Blogging Roller

Turns out, one of the "other analysts" that Michael Signer spoke of was a blogger named James Governor. In the comments to my previous post, James writes:

"actually it was me. i got a quick email from Michael and gave him a rapid response. its pretty harsh to accuse him of making the idea up if he attributed it to an analyst. Basically i felt that you are doing good work with Roller, and engaging with Sun customers, but that Sun itself has said basically not much about the future of the product at all. Michael had heard a sniff of an open source splash and is looking for ideas. i have not got the inside skinny, but i could easily imagine Sun "packaging" the Roller and open source news, or changing the license. or something. Either that or open sourcing some other JES componentry. Feel free to set the record straight. What are Sun's plans for Roller?"

James, I assumed that he was making things up because he was so far off base. How could he not know that Roller is already open source? Development is done on a public CVS server, issue tracking is public, and discussions happen on public mailing lists, blogs, and the Roller wiki.

James asks that I "set the record straight" and "what are Sun's plans for Roller?" I'm not going to discuss Sun's future product plans or announcements, but my personal plan is to make Roller the best possible platform for blogging, collaboration, and community building. If you want to know how that plan is going, watch me work.

Sun Readies Open Code, Michael Singer: "Other analysts say Sun could also open source its enterprise blogging application, named Roller. While the platform began its life as an open source project, before Sun hired its founder David Johnson, the company has not given the software the full on corporate treatment since he joined."

I don't believe those "other analysts" actually exist, this guy is just talking out of his, uh, never mind. I guess I need to set the record straight. First, Roller is and has always been open source. The version of Roller we use at Sun is the same one that you can download from the Roller project site at Java.Net in either source code or binary form. Second, I'm not interested in the "full on corporate treatment" -- I'm a married man.

That is big news. I did not realize that LiveJournal.com, a blogging service with 5.5 million bloggers, is based on open source software. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Will SixApart work to foster the continued development of the open source LiveJournal software or will it instead focus harvesting paying users for it's TypePad service?

It's cold in Denver, but we're enjoying some local warming here in Raleigh. It's so warm, in fact, that the kids all wore shorts today to school. I'm working out on the porch today.

Casey Cameron explains the common pitfalls of JavaOne proposals. You have until January 31 to submit your proposal.

I spent most of the break working on the book and now it's time to get back to Roller. Bugs have been trickling in from blogs.sun.com. Plus, Matt and Rick over at Javalobby upgraded JRoller to Roller 1.0RC2 last week and that shook loose a couple of bugs. So, now there's a short list of bugs that should be fixed before Roller 1.0 final. Thanks to everybody who has helped out by reporting bugs.

This site is under what appears to be a DOS attack from 70.85.45.132. Of course, it could just be a script kiddie trying to write his first email address harvester. I've notified my ISP, his ISP, and added a quick and dirty IP ban filter.

Newsfeed search engines like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub make it easy to monitor blogs and news sites. You can subscribe to a search newsfeed to be alerted whenever a blog entry or news items matches your search criteria. But how do you monitor all of the wikis of the world? The newsfeed search engines don't monitor wiki recent changes newsfeeds, or do they? 

I googled and turned up some wiki pages on InterWikiSearchEnginesDiscussion and UnifiedRecentChanges.  Looks like there is plenty more work to be done in this area.