FLOSS Foundations

Capgemini promoting and using Drupal

2010-07-29T15:24:27+00:00

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

GNOME Census report released

2010-07-29T15:00:17+00:00

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Why the change of heart? My intention was never to make a fortune with the report, my main priority was covering my costs and time spent. And after 24 hours, I’ve achieved that. I have had several press requests for the full report, and requests from clients to be allowed to use the report both with press and with their clients.

This solution is the best for all involved, I think – I have covered my costs, the community (and everyone else) gets their hands on the report with analysis as soon as possible, and my clients are happy to have the report available under a license which allows them to use it freely.

You can download the full report now for free.

OSCON 2010

2010-07-28T23:40:59+00:00

It’s nearing the end of July, which means that OSCON has come and gone. Here are my observations on this year’s event.

Talks

As always, there are a huge number of talks at OSCON, and this year I found it particularly hard to choose between sessions, though in several cases, hallway track conversations ended up making those choices for me. There wasn’t a theme to my talk attending this year, because a lot of topics are relevant to the work that I am doing now.

I attended a talk about Face Recognition on the iPhone. Sadly this turned out to be very focused on setting up for and calling the OpenCV library and less about face recognition, UI, or integrating face recognition into applications. As I’ve written previously, I think that new interface modalities may be arriving along with new devices, so I was hoping for a bit more than I got.

Big Data is also a topic of interest for me, so I went to Hadoop, Pig, and Twitter, and Mahout: Mammoth Scale Machine Learning. Hadoop, Pig, and Mahout are all projects at Apache, and each of them have an important part to play in the emerging Big Data story. The sort of analytics that people will be using these technologies for are part of the reason that data is now the big area of concern when discussing lock in.

The open source guy in me likes the idea of WebM, but it looks to me like there’s quite a way to go before it will be replacing H.264. I was surprised that the speaker didn’t have a better answer than “our lawyers must have checked this when we acquired On2″. More than anything else, getting clarity on the patent provenance for VP8 is what would make me feel good about WebM.

Robert Lefkowitz (the r0ml), is always an entertaining and thought provoking speaker. His OSCON presentations are not to be missed. This year he gave two talks, and you can read some of my commentary in my twitter stream. Unfortunately, r0ml picked licensing as the topic of his second presentation, and his talk was interrupted by an ill-tempered and miffed free software enthusiast, thus proving r0ml’s earlier solution that open source conferences are really legal conferences.

I’ve been following / predicting the server side javascript space for several years now. One of the issues with that space is the whole event based programming model, which caused mortal Python programmers headaches when dealing with the Twisted Python framework. Erik Meijer’s group at Microsoft has been grabbing techniques from functional program to try to make the programming model a bit more sane. I had heard most of the content in his Reactive Extensions For JavaScript talk before, and I’m generally enthusiastic about the technology. The biggest problem that I have is that RxJS is not licensed under an open source license. At JSConf I was told that this is being worked on, so I dropped in for the second half of Erik’s talk hoping to hear an announcement about the licensing. It was OSCON after all, and the perfect place to make such an announcement, but no announcement was made. I hope that Microsoft won’t wait until next year’s OSCON to get this done.

This year there were two of the keynote presentations that made enough of an impression to write about. The first was Rob Pike’s keynote on Go, where he eloquently noted some of the problems with mainstream programming languages. There was no new information here, but I liked the approach that he took in his analysis. The second was Simon Wardley’s Situation Normal, Everything Must Change . Simon is an excellent presenter and full of insight. While his talk was ostensibly about cloud computing, I think it was a little deeper than that. His story about the cloud is the story about commoditization of technologies, and since one of the roles of open source is commoditization of technology, I felt that there was some nice insight there for those of us working in open source. Simon also discussed the mismatch between innovation and mature organizations, another issue that people in open source often run into. The video is already up on YouTube, so you can make your own assessment of the talk.

The size and breadth of OSCON gives it one of the richest hallway tracks of any conference. This year was no exception – the hallway track started on the train from Seattle to Portland, and extended all the way through the return train trip as well. I always look forward to these discussions and to connecting with old friends. One friend that I caught up with was Cliff Schmidt, now executive director of Literacy Bridge, which is working to make knowledge accessible to people in poor rural communities throughout the world via their Talking Book device. Cliff had one with him, and this was the first time I had seen one. Just in case you haven’t, here’s what they look like:

Languages

OSCON began as a language conference, and this year, there were two special events in that space, the Scala Summit and the Emerging Languages Camp.

I have followed the Scala community pretty closely, because they are quickly accumulating real-world experience with functional programming. There are lots of cool tricks that remind me of stuff that I played with when I was in graduate school, and there are lots of bright people. But there are some things that I find worrying. For example, one of the speakers was touting the fact that Scala’s type system is now Turing complete. If I’m using Scala, one reason is that I want my programs to type check at compile time. Having the type checker go off and fail to halt is not what I had in mind. I recognize that you’d have to write some gnarly type declarations for this to happen, but still.

This was the first year for Emerging Languages Camp, and from what I can tell it was a roaring success. I didn’t attend as many sessions as I would have liked. This was due to a combination of factors – other talks that I wanted to see, being the biggest. The other factor was that the first talk I attended was Rob Pike’s talk on Go, and the room was very full, which made it hard for me to concentrate (probably had more to do with me than the room). When I saw that all the talks were being recorded and that the video folks promised to have them up in 2-4 weeks, it made it seem less urgent to try to pop in and out and fight the crowd. Still, this is a sign of success, and I hope that the minimum, the Emerging Language Camp will be given a larger room next year. Part of me would like to see it be a completely separate event from OSCON, but that’s probably not realistic.

Of the talks that I was able to attend, I found the Caja and BitC talks to be the most relevant. Fixing Javascript to have security is important for both client and the burgeoning server applications of Javascript. I wish that I had seen the talk on Stratified Javascript, since concurrency is ever the hot topic these days. As far as BitC goes, we are well beyond the time when we should have had a safe systems programming language. As much as C has contributed to the world, we really need to move on.

What is OSCON for?

I had a few discussions along the lines of “What is OSCON for?”, and Tim Bray shared some thoughts in his OSCON wrap up. As I have written before, I think that open source has “won”, in the sense that we no longer need to prove that open source software is useful, or that the open source development process is viable. There are still questions about open source business models, but that’s a topic that I’m not as interested in these days. Open source having “won” doesn’t mean that our ideas have permeated the entire world of computing yet, so there is still a need for a venue to discuss these kinds of topics. OSCON is more than that, though. It’s also a place where hackers (in the good sense) have a chance to showcase their work, and to exchange ideas. In that sense, part of OSCON is like a computing focused eTech. Apparently O’Reilly is no longer running eTech, which is fine – the one time that I attended, I was underwhelmed. I think that perhaps what is happening in the Emerging Languages Camp might be an example of how things might move in the future.

Of course, there’s a larger question, which is why do we have conferences at all anymore? Many conferences now produce video content of the sessions. I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in having an event to do product launches or announcements. The big thing is the hallway track, which allows for realtime interchange of ideas and opinions, and in the case of open source, provides a dosage of high bandwidth, high touch interaction that helps keep the communities running smoothly. We’re in the 21st century now. Is there something better that we can do?

GNOME Census

2010-07-28T11:15:35+00:00

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why?

By looking at the modules in the GNOME 2.30 release, made last March, we aim to answer many of those questions, and give deeper insight into the motivations of participants in the project.

