This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it. here are some of the more important links. The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised...
Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what’s important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards. he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance. He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.
Definately worth a read.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary
A lot has been written about the history of Microsoft. This article reviews a new book that looks at Microsoft from the perspective of the changes that it has had to introduce and continues to push forward as a result of its legal difficulties and “evil empire” image. The full article is worth reading but here are a few of the more interesting quotes:
“They need to get the outside world to learn to accept them without thinking that there’s something shady going on there all the time. That’s a very long-term process,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of cynicism out there. No matter what Microsoft tries to do, nobody’s going to turn around overnight and say, ‘Well, we accept them now as good neighbors.’ “
One of the best insights:
In simple terms, some of Microsoft’s critics might characterize the ongoing changes as an effort to shift the outside perception of the company from “evil” to “good.” But Slater said he doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t think they were ever evil,” he said. “I think they were unable, or unwilling, to curb the zeal that was always part of the Microsoft culture.” He said the company …
The Radicati group recently published a report titled
“IBM Lotus & Microsoft–Corporate Messaging Market Analysis” (June 2004), available at www.radicati.com/reports/single.shtml.
Its a truly awful report, as many people have commented. It breaks all normal reporting rules:
I actually looked forward to reading it when I first heard it had come out because I had some concerns over Lotus Workplace and how Lotus Notes/Domino would transition to the new architecture. However the report was so biased I ended up feeling much more positive about Lotus than I had before. The basis for my change of view “IBM must be on to something with Workplace if such bad analysis is the only tool available to make Microsoft look good”. I was also left even more uncertain over what Microsoft is up to with Exchange, as I have already blogged on here and here.
The last straw for me in this report was the criticism of IBM/Lotus over migration to Workplace and the commendation of Microsoft on …
Absolute goldmine, lists every OS you can image and provides details on whether its works on Virtual PC. I was pretty amazed by the list, especially compared with VM Ware. Where a product has issues it also has notes of workarounds. Even better if you want to keep up to...
These video’s are pretty good examples of some of Microsoft’s integrated innovation ideas. Illustrated by the connected car concept
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 …
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:
As I gradually migrated towards infrastructure and away from line of business applications, the reality of having to deliver applications to Windows and manage them on Windows began to dawn on me. To a developer used to centralised computing, with remote access through X Windows or terminal clients this was a considerable shock. However my first real Windows development project showed one of my most valuable character traits, I don’t give up easily! Without going into the gory details, here are some of the attributes of that first application, a system for capturing, storing, accessing and viewing large image collections:
In this article I use Open Source in its broadest sense, (i.e. not consistent with the specific licensing defined by opensource.org), but meaning my experience in using other peoples source or developing source for others to use. In particular I wanted to give examples of where the concept of Open Source had it been so visible then, would have suited some of my projects.
My computing true home has, and always will, be VMS. As a VMS systems integrator I learned rapidly to admire the power, elegance and consistency of the system, its ‘conceptual integrity’ if you will. It’s this history of VMS that made it so difficult to admire Unix, which by contrast has always seemed lacking in that same ‘conceptual integrity’, to stretch a point, always seeming to have been assembled rather than architected.
It’s also that history of VMS that first attracted me to Windows NT, (the development of VMS was led by a team from Digital who worked extensively on VMS). Having been repelled by DOS and Windows, I was excited by the prospect of NT but ended up being left gaping at the lost opportunity, (still not realised today). I was truly …