Microsoft and integration

I have thought for a long time that Microsoft don’t make much use of their own software to build pre-integrated solutions for their customers, (unlike Oracle for example).  They seem to have caught onto the idea at last, (not from listening to me though :-)).  Anyway a few months ago they started to talk about solution accelerators, which are solutions built from sets of MS products with associated processes, procedures and best practices as well as custom systems integration.  These solve particular business problems, like for example, the process of hiring new employees.  There is also evidence that Microsoft is doing the same at the infrastructure level where the range of tools available to them is even richer, SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint etc.  This is a good example:

Microsoft also plans to make available to enterprise partners a “zero touch provisioning” accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.

“We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application,” Hassall said. “And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server …

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Office news

Office news. 

A new version of open office is available.  The main improvements are:

Enhancements to the open-source productivity suite include support for PDF and XHTML exports and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to the OpenOffice Web site. The new release, for example, will support forms conversion within Word documents and import text document layouts with more fidelity. OpenOffice 1.1 also boasts enhanced support for mobile device formats such as Palm’s AportisDoc, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

IBM has ideas of its own, taking a thinner approach with its WorkPlace products

A wild card in the Office wars is IBM, which plans to offer server-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality to buyers of its WebSphere portal. At the very least, that could allow large customers to negotiate better Microsoft Office pricing/licensing, observers said. (See IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office.)

The MS Office team are majoring on quality for their next release, does this imply major changes, requiring major testing, or just good practice?

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.

“We’re trying to reduce the iteration of …

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Architecture Lifecycle

HP have posted a short article on the role of the Architect throughout the IT project lifecycle.  I like the perspecitive as often the dominant role of the Architect is the “design” role, and this is the one that is most repeatable and easy to capture in methodology.  The following...

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Some progress in server infrastructure for processing XML documents.

Its interesting to see the slow but sure emergence of middleware to exploit XML documents.  Microsoft have WSS which can manipulate Infopath docuemnts stored in its document libraries for example.  InfoWorld report on a mor ambitious tool from IBM, code named Project Cinnamon, you can get the full details here, but here is the real content:

Cinnamon was born in IBM’s Almaden Research Center and is a tool designed to automatically create mappings among different forms of data. By allowing users to define how an XML document gets mapped into a database such as DB2, the technology makes it easier to store those documents and to manage their content.

The upcoming utility hopes to address one of the thornier problems associated with XML-based development. Although XML serves as a clear standard for how content in a document is defined, the schema or definition of that content can be markedly different from document to document. This makes it impractical to place thousands of different documents in even a single data source and be able to retrieve certain data using a single search engine, an IBM representative said.

InfoWorld also says:

Some analysts think the upcoming technology can play a central …

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The five top objections to open-source

Computer World has an article on this topic, most of which has already been debated many times with simillar answers to the ones that CW gives.  However I repeat the list here, because item 5 on the list is actually new to me:

  1. Support availability

  2. Functional limitations of the software

  3. Software license terms

  4. Rapid software release cycles

  5. Package road maps or future plans

Items 1 to 4 are answered pretty well, and I don’t think are a major concern now for most companies and the service offerings are developing at a rapid rate.  However here is the answer to item 5:

Package road maps or future plans are important to most companies. Major vendors tend to heavily promote their road maps, even to the extent of publicizing future capabilities years in advance. Of course, there is no promise that any advertised feature will ever see the light of your computer display. Not all vendors publish such road maps, and some share them only with strategic accounts under nondisclosure agreements.

Some open-source groups publish road maps, and some do not. At times, the stated goal is to mimic the functionality of a commercial package, though when any particular feature will appear …