The GNOME heartbeat - pre-release peaks and GUADEC boosts

Here are our key findings:

GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Company	Commits	Percentage
Volunteer	101823	23.45
Unknown	73558	16.94
Red Hat	70790	16.30
Novell	45349	10.44
Collabora	21684	4.99
Intel	11160	2.57
Fluendo	10218	2.35
Lanedo	10090	2.32
Independent	8922	2.05
Sun	8862	2.04
Nokia	6183	1.42
Openismus	5303	1.22
Codethink	5276	1.21
Eazel	4734	1.09
Litl	4620	1.06
Canonical	4487	1.03
Movial	2988	0.69
Mandriva	2504	0.58
The Family International	2130	0.49
Entropy Wave	2056	0.47
(Academia)	1894	0.44
Mozilla Corporation	1040	0.24

One of the interesting things that we have done for the census is to look at who is maintaining modules by looking at commits over the past two years, and use this data to identify areas of the platform which see lots of collaboration, areas where the maintenance burden is left to volunteers, and areas where individual companies assume most of the maintenance burden.

There are a number of modules in the platform which see a considerable amount of co-opetition, including Evolution, Evolution Data Server, DBus and GStreamer. Most modules in the platform, however, are either maintained to a large extent by volunteer developers, or see the vast majority of their contributions from one company.

I see this information being useful for companies interested in using the GNOME platform for their products, companies seeking custom application development, potential large-scale customers of desktop Linux or customers buying high-level support who want to know who employs more module maintainers or committers to the project.

: The GNOME maintenance map, with modules coloured according to the company maintaining them

Update: Two significant omissions in the maintenance map were pointed out to me. After correctly associating a number of commiters to a company, Lanedo is responsible for 16.5% of the commits in GTK+ over the past two years, and volunteers are also responsible for at least 17%. Red Hat are still the largest contributor, with 32% of all commits to the module. libsoup is maintained by Dan Winship, who left Novell to join Red Hat in 2007, where he developed and maintains the module.

Update 2: As I announced in this post, the report is now available as a free download via neary-consulting.com licensed as Creative Commons by-sa 3.0

Brief Update — CEO Search

2010-07-27T18:00:38+00:00

A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.

First, there are a lot of exceptional people interested in Mozilla. Mozilla is in an exciting and challenging place. There’s a lot to do, the opportunities in front of us are immense, and the need for excellent leadership and execution is as great as it has ever been. Firefox on the desktop is strong and effective, we’re moving into the mobile space (Firefox Home for iPhone release this month, Firefox browser on Android phones coming later this year), Sync in Firefox 4 and related services in development. The Internet environment is changing, and Mozilla has a unique role.

Second, we know that a great CEO needs a combination of a bunch of different characteristics, such as:

great executive skills — able to cause us to get things done, to get the right things done, and to get them done effectively and efficiently
able to lead in a complex strategic environment
collaborative, good at making others better
great technology sense
and of course, phenomenally attuned to the nature of Mozilla — who we are, why we do things, the centrality of the mission and the community building it

We decided to start by getting to know people across a wide range of backgrounds skill sets. We’re fortunate that we have flexibility and aren’t pushed into making a hasty decision so we can do this. This means that our recruiters are talking to people with software backgrounds, Internet backgrounds, consumer backgrounds, open source backgrounds, platform backgrounds, engineering, strategy, start-up, big company and community backgrounds. The recruiters and John also spend a lot of time working together, and John has talked to a broad set of people as well.

A few people have been surprised that John is so central to this process. I think that’s because it’s a bit rare to let the world know what’s happening at this stage. Often the first hint is the announcement of a new CEO, or that the old CEO is gone. In our case John is still here, still deeply engaged day-to-day and still our CEO in fact as well as name. He’s also the person closest to the CEO role and so a really good source for the candidates and recruiters.

The next step in the transition process is to bring a much smaller number of people in to meet members of the MoCo Steering Committee — the management and leadership and strategy group for our product efforts, and if that goes well, to expand the number of people a candidate meets from there. We’re still in the very early stages of this part of the process. Members of the Steering Committee have met a handful of people and we expect to meet more in the coming weeks. So far this step has helped us figure out that a few candidates don’t fit, and some we’re quite eager to talk to more. It’s hard to predict what the right set of traits will turn out to be; the search is highly individualistic. John is fond of saying that he wouldn’t have looked like a particularly good candidate on paper either. That’s in part why we want to meet a wide variety of people.

Drupal trademark policy: update after 11 months

2010-07-26T13:53:48+00:00

The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.

Now one year later, there have been some interesting results from the trademark policy. So far, I have received 89 serious trademark queries. Twenty-three of these resulted in a license being granted because the requested use was intended completely to foster Drupal software. For example, there was a request for the name Drupal to be used in the title of a Drupal camp. There were other requests for the name to be include in non-commercial modules. These are all acceptable and good uses of the trademark.

In 32 other trademark usage requests, a formal license contract was required. Among the formal licenses, so far only four contracts have actually resulted in the payment of the administrative license fee. Although the fee is quite reasonable (i.e., 600 euros for clearly commercial use; 300 euros for mixed use), many correspondents ultimately changed their plan in order to avoid the administrative fee. In quite a few other cases where a formal contract was imposed but the intended use was clearly not commercial, no administrative fee was requested. These were typically requests from local Drupal groups.

Finally, there were several trademark usage requests that were rejected simply because they would endanger the level playing field due to their monopolizing nature. Examples of this include domain names like drupalhosting.xyz or drupalthemes.xyz.

I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it's the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the results so far. I've learned a great deal in the process, and, despite a few unsupportive comments from some, the reactions I have received overall have been positive. In fact, the most common reaction is that, although they understand why they need to pay the administrative fee and why they cannot use a monopolizing domain name, they cannot understand why numerous websites seem to get away with trademark infringements.

This reaction is understandable, of course. Remember, though, that the trademark policy is still quite new. I trust that most members of the Drupal community will comply voluntarily with the policy. So far there hasn't been a need to be a lot more vigorous in ensuring compliance with the trademark policy. There have only been a few difficult people or organizations that have attempted to infringe on the policy, requiring me to become more stern at times.

As expected when we first announced this policy, there were some comments on the actual content of the policy. My lawyers are now in the process of preparing a slightly updated version of the policy. So if you have any suggestions on improvements, please share them with us. For now, though, I'm quite pleased at the results of our first 11 months of having a trademark policy.

ICUC 2010

2010-07-23T18:50:53+00:00

Last weekend I attended the Internet Cowboy UnConference in Wyoming, organized by Yossi Vardi. It’s a collection of people hand-picked for some combination of technology or media or advertising or investment savvy and so it’s wildly eccentric. It’s an “unconference” meaning that rooms and times and projectors and organization are provided, but all content is created by the participants by adding your topic to the schedule, which is kept on erasable whiteboards. Since this is in Wyoming the mornings are optional outdoor activities, and the afternoons and evenings are “school.” It starts Thursday evening and goes through Monday morning, though I leave Sunday night because Monday is generally a busy day at Mozilla.

Some of the sessions are tightly related to the Internet, technology and media industries, and some wander wildly afield depending on who brings things — last year there was a fascinating video of a dance club and its members in Israel for example, plus some “let’s go do interesting photography” sessions. This year included Segway sessions, education for the modern world, the nature of conferences and events, and “21st century statecraft” in addition to the Internet-focused sessions. Plus an evening talent show, a gadget-a-thon and the local rodeo. It’s amazing what one learns about people while watching them paddle on a raft in (mild) white-water!

Last year there was a lot of erasing and rearranging and combining of topics, this year it seemed much less so to me. Last year I joined Don Levy of Sony and Rachel Masters in jointly hosting a session on creativity and synthesis — I even took a piece of in process fabric artwork with me since it had caused the topic to be top-of-mind for me. This year I didn’t expect to lead a session until I got there and a few people were disappointed.

