that’s whacked

better living through open source

Tuesday, Jan 15. 2008  –  Category: Linkage, OpenSource

i came across osliving a while ago (and actually emailed the author to see if Songbird could be listed), but hadn’t visited the site in a couple of months. i stumbled across it again yesterday, and wow - it looks great. his redesign is really nice… very nice clean simple layout, with immediate clear navigation and categorisation.

props to andrew on a site well done.

Closed processes and development in an open source world

Sunday, Nov 4. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

I just read an interesting article on Linux.com criticising two examples of poor showing in the open source world, one revolving around a KDE icon theme, and the other around GIMP’s UI team.

Certainly I see some parallels in any open source project, both OpenSolaris & Songbird included.

First: my opinions. You didn’t ask for them, but you’ll get them anyway. Blogs rule like that. For the two examples cited in the article, I actually have differing opinions.

For the icon example, I disagree with the Oxygen project and agree with the writer. The icon developers gave up any rights they had to restrict redistribution with their license they published under. The derivative theme was well within its rights to redistribute the Oxygen icons.

For the GIMP UI example, I actually agree with the GIMP UI team. I think they way in which they phrased it could have been better. Perhaps instead of “I am afraid that I do not have positions open at the moment.”, he could have expanded and invited the volunteer to submit his work for review and inclusion without necessarily being a part of the formal GIMP UI team. While some people may disagree with me, I think UI work benefits from having a core team of people with a shared set of goals and design aesthetic. Adding another team member could alter that dynamic and/or add more overhead to the team.

Anyway - these are pertinent issues to both communities in which I participate in. OpenSolaris perhaps more than Songbird - since Songbird has no internal/closed repositories of source. But one prime example of a project people complain about is installation, or packaging - and I know I’ll probably get heat for this, but I think doing closed development is not that bad. The packaging project took some heat for doing its initial prototyping and development (I know I had at least one debate with sch about it ;-)) between its team members before opening up and publishing its work. But given the conflict that can arise between people deriving work prematurely (e.g. the Oxygen case), or even just the issue of it being a design-in-progress (let alone a work-in-progress) means its often easier to be more agile and develop the core of the project between team members (whether that’s internal to Sun or involving external members).

Open source your work when you are ready - not when people ask you to

When you are ready for people to hack on your code, make derived works, and submit features and bugs - then you are ready for open source development. If you aren’t ready for those, then don’t. Open sourcing code isn’t free (assuming you care about your open source community - throwing code over the wall, as always, is cheap and easy - and you get what you pay for). If you want a thriving community then you have to be ready to spend time to cultivate it. If you’d rather be hacking on code to get something initially out - then you shouldn’t publish it initially.

theo’s response to the dual licensing gpl/bsd controversy

Saturday, Sep 1. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

it was interesting to read theo’s response. my first thought was “wow… he was totally not inflammatory and incensed”.

anyway, he had some interesting points - some of which we (OpenSolaris) might want to keep in mind as we think about future licensing directions.

more interestingly he drew the conclusion that the BSD community was (is?) at as much risk of being locked out of future changes by the GPL community as they are from the commercial/proprietary community (if not more).

link: dealing with upstream

Monday, Aug 20. 2007  –  Category: OpenSource

great article on arstechnica about how to deal with upstream dependencies. specifically they talk about KDE4.0, but the lessons seem useful and applicable to the generic case.

gplv2/cddl dual-licensing

Saturday, Aug 18. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

This should be implied as usual, but I’ll explicitly state it here: this is my personal opinion only, and isn’t reflective of any opinion of the OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board) nor of Sun.

Looks like the Netbeans project is thinking of going the dual license route, and licensing under both CDDL and GPLv2. Doing a Google search for ‘netbeans cddl gplv2′ pulls up quite a few blogs and responses from people who generally view it as favourable - but it’s not clear to me why.

A few posts cite that it will make Netbeans more “Linux-friendly”. I’m not sure how or why this perception is there. Are people looking to integrate Netbeans into the Linux kernel? Into Emacs? (Wouldn’t be surprised really..) There is nothing in the CDDL that prevents Netbeans from being distributed in Linux distributions, and as near as I can tell there is nothing in the GPLv2 that would prohibit distributions from bundling Netbeans. So is it really just people’s false perception that “anything not GPLv2 is bad”?

My (and many other people’s) worry with projects going down the dual licensing path is the danger of creating a fork…. how will patches and fixes be ported in the source base? What if someone forks a GPLv2 only Netbeans from which fixes can be sent back upstream into the CDDL Netbeans?

