Category: Open Source

I was at Enterprise Java Australia’s annual get together a few weeks ago. The highlight for me was listening to Simon Phipps lucid telling of the open source strategy at Sun. It felt to me that the presentation we got was not too dissimilar to the one Phipps used at Sun. It starts with Bill… Continue reading The effects of Sun’s Open Source Strategy

New trends: Ruby books are now outselling Python and Perl books. But JavaScript books have increased the most and are outselling all of the other dynamic languages. Why? Tim thinks it is driven by interest in Ajax, which is the hottest thing right now. Time to get over my JavaScript hatred. IntelliJ helps with that… Continue reading OSCON2006: Tim O’Reilly Keynote – Open Source Trends

(Update: Wow I got a record number of comments to this blog. Answers to some common themes at the end of the post) Who are those who are benefiting from Ruby on Rails? Answer: O’Reilly Publishing, the authors Bruce Tate and Dave Thomas and a handful of consultants. At last year’s conference, Tim O’Reilly had… Continue reading Report from OSCON2006: The Ruby Conspiracy

I do not normally take to buzz words, hype and shiny new toys. These things usually annoy me. I do however think there is something to Web 2.0. I don’t want to go into what is meant by that here. See Tim O’Reilly’s landmark essay for a definition. If you look at the technologies that… Continue reading Going Web 2.0

Last year I attended a meeting of the ACM at HP in San Jose. The topic was the early history of computing. During the session the presenter touched on a patent court case for a patent on digital computing that had occurred in 1973. I was not exactly up with the latest tech news back… Continue reading A patent on digital computing

Something seems to be up with SourceForge. I have been using it heavily this week. CVS has been down three times for extended periods. The Admin web site has been down 4 times. This is seriously interrupting me! There are two possibilities: This is just a run of bad luck Sourceforge is underfunded To explore… Continue reading Whats up with SourceForge?

Linus Torvalds said right from the beginning “Release early, release often”. This seems to be a critical requirement for open source projects to attract collaborators. There is a whole chapter on this in The Cathedral & The Bazaar, the classic open source text. Having released ehcache-1.2beta3 with the distributed stuff in, some old collaborators and… Continue reading Release early, release often.

It is hard to work out exactly which browser market share statistic to pay attention to. The numbers vary depending on whether people mainly access from work and by region around the world, as well as the type of site. Be that as it may I think the trend line is interesting and perhaps more… Continue reading Relative Browser Market Share Trends

Pantip Plaza in Bangkok is the mecca for software pirates. It is 6 stories of booths, probably around 500 500 in total, selling up to the minute versions of software for 100 Baht (USD2.50) per CD or DVD. International travellers from all over the world flock there in droves. I was having money and financial… Continue reading The Sun and Moon: Thailand’s Suriyana and Chantra Open Source Windows Distributions

I have been aggravated and annoyed for some time by Google pretending that their use of open source software entitle them to say they contribute. My personal open source contributions rival their entire corporate contribution. Google have some great open source developers working for them – on closed source software. But Google do not contribute… Continue reading Seeing through Google’s nontributions