I decided to host a session on a topic of interest to me where I’m still thinking things through. This leads to more of a discussion than a presentation, and allows me to learn at least as much as anyone else. I opted for what I called “Delivering the Internet Experience — browsers, “apps,” TV, the “web.” I wanted to explore the question of how we get the characteristics that have made the “web” so innovative and explosive as new use cases develop. The session turned out to fit in well with a few of the other sessions. We started with one on big trends — search, social, for example, what has made search so successful, how do the underlying concepts relate to today’s big trends. Then Jeff Pulver lead a session on the real-time web called “Connected Me.” Then my session, and then one on the ways in which “the titans” of different areas of the industry are likely to end up competing more and more with each other. It was a pretty interesting set of conversations. In part because a similar group of people self-selected to attend this arc and so we could push ideas around from different perspectives over the course of a few days.

A good part of the discussion about apps, browsers, the web was not surprising — local execution is fast, it’s easy to like the current “app” model as long as there’s only one platform, much harder if the Internet remains heterogeneous or new technologies/ platforms develop, web platform not (yet) as rich in accessing capabilities of the devices.

Much less crisp (and also more interesting to me) was the discussion about the traits of the web that we don’t have with the current app model, ranging from the ability of developers to reach a potential audience without centralized control to the ease with which one can move from consumption to creation on the web. We also talked a bit about how and where a human being has the ability to integrate, mange, filter, change and “own” his or her online life. To me, this is an often-hidden but essential aspect of a browser. The obvious part of a browser is that it delivers the web, and this is a massive task. The less obvious piece of the browser is its ability to give an individual the ability to integrate, manage, and change our experiences across the range of sites we visit and apps we use.

Thought-provoking and fun as well.

seasideOne

2010-07-23T13:27:38+00:00

Following on from the recent release of the Seaside release candidate for 3.0, a Squeak “One-Click” image has been put together to allow you to try out the new version with—er—one click!

The new image is based on Squeak 4.1, and launches fully configured with Seaside running with Comanche on port 8080, so you can immediately see the new improved Seaside welcome page at http://localhost:8080/, with links to documentation and the Seaside book.

Seaside’s 3.0 release is faster, cleaner, better tested and has many other changes and improvements over previous releases, so it’s well worth checking out this release candidate now.

Intermittent Gerv

2010-07-22T22:26:03+00:00

I will be around only very intermittently for at least the next six weeks, because I will be doing the following things:

Helping run a Christian kids camp on canal boats
Getting one of my kidneys pierced
Relaxing on my fiancée's family's holiday
Preparing to get married
Getting married
Going on honeymoon
Moving in to our new flat

So, if you are hoping for me to do something, please expect highly delayed service. We thank you for your patience. See you in September :-)

Drupal Gardens now in open beta

2010-07-22T18:09:16+00:00

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

It’s been fun to watch Drupal Gardens grow and mature during the private beta. In addition to building out the feature set, we’ve spent a great deal of time improving the stability and underlying performance of the service. And we’ve had a wild ride on Drupal 7 HEAD along the way, as Jacob Singh describes so colorfully:

Running from an Alpha versus HEAD is like the difference between playing Jenga on a sleeping elephant to playing Jenga on a cocaine addled elephant riding a skateboard being jabbed in the [rear] with a hot poker.

We’ve also invested plenty of time with Drupal Gardens users - gathering feedback, performing user tests, discussing potential features. One request that was added in the latest release is site duplication. This is the ability to clone an existing site, including its design, functionality, information architecture and content, to create a new site. It’s one of the first Enterprise Drupal Gardens features, enabling site builders and designers to do rapid prototyping in Drupal Gardens and roll out new sites quickly according to pre-defined templates. Site duplication will evolve into site and theme marketplaces where anyone can share site templates for use by others.

Drupal Gardens continues to advance with great strides. I encourage you to take Drupal Gardens for a test drive and to share your feedback with us.

Rotten to the (Open) Core?

2010-07-19T14:01:45+00:00

Open core, Open core, more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in.

When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the brand). I don’t actually care that much how SugarCRM, Jahia, Alfresco et al make the software they sell to their customers. As a customer I’m asking a whole different set of questions to “is this product open source?” I want to know how good the service and support is, how good the product is, and above all, does it solve the problem I have at a price point I’m comfortable with. The license doesn’t enter into consideration.

So if that’s the case (and I believe it is), why the fighting? Because of the Open Source brand, and all the warm-and-fuzzies that procures. “Open solutions” are the flavour of the decade, and as a small ISV building a global brand, being known as Open Source is a positive marketing attribute. The only problem is that the warm-and-fuzzies implied by Open source – freedom to change supplier or improve the software, freedom to try the software before purchasing, the existence of a diverse community of people with knowledge, skills and willingness to help a user in difficulty – don’s exist in the Open Core world. The problem is that for the most part, the Open Core which you can obtain under the OSI-approved license is not that useful.

Yesterday on Twitter, I said “Open Core is annoying because the “open core” bit is pretty much useless. It doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.”

Now, I wasn’t expecting this to be particularly controversial, but I got some push-back on this. Dan Fabulich replied “Ridiculous. Like the free version of MySQL is useless?” Which leads me to think of Inigo Montoya on the top of the Cliffs on MoherInsanity turning to Vizzini and saying “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

With all this talk of Open Core, clearly some confusion has crept in. Perhaps it’s on my part. So allow me to elaborate what I understand by “Open Core”.

First, companies can’t be Open Core. Products are Open Core. So whereas Monty considers that from 2006 on, MySQL was not an “Open Source company”, I would contend that MySQL Server has always been, and continues to be, Free Software, and an Open Source product. That is, not Open Core.

Open Core for me means you provide a free software product, improve it, and don’t release the improvements under the free software licence. In my mind, Mac OS X is not “Open Core” just because it’s based on the NetBSD kernel, it is proprietary software.

Perhaps it would be useful to give some examples of what is Open Core:

Jahia is Open Core – significant features and stabilisation work are present in the Enterprise Edition are not available at all in the Community Edition
SugarCRM is obviously Open Core. Key features related to reporting, workflow, administration and more are only present in the commercial editions
JasperSoft BI Suite is Open Core. Lots of useful features are only available to people buying the product.

The key here is that support contracts and extra features are only available if you also pay licensing fees. To take the oft-cited example of InnoDB hot back-up tool for MySQL, you can purchase this and use it with the GPL licensed MySQL Server.

This is why I say that Open Core products “don’t do exactly what it says on the tin” – the features you see advertised on the project’s website are not available to you along with software freedom.

I have talked to companies who deliberately avoid adding “spit & polish” to the community edition to encourage people to trade up for things like better documentation, attractive templates and easy installation – and don’t provide an easy way for the community edition users to share their own work. Other products have an open source engine that doesn’t do much except sit there, and all useful functionality is available as paid modules. Yes, a persistent, skilled, patient developer can take the Open Source version of the product and make it do something useful. For the most part, however, if you want to actually use the software without becoming an expert in its internals, you’ll need some of the commercial upgrades.

There is another name for this which is even more pejorative, Crippleware. Deliberately hobbled software. And that’s what I think gets people riled up – if you’re releasing something as free software, then there should at least be the pretence that you are giving the community the opportunity to fend for itself – even if that is by providing an “unofficial” git tree where the community can code up GPL features competing with your commercial offering, or a nice forum for people to share templates, themes and extensions and fend for themselves. But what gets people riled is hearing a company call themselves “an Open Source company” when most of the users of their “open source” product do not have software freedom. It’s disingenuous, and it is indeed brand dilution.

That said, let me repeat – I have no problem with companies doing this. I have no problem with them advertising their GPL-licensed stuff as Open Source. I would just like to see more of these companies providing a little bit of independence and autonomy to their user community. But then, that’s potentially not in their long-term interest – even if it is difficult to imagine a situation where the community-maintained version outstrips the “Enterprise” edition in features and stability.

Frequent/Intense Huh?

2010-07-16T05:10:16+00:00

Firefox Home for the iPhone is now out, which is cool. However, according to its page on the iTunes Store, it features:

    Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor
    Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
    Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes
    Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling
    Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
    Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity
    Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
    Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence

I don't quite know what our engineers were doing when they coded Firefox Home, but I'm pretty sure they didn't include any of those things. Although perhaps, for some people realising the number of tabs they have open on their desktop might promote Intense Horror/Fear.