Do people (Sun?) think that more people will contribute to Netbeans now that it’s GPLv2? I would argue the contributor agreement requirement is more of a stumbling block than the license. If people are willing and sane enough to sign the SCA, then I would think they would be intelligent enough to understand the licenses under which their code would be distributed.

It just seems to me that people push Sun to hop on the dual-licensing with GPLv2/v3 wagon merely for the sake of publicity. I’ve yet to see compelling reasons to dual-license. Now switching entirely to a GPLv2/GPLv3 license is more compelling to me since it reduces the fork-dangers of having a dual licensed source base. If there is compelling code out there (Eclipse? I’m not sure how the mingling of GPL & EPL (Eclipse Public License, not the English Premier League) goes..) that is GPLv2 and Netbeans wanted to go the GPLv2 route to promote co-mingling and cross-pollination of code - then that’s one thing. That is a compelling technical reason for a license switch in my mind. (Likewise for OpenSolaris if it were to pursue the GPLv3 route).

open sourcey goodness

Thursday, Aug 16. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

check out sherry’s post on opensolaris-code earlier.

it’s nice to see the Sun/Intel collaboration thing paying off. corporations partner up all the time - but it’s never clear what the exact dividend of said partnership is. sometimes it’s obvious (Partner A bundles Partner B’s software, or Partner A uses Partner B’s hardware), but sometimes it isn’t, e.g. did Google & Sun’s agreement from almost 2 years ago have anything to do with last week’s announce that Google Pack was going to bundle StarOffice?

anyway, the putbacks Sherry mentions are pretty good indicators that the Sun/Intel partnership is paying off dividends already. my only regret is that we don’t have onnv-gate moved outside yet, and that OpenRTI[1] (to steal Rich’s name for it) doesn’t exist (yet).

[1] that would be the ‘open’ replacement for WebRTI (Sun’s Request-To-Integrate) tool, not the Australian Defence Force’s OpenRTI

OSCON 2007 wrapup

Monday, Jul 30. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

Wow, last week at OSCON was a blur. Between booth duty, the Sun party, and all the talking to people, I was thoroughly exhausted. I spent most of the weekend recovering from sleep deprivation.

anyway, all my photos are up. we had a great time, talked to a ton of people, and learned many important life lessons. one of which is:

Rearranging the letters of OpenSolaris spells ‘penis’.

java ain’t open source?

Monday, Mar 19. 2007  –  Category: OpenSource

you , my friend, are an idiot.

“I guess this shows my first point up as being a little inaccurate.”

Uh. No. My car coming with a 31mpg highway estimated mileage is a little inaccurate. You are a little inaccurate in the same way the Titanic’s calculations were a little inaccurate.

Update: I retract and apologise for my undeserved insult of Nick. My issue with his post still stands, but my name-calling was uncalled for. Leaving the original text (struckout) for posterity so all may view my immaturity ;-)…. (please see the comments below for more elaboration)

seoul photos, now with new and improved context

Friday, Nov 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

I finally got around to captioning and describing all my photos from my trip to Seoul for Tech Days from two weeks ago.

initial impressions and random ramblings

Saturday, Nov 4. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Travel

got in to the hotel last night @ around 20:30.

• stayed awake the entire flight (watched 4 movies, synced up the PG gate to snv50, live-upgraded to snv51, reinstalled frkit, and failed miserably to write better documentation on the Teamware->Mercurial bridge. note to all fr4k users: lugging 3 batteries in your carry-on is totally worth it)

• once i got to the hotel, i did some much-needed stretching/not-really-yoga (i say not-really-yoga, because i don’t think traditionally yoga is practiced while drinking beer) to get my back unkinked from the flight.

• paid the ridiculous 25,000 W/day (~$28 US) for Internet access (what a rip-off. i should see when dp/jimgris get here if we can get adjacent rooms and use my travel wireless router i brought).

• wandered into the COEX Mall late last night (~11pm?) to try and find some grub (of the edible kind, not the boot loader kind. wow. it was still pretty busy. ate some soba, and wandered through the arcade, where i had the following random three observations:

  • is it common for couples to wear matching or identical shirts/outfits?
  • girls play arcade games.
  • why is everyone so dressed up?

• i punched-in to Sun’s network, latency to sfbay is pretty reasonable… and was greeted by a flurry of messages through friday of various opensolaris.org machines being down, non-responsive, etc. etc. looks like i picked a good day to miss work

anyway. it’s 7:37am sunday morning here. i just had some great coffee at the breakfast buffet downstairs and i’m waiting for a friend to get here (who also happens to coincidentally be in Seoul this week) so we can go checkout the city.

i’m torn. should i go to the knife museum? or the kimchee museum? both are supposed to be wonderfully weird and wacky.