Either someone checked or unchecked the wrong boxes here, or Apple has got thoroughly confused.

And for the person who reviewed it who was asking why they couldn't have full Firefox - ask Apple, dude. I'm sure we'd love to do it.

mykdavies

2010-07-15T16:34:21+00:00

Anyone with an interest in the continuing role and development of Smalltalk has had lots to chew on over the past few days.

As part of a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages, Computerworld Australia has published a conversation with Alan Kay about his role in the development of the “foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80″, Object-Oriented Programming, and modern software development.

InfoQ is running a series of interviews recorded at QCon London. One of these is a session with Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discussing the Future of OOP, including their take on what Smalltalk got wrong and right.

Finally, Gilad Bracha continues to lay out his vision for what he sees as Smalltalk’s successor, Newspeak. His latest post contains encouragement and advice for those interested in porting existing libraries and applications to Newspeak.

Spam in Discussion Forums

2010-07-15T00:31:26+00:00

We've recently had a problem with spam in the Mozilla discussion forums, coming in from Google Groups. Here's a document which outlines why this isn't entirely easy to solve, and suggests a way to deal with the problem. Comments welcomed.

Lock-In Milestone

2010-07-14T23:05:23+00:00

Wow. I have come across my first website (Quora) which I cannot create an account on without first having an account on one of a small set of other specific sites (in this case, you get a choice of Facebook or Twitter). If I'm on neither, I simply can't participate. It's that simple.

IOW, other companies are now driving Facebook and Twitter signups. Full control of Internet in 5, 4, 3...

Bugzilla API 0.6.1 Released

2010-07-13T23:41:27+00:00

Version 0.6.1 of the Bugzilla REST API has been released, and the main api-dev server should be back up and working fine. If it's not, let me know.

New In 0.6.1

Compatibility with Bugzilla 3.6. If you are using the 0.6 version against bugzilla.mozilla.org or another installation of Bugzilla 3.6, upgrade, because some of your calls may no longer work.

Compatibility Notes

Two things are still not working: JSONP, and the new_since parameter to the /comments call.
Version 0.5 is now no longer available on the api-dev server.

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">Feedback and discussion

BzAPI Unwell

2010-07-13T02:36:08+00:00

Some parts of the bugzilla.mozilla.org BzAPI are a little unwell at the moment, following the upgrade to 3.6. I have fixes in hand, and hope to ship a new, working version tomorrow.

cogs

2010-07-08T20:28:52+00:00

Eliot Miranda has announced that his new Cog VM is now available for download, bringing Just-In-Time compilation and massive speed-ups to Squeak and Pharo.

If you’ve been following Eliot’s blog, you’ll know that he’s been working on this new VM for quite a few months now; well, it’s now ready for public consumption, and it’s blisteringly fast: up to three times faster than the existing VMs.

The VM selectively re-compiles code to native (Intel) machine-code, based on the size and complexity of the methods, and how often they’re called. This means that the benefits of the new VM vary from task to task, but Andreas Raab estimates that you should expect a 2-3x performance improvement generally, “more towards 2x when running primitive and I/O-bound stuff; more towards 3x when running ‘pure’ Smalltalk code”.

Eliot is interested in hearing from developers on other platforms who want to port the new VM to those platforms. In the meantime, he has also released the “Stack VM”, a cross-platform interpreter that uses context-to-stack mapping to achieve more modest performance gains.

See Eliot’s original post and the following discussion for more details of the new VM, some notes of caution, and how to get your hands on it and use it.

Thanks to Eliot for this great piece of work, and to Teleplace who have funded this work (and have been using it for the past year), and have agreed to release the new VM’s under the MIT Licence.

Drupal 7, the cocoon and the butterfly

2010-07-08T10:29:09+00:00

There exists an interesting story about a man and a butterfly cocoon. It is about a man that found a cocoon, and brought it home to watch it turn into a butterfly. As the butterfly inside matured, it struggled to get out of its cocoon, but couldn't quite get free of it. One day, the man became tired of waiting and decided to help the butterfly. He removed the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly was pleased, but it had a swollen body and small, wrinkled wings. As a result, the butterfly never succeeded in flying and spent its entire life crawling around.

What the man didn't understand was that the struggle required for the butterfly to break out of its cocoon actually forced fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom. It is the struggle that causes the butterfly to develop its ability to fly.

I feel the same way about Drupal 7. Seeing Drupal 7 getting steadily closer to its release, is like watching a cocoon grow into a butterfly: the inevitable results are going to be spectacular. Release management and fixing bugs is hard work, the work of a determined caterpillar. However, I think Drupal 7 will be quite a metamorphosis relative to Drupal 6. Not only will it look different, it will function differently -- making users and developers feel like Drupal spouted wings.

And like the caterpillar that grew into a butterfly, it won't be the Drupal many of you used to know. It will be a nicer looking, more powerful, and more scalable Drupal that is easier to use. If you overlooked Drupal previously in favor of another system, you might want to revisit Drupal once Drupal 7 is released. I think you will be surprised at the difference. Or if you know someone that overlooked Drupal in the past, you might want to echo this story.

What I want for my website

2010-07-06T13:03:43+00:00

I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website's content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn't.

I want the software that runs my website to be stable, efficient at handling my website's traffic, and flexible. Good content management systems meet these requirements, but it took years to get where we are today, and we still have a really long way to go. Fortunately, all my websites run Drupal, so the first part of my requirements presents no problem. If you want, you can have a Drupal site too -- it's free! :)

I also want the website content to be of high-quality. That applies to both the quality of my own writing, as well as that of others that participate on my site. I believe this is a much more difficult problem to solve -- I'm interested in helping to solve it.

I'll be moving from an apartment to a house with a small yard, so last weekend we bought a hose to water the plants and the grass. Now that I'll have to get into gardening, it struck me that maintaining and improving the quality of my website is a bit like gardening too.

First and foremost, you have to keep the weeds out. In the world of websites, that means preventing spam comments and other unwanted posts. I never liked weeding -- as a kid, I had to help weed our garden. Collecting a bucket of weeds each vacation day was no fun. I don't like manually deleting spam comments either, so I addressed that with Mollom.

So far so good -- Drupal and Mollom make me a pretty happy camper as my two requirements are mostly met.

Just weeding your garden, though, doesn't make it beautiful or interesting. The same is true for websites. My favorite websites are those where the quality of the comments exceed the quality of the actual posts. I think there is much more that can be done to improve the quality of content on websites.

For example, I often wish I could tell people that their comments are poorly written or formatted before they even submitted it. It would be nice if more comments used proper capitalization and punctuation like we learned it in school. Or better yet, imagine having a service that estimates the added value of any new comment, or that somehow encourages thoughtfulness and constructive debate. I know I'm dreaming (and rambling a bit), but I also believe that these kind of tools are in our future for those that want them. They would be a natural addition to Mollom so maybe I'll be working on them myself, especially if people keep getting their capitalization and punctuation wrong. ;-)

Two hundred fifty million spam attempts blocked

2010-07-05T19:48:02+00:00

While many of you (in the United States, at least) were out enjoying 4th of July cookouts over a holiday weekend, our servers at Mollom remained hard at work. Around 10pm on Sunday evening, while fireworks colored the sky here in the US, Mollom blocked its 250,000,000th piece of spam. The timing couldn't have been better; it's almost as if the fireworks were also for us. ;-)

That is 250 million pieces of content Mollom prevented from cluttering up your sites, and 250 million times we saved administrators all across the web from laborious work in comment moderation queues. If it takes 10 seconds to delete a single spam comment, Mollom has saved site administrators almost 80 years of non-stop work. That has to be worth a few firecrackers at least!

GNOME Training confirmed!

2010-07-02T17:50:15+00:00

A few days ago, I took the risk of setting off alarm bells on the GNOME developer training sessions planned for GUADEC this year. It was a risk, and comments from the naysayers reminded me that it’s easier to do nothing than it is to take a risk. I’m happy to say that the risk paid off.

Thanks to all who spread the word, a couple of prospects I was aware of confirmed their presence on the course, and I received a new group booking. The training is now feasible, and we are confirming that it will happen. There is still room on the course, and I expect to sell a few more spots in the coming days.

I did get one interesting suggestion in a Twitter reply to the announcement, and I’ve adopted it. If you are interested in attending one or two of the modules (say, community processes and the GNOME platform overview, but not the practical session or Linux developer tools), you can do so for the much lower price of €400 per module and €750 for two modules, not including a GUADEC registration.

Anyone who would like to avail of this offer, please contact me, and we will take care of getting you signed up.

Thank you all for your help and support!

http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/06/28/gnome-developer-training-in-danger/

mykdavies

2010-07-02T14:51:42+00:00

Luc Fabresse invites all Smalltalkers to submit your Smalltalk based software to the 7th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the 18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted. Last year’s entries included student projects, one-man labours of love, and full commercial applications.

Don’t forget that early registrations for the conference are only open for another month. You can register at http://registration.esug.org/ (running on Seaside). This server comes with new features: you can now do a group registration and make a single payment; it also allows you to book and pay for reduction tickets (typically for Golden and Platinum sponsors).

The ESUG 2010 conference preliminary schedule is available at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010

Acquia Search: an update after one year

2010-07-02T14:47:50+00:00

About 20 months ago, at Acquia, we began working on a hosted offering for Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Exactly one year ago, we launched it commercially as Acquia Search. Time and the public reaction have proven that we made the right choice. In the past year, Apache Solr has received a tremendous amount of traction in the Drupal community. Most large sites launched recently use Apache Solr because it provides a faster, more scalable search solution, as well as improved search accuracy and more features than the built-in search features of Drupal's core.

If you want to install, run and maintain Apache Solr yourself -- assuming you have the resources required -- you can of course do so. However, many organizations lack the technical expertise to deploy, maintain and scale Java applications. Even if they do have the resources, it's often cheaper to use Acquia Search. Acquia Search has been part of our overall plan to sell simplicity and enhance the experience of using Drupal. Today, the majority of our customers that subscribe to the Acquia Network, which includes very large Drupal sites, actively use Acquia Search instead of maintaining their own or using Drupal core's built-in search. In the past three months we have handled about 20 million search requests on behalf of our customers. These are important proof-points of our strategy.

The growth in popularity of Apache Solr and the story of Acquia Search haven't finished, though. This week we released some excellent new features for Acquia Search which we believe will further help drive adoption of Apache Solr and Acquia Search. We added support for attachment indexing (e.g. search PDF and Word documents), multi-site search (i.e. search multiple Drupal sites at once), and other additions. For more details on this latest release of Acquia Search, check out Peter Wolanin's blog post on the subject. I think our customers will be quite pleased at the improvements we've made in this release. And if you're not using Apache Solr or Acquia Search, you should seriously consider implementing it. It's cool stuff. :-)

1000 Reported Bugzilla Installations

2010-07-02T13:16:58+00:00

I just added the 1000th entry to the Bugzilla Installation List. Almost all of that list (a few were originally found by web trawling) is made up of companies who took the time to get in touch with us and thank us for writing Bugzilla. Which is really encouraging. :-)

I prune the list every few months to remove dead links and defunct companies, but of course we can't tell if a company stops using Bugzilla and doesn't tell us. Then again, Max tells me that, from update pings, he can tell that there are at least ten times that number of active installations out there. So the figures have uncertainty in both directions.

Still, it's a pretty cool milestone.

Heathers

2010-07-02T09:46:16+00:00

No, not the film.

While I’ve been back in Ireland it’s been impossible to avoid “Discover Ireland” promoting the country as a tourist destination for locals, with ads backed by an infectiously catchy tune.

I’d never heard the group before, so I went hunting and found Heathers, an Irish duet of teenage girls who seem just a little shy, but when they start singing they belt it out. Very simple – guitar + +2 female voices, with an atypical sound and a heavy Irish accent. They’re pretty great. The joys of the interweb and youth who thinks differently about copyright – there is *lots* of live material from these girls on youtube. They’ve already been touring the US and I suspect that they will make a name for themselves. Well worth discovering.

N-VA using Drupal

2010-07-01T14:18:29+00:00

The New Flemish Alliance (Dutch: Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, abbreviated as N-VA) is using Drupal for their website: http://www.n-va.be. The N-VA is a Flemish political party. They became the largest party in both Flanders and Belgium in the 2010 federal elections a few weeks ago.

An Email Address Without A Domain Name?

2010-07-01T11:31:46+00:00

A few years ago, I was in China. A young Chinese girl started talking to me on the street (this was in broad daylight; her interest was entirely innocent). After a few minutes of conversation, she said "do you want my email address?" I said "sure", and she told me it was "somename030". This confused me. "somename030 at where?", I asked. But she genuinely didn't understand the question.

Even now, I don't know what she meant - but presumably there was one particularly popular email service in China that "everyone" used, such that in her circles, the culture was to not bother specifying the domain name.

What sort of lock-in does a provider of a service have, when the use of their service, rather than that of a rival, is assumed by everyone who is swapping identifiers? And is that a good thing?

So why is it that people are starting to just say "I'm @person", without noting that it's a Twitter name? Other services, such as identi.ca, use similar @names - but if we let Twitter own the namespace for personal identity in this way, I think there's a risk we'll end up reinforcing the network effects and perpetuating an unhelpful and un-open market dominance by a single provider. Which, IMO, is bad whoever that provider is.

So when you tell people who you are, please specify the service you are using :-)

Kidneying Around

2010-07-01T11:06:23+00:00

(Background reading all this is new to you.)

A few weeks ago I had one of my regular six-monthly CT scans. It showed that the metastases in my lungs have grown a bit each, although not a great deal (2.2 up to maybe 2.8cm across). However, it also showed up a 3-4cm lump in my left kidney which needed further analysis. I had an appointment this week about that. Basically, there are three options:

Metastasis (spread) of my existing cancer
Benign lump
New kidney cancer

3) is apparently very unlikely, both because of how it looks on the scan and because of how relatively slowly it's growing. So they want to do a biopsy to distinguish between 1) (leading to an operation) and 2) (which would require no operation).

If surgery is required, they hope to do a partial (rather than full) nephrectomy (kidney removal), and it'll probably be in September or October, after my wedding and honeymoon :-). The fact that a partial nephrectomy is possible is very encouraging, because it means if it turned up in the other one in a few years in the same way, I'd have two half-kidneys, rather than no kidneys! But I continue to be amazed by the carefully-designed redundancy in the human body.

Backseat spy mirror

2010-07-01T01:36:12+00:00

Have you seen this before? It's a built-in spy mirror to watch your kids on the backseat. Nifty.

OSGeo Presentation Video

2010-06-30T14:54:13+00:00

A few weeks back I put together a video presentation of OSGeo. Basically a slideshow with a voiceover. It was my very first attempt to have a 'virtual' presentation at an event that I couldn't travel to. I'm day dreaming of having an OSGeo promo video contest... anyone else interested?

Introducing OSGeo from Tyler Mitchell on Vimeo.

My presentation for the Quebec OSGeo Rendez-vous event.

GNOME Developer Training in danger

2010-06-28T18:01:37+00:00

The take-up on the GNOME Developer Training sessions at GUADEC (pdf brochure) has been below expectations. Without going into the details, we’re in a situation where running the training would cost the foundation and the organisers more money than canceling.

If we have not had a number of people sign up for the training by Wednesday evening, we will unfortunately be in the situation where we will have to cancel the session. The GUADEC organisers sign the final contracts with the university for room reservations on July 1st, and that will increase our costs substantially, so that is our deadline for viability.

I hesitated for a long time before writing this blog. It’s never nice to have to admit that something you thought was a good idea, that you put together and made a reality, might not work out.

Many people have, over the years, said that the lack of training options was a major flaw with GNOME. With this training offering, we gave people what they were asking for, with a two day training course plus the flagship GNOME conference for less than you would pay to attend another technical conference. If we cancel this training session, there will likely not be another. The credibility of the foundation (and, I suppose, my credibility) will take a hit.

I decided to let people know in advance that the session is likely to be canceled, to have a chance to stop that from happening. I have confidence that the GNOME community can come to the rescue here, in some sense.

I am sure that there is interest out there. Perhaps people have not yet gotten budget commitments to send developers along, but that they’re still working on it. Perhaps there are people who really should know about the training who don’t yet, because I haven’t managed to get in touch with them. Perhaps a couple of people were planning on signing up, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

If you are in one of these categories, please get in contact with me soon. If you know someone who would benefit from the training, please let them know, and point them to the brochure and web page. If I have a relatively small number of commitments to attend by Thursday, the training will go ahead.

Thanks everyone for your help and support – I will keep you posted to any new developments.

Little firefighter

2010-06-27T00:39:35+00:00

Google Docs OpenDocument Fail

2010-06-24T18:54:07+00:00

Would you believe Google Docs doesn't actually support ODF, at least for spreadsheets? According to some reports on the web, it only supports the older StarOffice format (despite having an option labelled "OpenDocument" on the export menu). Every time I try and upload an ODF document generated by OpenOffice 3, it fails with an unspecified error. So to get documents for local working before re-uploading them, I have to use XLS :-((

Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Barcelona Nov 3 – 5

2010-06-24T17:58:29+00:00

Mozilla has always been about building openness, participation and individual empowerment into the infrastructure of the Internet. Our products are very powerful ways of doing this.

Mozilla Drumbeat is a new initiative for people who want to use the open infrastructure of the Internet to bring openness, participation and individual empowerment to other aspects of online life. One such area is education and learning. We know that the Internet can make new types of learning possible. It’s also an area where individual empowerment makes a lot of sense – so many people are eager for education but don’t have good options within the existing systems.

Learning, Freedom and the Web is the theme for this year’s Drumbeat Festival, which will be held in Barcelona Nov 3 to 5. Take a look, and if you’re active in this area please do let us know.

Bugzilla Sweepstake: Entry Extended

2010-06-24T09:49:50+00:00

You know sometimes they say about a competition "due to unprecedented demand, we've extended the deadline for entering"? Well, you can read that two ways, can't you?

Due to unprecented demand, I am extending the deadline for the competition for guessing when bugzilla.mozilla.org will hit 600,000 bugs until next Tuesday, 29th June. Do check out the original announcement, and spend 30 seconds making a wild guess. You could win both the adulation of your colleagues and peers, and also (far less important) Mozilla merchandise - a bag and t-shirt for the winner, t-shirts for the next two runners-up.

Moving boxes

2010-06-22T02:23:03+00:00

links for 2010-06-18

2010-06-18T10:01:30+00:00

Lunchtime run 17/6/10

(tags: running training)

Etoys on iPad

2010-06-17T20:40:51+00:00

Bert Freudenberg has recently got Squeak working on the iPad, and has the video to prove it!

Bert’s work is based on John McIntosh‘s original port of the Squeak Virtual Machine to Apple’s touch-based OS, modified slightly to enable multi-touch and keyboard input. Bert also added multi-touch handling to Morphic. Interestingly, he notes that “Morphic was designed to handle multiple ‘hands’ (pointing devices) from the beginning”, so Squeak has always been multi-touch capable, and just let down by operating systems until now!

Bert’s work will help the Etoys team prepare their application for the next machine from OLPC, the XO-3, which will also be a touch device. The new version of the Sugar OS for the new device is still being developed, so it looks as though Etoys is well ahead of the curve.

Given the recent changes to Apple’s licence terms for iOS developers, it’s looking increasingly likely that we will see Squeak-based applications appearing for the iPad in the future. After a forty year wait, the Dynabook is nearly here!

Mollom protecting Drupal Gardens against spam

2010-06-17T13:05:01+00:00

Acquia recently wrapped up its latest internal development sprint. One new development that was announced is the fact that Drupal Gardens is now protected by Mollom's spam protection services.

What does this mean for Drupal Gardens users? Just what you'd think. You receive the best spam protection available on the web from Mollom. There is no setup, no hassle, and no cost.

What does this mean for developers? A great example of how to provide Mollom to your customers, in the form of the Mollom API module for Drupal. The Mollom API module was developed by Jacob Singh and Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia. The Mollom API module uses Mollom's Reseller API to automatically provision the service and to programmatically obtain public and private keys for each Drupal Gardens site.

Clickability FUD on Open Source versus SaaS

2010-06-17T10:12:53+00:00

Clickability, a proprietary SaaS platform for content management, has compared SaaS to Open Source. Not only is the comparison inaccurate, it omits the downsides of SaaS and frankly, they are comparing apples to oranges. Open Source is a licensing and development model, SaaS is a software delivery model. Either they are distorting things on purpose, or they don't understand Open Source at all. In other words, time to look at some good ol' FUD and to share my take on Open Source versus SaaS.

To give you a sample of their comparison, take Clickability's take on integration:

Screenshot taken from Clickability's SaaS vs Open Source comparison.

One of the biggest advantages of using Open Source software is that there are no limits on what services you are "allowed" to integrate it with. Given the number of sites that Drupal powers and the size and strength of the Drupal project, official integrations with other software and service vendors are abound for Drupal. If you need integration, for example, with a highly specialized, niche product or web service, it may already exist among the 6,000 contributed modules for Drupal. If it doesn't, you are free to create it yourself for Drupal. The same is true for other Open Source projects. Good luck getting that into the development cycle of a proprietary SaaS platform.

In many ways, Open Source is actually less risky than putting all your eggs in a single proprietary-software-basket. If you are unhappy with a particular Open Source company or service, you can take all the code and go to the next company.

Or take their section on hosting and performance:

Screenshot taken from Clickability's SaaS vs Open Source comparison.

I won't even begin to debunk what they write on hosting Open Source applications. Suffice to say that the great thing about FUD is that it validates our work in the Open Source community. They wouldn't have such a comparison page if they weren't worried about Open Source disrupting or slowing down their business.

My take on Open Source versus SaaS?

It is true that SaaS enables organizations to save money on hardware, configuration efforts and avoid hosting and maintenance hassles. However, proprietary SaaS vendors like Clickability need to ask themselves what happens when we start building SaaS solutions based on Open Source values. Open Source SaaS offerings, like Acquia's Drupal Gardens offer the convenience and support of SaaS multiplied by the benefits of Open Source.

Sabotage and free software

2010-06-16T10:50:49+00:00

Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and one article on “motivating saboteurs” caught my eye enough to share:

Personal Motives

The ordinary citizen very probably has no immediate personal motive for committing simple sabotage. Instead, he must be made to anticipate indirect personal gain, such as might come with enemy evacuation or destruction of the ruling government group. Gains should be stated as specifically as possible for the area addressed: simple sabotage will hasten the day when Commissioner X and his deputies Y and Z will be thrown out, when particularly obnoxious decrees and restrictions will be abolished, when food will arrive, and so on. Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.

Since the effect of his own acts is limited, the saboteur may become discouraged unless he feels that he is a member of a large, though unseen, group of saboteurs operating against the enemy or the government of his own country and elsewhere. This can be conveyed indirectly: suggestions which he reads and hears can include observations that a particular technique has been successful in this or that district. Even if the technique is not applicable to his surroundings, another’s success will encourage him to attempt similar acts. It also can be conveyed directly: statements praising the effectiveness of simple sabotage can be contrived which will be published by white radio, freedom stations, and the subversive press. Estimates of the proportion of the population engaged in sabotage can be disseminated. Instances of successful sabotage already are being broadcast by white radio and freedom stations, and this should be continued and expanded where compatible with security.

More important than (a) or (b) would be to create a situation in which the citizen-saboteur acquires a sense of responsibility and begins to educate others in simple sabotage.

Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Trying to convince people that free software is good for them because of the freedom doesn’t work directly – you need to tie the values of that freedom to something which is useful to them on a personal level.

“You get security fixes better because people can read the code”, “You have a wide range of support options for Linux because it’s free software and anyone can understand it”, “Sun may have been bought by Oracle, but you can continue to use the same products because anyone can modify the code, so others have taken up the maintenance, support and development burden”, and so on.

Providing (custom tailored) concrete benefits, which comes from freedom is the way to motivate people to value that freedom.

In addition, the point on motivation struck a cord – you need to make people feel like they belong, that their work means something, that they’re not alone and their effort counts, or they will become discouraged. A major job in any project is to make everyone feel like they’re driving towards a goal they have personally bought into.

Finally, you will only have succeeded when you have sufficiently empowered a saboteur to the point where they become an advocate themselves, and start training others in the fine arts – and this is a major challenge for free software projects too, where we often see people with willingness to do stuff, and have some difficulty getting them to the point where they have assimilated the project culture and are recruiting and empowering new contributors.

For those who haven’t read it yet, the document is well worth a look, especially the section on “General Interference with Organisations and Production”, which reads like a litany of common anti-patterns present in most large organisations; and if you never knew how to start a fire in a warehouse using a slow fuse made out of rope and grease, here’s your chance to find out.

wiki.mozilla.org Search

2010-06-15T14:15:58+00:00

For a while now, I've thought that the search on wiki.mozilla.org sucked. But it could be that it doesn't suck nearly as hard as I thought, because I went to my Preferences page, on the Search tab, and noticed that large sections of the wiki were not being searched by default. Which might explain why I wasn't finding things.

So if you have had a similar experience, you should check and see whether this might be the solution.

THBAPSA.

@font-face Generator

2010-06-15T13:56:32+00:00

Want to use decent fonts on the web but worried about cross-browser support or large TTF files?

Enter the FontSquirrel @font-face Generator. You can upload a font, subset it and then get it back as a handy ZIP file containing all of the different formats that different browsers support (EOT, TTF, WOF, SVG). It even gives you the right CSS to include it in your page.

Another option is the Google Font Directory, which seems to be eating some of Typekit's lunch (although the site says that they are working with Typekit).

Varnish using Drupal

2010-06-11T16:57:14+00:00

We all know that Drupal can work with Varnish, a HTTP accelerator that caches pages in virtual memory. Well, now Varnish uses Drupal too! Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish, just relaunched its site using Pressflow, a Drupal distribution with performance and scalability improvements. The site was built by Kodamera.

Last chance for early bird rate for GNOME training

2010-06-11T15:40:23+00:00

Registration for the GNOME Developer Training courses at GUADEC is still open on the GUADEC registration site – and the early bird rate of €1200 is available for all orders received until next Tuesday June 15th. So if you’ve been hesitating or delaying signing up, the time is now!

As a reminder of what’s included in the package, you will get lunch and refreshments both days of the training course, a full professional registration to GUADEC worth €250, and printed materials related to the course to take home with you and spread the knowledge, and two full days of intense Lunix development training with a focus on GNOME. There are four half-day modules, covering Linux development, testing and debugging tools, the social side of contributing to free software projects, an overview of the GNOME and freedesktop.org platform and a hands-on workshop where you get to put what you learn into practice.

this will be a great opportunity to give a boost to your entire team by learning developer tips & tricks on being a productive Linux developer, learning tools and tips to improve performance and memory usage of your applications, and how to get your code upstream more efficiently & reduce maintenance costs.

Registration is open, and we still have a few places left!

Leffe using Drupal

2010-06-11T11:03:50+00:00

Leffe, one of my favorite Belgian abbey beers, is now using Drupal for their main website: http://leffe.com. Cheers to that!

squeakvjava

2010-06-11T10:25:42+00:00

Joachim Geidel has published a preview release of JNIPort, a Smalltalk library which allows Java code to be invoked from Smalltalk. It acts as a bridge between the world of Smalltalk objects and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) where Java code is executing.

The port to Pharo and Squeak is not yet finished: it lacks support for callbacks from Java to Smalltalk, and is a work in progress. Joachim is particularly interested in feedback from Squeak 4.1 users.

JNIPort was originally written by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk and published under a liberal licence which permits its use in commercial and non-commercial software. Joachim Geidel originally ported JNIPort to VisualWorks in 2006 and is now building on that work to make it available to Pharo and Squeak. The goal is to publish a stable release for VisualWorks, Pharo and Squeak in Q3/2010.

In addition to giving Smalltalk programs access to Java libraries and services, the interactivity of Smalltalk makes it an ideal environment to experiment and prototype new Java functionality.

Once it’s installed, calling some Java can be as simple as three lines in your workspace:
jvm := JVM current. class := jvm findClass: #’java.lang.System’. class currentTimeMillis_null

Installation instructions documentation and much more information are on the JNIPort Wiki.

Bugzilla 600,000 Bug Sweepstake

2010-06-11T09:35:56+00:00

It's that time again! :-) The bugzilla.mozilla.org bug database will soon hit another major milestone and again, as is traditional, I'm running a sweepstake on exactly when that will be. You can win Mozilla gear! There will be a backpack and t-shirt for the winner, and a t-shirt for 2nd and 3rd.

So please email me using this link, filling in the date and time you think bug 600,000 will be filed. As the link suggests, your entry should be on the first line of your email, and formatted as follows:

2010-09-08 06:54:32 bugzilla-id@example.com

All times are in ZST ('Zilla Standard Time, a.k.a. Pacific Time, as displayed in Bugzilla timestamps), and the email address must be your Bugzilla ID. If you prefer to be contacted on a different address, add that as well, on the end of the same line in brackets. We have ample graphs and charts (requires editbugs) to help you with your assessment. But if you can't be bothered to do any research and analysis, just guess optimistically and hope! Hey, it worked for BP...

This is a Mozilla community event. To keep it that way, entrants must have a Bugzilla account on bugzilla.mozilla.org created before the end of May 2010, and which has done something useful in the past six months. I'll check those who are closest, and keep discarding entries until I find one which meets these criteria. Therefore, there's no point posting this to Slashdot or any other non-Mozilla-focussed news source.

The judge's decision is final, and any funny business regarding the filing of bugs on or around the 600,000 mark will be frowned upon. The closing date for entries is midday ZST on Tuesday 22nd June 2010.

The winner and two runners-up will get some merchandise from the Mozilla store. We currently plan to give the winner a Firefox backpack. 2nd and 3rd will get their choice of t-shirt from the Mozilla store.

MPL Update: New Changes For Review

2010-06-11T09:19:45+00:00

We've published the first draft of our proposed changes to sections 2 and 3 of the MPL.

In particular, in what I'm sure will be a popular move, we've revised and simplified the notification and documentation requirements in section 3 (the part responsible for the boilerplate headers in every file).

We are very interested in feedback! Please do read and comment in the commenting tool.

South African Government using Drupal

2010-06-10T10:50:19+00:00

The South African Government is using Drupal for their official 2010 FIFA World Cup website at http://www.sa2010.gov.za. With the start of the 2010 World Cup just hours away, this is a timely discovery and a nice win for Drupal. The site was built by eConsultant. (Hat tip: Usamah)

My first paycheck

2010-06-09T19:46:56+00:00

One of the fun things about moving is that you get to go through a lot of your old stuff. It floods your mind and heart with memories of the past.

For example, I found this old paycheck from 1997 when I was 19 years old. I was working part-time for a Belgian internet service provider called Planet Internet to help support my way through college.

As you can see from the picture above, I was making 296 BEF/hour, which in today's world is 7.4 EUR/hour or 8.8 USD/hour. The best part of the job was the free flat-fee internet subscription which would otherwise have cost me 300 EUR/year (or 360 USD/year).

When I joined, Planet Internet was still a relatively small start-up, and I was part of a 5-person team that did both technical support and telemarketing. When I left a few years later, they had over 50 people in support and telemarketing alone. Ironically, more than ten years later, I have my own fast-growing start-up selling technical support through inbound sales and marketing ...

(Strictly speaking, it wasn't my first paycheck as in high school, I worked at the grill of a Quick, a fast food restaurant similar to McDonald.)

0x1F631 FACE SCREAMING IN FEAR

2010-06-08T11:07:15+00:00

Yet more evidence that a whitelist approach to IDN ("you can only use these characters") is much to be preferred by registries to a blacklist approach ("you can use any character except these few").

...
1F648		SEE-NO-EVIL MONKEY
1F649		HEAR-NO-EVIL MONKEY
1F64A		SPEAK-NO-EVIL MONKEY
...

Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop: London

2010-06-07T16:53:46+00:00

The MAOW is coming to London! It's happening on the evening of Wednesday 30th June, and I'm so keen to be there I rearranged a flight to the Mozilla Summit. If you are based in the South-East and already build or are interested in building add-ons, register and then come and hang out with us.

The venue is "The Hub", a co-working space near King's Cross station.

Wordpress.com: Free Video Only

2010-06-07T16:45:19+00:00

If your blog is powered by wordpress.com, and you have the VideoPress upgrade, you can now select "free formats only" and have it only use HTML5 Ogg/Theora/Vorbis video. WebM support coming soon :-)

Thanks are due to Wordpress for supporting people who wish to choose free formats.

First birthday Stan

2010-06-07T10:26:48+00:00

Happy first birthday, Stan!

Bath time

2010-06-05T20:01:18+00:00

Simple Scan

2010-06-05T09:38:30+00:00

A word of praise for "Simple Scan", the new scanning app in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. Turn on your scanner, start the application, press "Scan", watch the image appear before your eyes, drag some borders to crop, and press "Save". It's that simple. Great work.

Even more noteworthy: the interface they implemented is even simpler than the one in the spec, which is still option-heavy. Most commonly, when you try and implement a UI it ends up more complicated than the spec due to unforeseen edge cases.

Micro Lightning Talks: Things Mozilla Developers Need To Know

2010-06-04T16:57:44+00:00

I hope to present a set of Micro Lightning Talks at the upcoming Mozilla Summit, called "Things Mozilla Developers Need To Know". Micro Lightning Talks (which I just invented) are one or two sentences - one of instruction and one optional additional sentence of rationale - so a lot of them can fit into a conventional "long" lightning talk. The sentences have a common theme, in this case our development process.

So each Micro Lightning Talk tells people, in one or two sentences, something that it would be good if everyone on the Mozilla project knew, and why - either because it would make their own lives easier, or because it would make someone else's life easier! Here are some examples:

When creating new tri-licensed files, you should use the boilerplate linked from the mozilla.org/MPL rather than copy-pasting from an existing file. This is so the formatting is right for automated tools.
When you change the meaning of a string in a DTD or .properties file, you must also change its name. Otherwise, localizers won't know to re-localize it.

You need let the licensing team know before importing third party code into the tree. This is so we can meet our licensing obligations.

If your life would be made easier if everyone in the project knew a very simple Mozilla-development-related thing, then please post your ideas here, in one or two sentences - one of instruction and possibly one of rationale. I will consider all submissions :-)

iPhone.next?

2010-06-04T15:52:36+00:00

Apple’s WWDC is next week, and I’ll be attending for the first time. There’s a lot of speculation swirling around the next iPhone, especially given the prototype obtained by Gizmodo. As I wrote previously, having an iPad has definitely cut into my iPhone use, and at the same time has raised the bar on my expectations for my next phone, iPhone or otherwise.

iPhone

I am using a 3G iPhone now, and I’m not having the best user experience at the moment. There are lots of lags and stutters at inopportune moments, both in the user interface and in the performance of AT&T’s 3G network. I’ve grown used to the briskness of the iPad, and I expect that on my phone now. Apple has set their own bar here. So getting me to iPad level responsiveness is job one. Job two is to get me decent battery life. My iPad lasts way longer than my iPhone. I understand why, but I don’t like it. I really, really want to be able to use my phone without redlining it every day. The last of the big items has to do with AT&T or a rumored second carrier. I want to be able to rely on the phone for accessing data. Right now it’s not as reliable as it needs to be, and I think that everyone knows that. It’s not at all clear to me that a second carrier will do any better, because I doubt that they are prepared for the level of traffic that is coming their way once they get the iPhone. Sprint and Verizon crumbled at Google IO, so let’s not kid ourselves that the other carriers are going to magically fix things. But maybe if a bunch of people jump ship to another carrier, things will get better on AT&T.

There are some secondary issues: 16GB has turned out to be less space than I anticipated, but since the 3GS already comes in a 32GB size, I expect the next generation to come in at 64GB, although I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t. I expect there to be camera upgrades, and I am pretty sure that I’ll be happy with what happens there. The real trick in cameras is the lenses not the megapixels, and all camera phones are on the same footing there.

This time around, there’s a “but”.

Android

After the Android 2.2 (Froyo) announcements, I am considering an Android phone as my next phone. There’s no question that today, the iPhone user interface is more highly developed, polished and intuitive than Android. At the moment fragmentation of the Android platform is a reality, despite Google’s assurances that this will get cleaned up in the future. There are numerous good apps in the Android Marketplace, but some of the applications that I use the most are not there, because they are the iPhone counterparts of Mac desktop applications. That’s a fairly large problem. These are all good reasons to stick with the iPhone.

There are two big reasons that I am looking more closely at Android. The first is that Android has much much better “integration with the cloud”. One of the biggest annoyances that I have with my iPad is the hassle of moving PDF ebook files from my Macintosh to the iPad. I shouldn’t have to use a cord, and I shouldn’t have to use iTunes. 1Password can implement wireless syncing to the iPad and iPhone, why won’t Apple? The second and more important reason is that I like what I see in some of the directions that Google is taking the user interface. Specifically, I’m talking about use use of voice and (possibly) the use of computer vision as demonstrated in Google Goggles. The iPhone, and more recently, the iPad have done something very interesting with multitouch/gestural interfaces. If you subscribe to the theory that science fiction influence science fact, then we could look at Iron Man 2 for some examples of future interfaces. Tony Stark interacts with his computer via a combination of gestures and voice commands, and from the content of the voice commands, it is clear that the computer is employing something like vision in order to resolve references in Stark’s words. As great as Apple’s advances in multitouch have been, they have done very little in terms of voice. Perhaps their acquisition of Siri is a step in that direction, but Apple’s famed secrecy makes it hard to know. The same is true in vision, except that Apple has made no such acquisition. There’s quite some distance to go before Android’s speech and vision could bring about a multimodal interface like the one in Iron Man, but at least I can see the signs that Google is going that direction. Of course, I could just wait it out on a few more generations of iPhone while Google engineers work all these issues out, but I see signs of Google acting like a leader instead of a catch up player, and I like that.

What about Apple’s recent behavior with regard to languages other than Objective-C? Yes, I am bothered by it, but it’s not as big an issue to me as working well in an internet centric world, or working towards a much more multimodal user interface. Nobody is leaving the web platform because they are unable to write in-browser applications in their favorite language, and lots of people are delivering all kinds of interesting stuff in that space. More choice would definitely be nice, but if choice or freedom are your high order bit, that’s what Android is for.

If nothing else, I think it’s a good sign that there are two mobile platforms good enough to put me in this conundrum.