Blogging Roller

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

By my count that's how many Apache members work at Sun. I thought I had a complete count, but Nick Kew's recent post revealed a sixth (see the comments). Here's the list:

• Craig McClanahan
• Craig Russell
• Dave Johnson
• Jim Winstead
• Nick Kew
• Ted Leung

Know of any other Sun employees that are Apache members?

It's great to be welcoming new folks to Sun, especially when they're brilliant people like Ted Leung and Nick Kew, both of whom, by the way, are members of the Apache Software Foundation. I met Ted at ApacheCon US 2004 in Vegas and he answered all my questions about the implications of moving Roller to the ASF. And I met Nick at ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin and we chatted, over a couple of pints of Guiness, about the perils and pleasures of working from home and other things.

I'm also pretty damn pleased to be part of the MySQL welcoming committee, AKA the SunVisor program, and paired-up with Chuck Bell of MySQL. He's the author of Expert MySQL. I'll be answering his questions about Sun and, I hope, learning a thing or two about MySQL in the process.

Welcome to Sun guys!

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.

Kenai was announced yesterday at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS 2008):

It was mentioned in Software VP Rich Green's presentation.
I think that's just about all I can say on the topic.

And by the way, the audio and slides for all of the SAS 2008 presentations are online now. Ian Murdock's presentation is especially good, as Redmonk's James Governor tweeted yesterday "Ian Murdoch (the ian of debian) is doing a phenomenal job of explaining what Linux, and distributions are. A great education for analysts."

Here's a sampling of governance docs from some of Sun's many open source projects. I've listed them in order of what I feel to be, the most progressive (i.e. community governance) to least progressive (i.e. corporate control). I've also listed a key quote from each doc and made a brief comment about each.

• OpenSolaris governance: "The OpenSolaris Community has the authority and responsibility for all decisions" - seems to approach ASF style governance.


• OpenJDK interim governance: "The [board] shall be comprised of [5 and ] shall conduct its affairs in accordance with democratic principles and shall represent the interests of the Community. Two [members] shall be employees of Sun" - not final, but looking good.


• Netbeans governance: "In the case of an irresolvable dispute, there is a governance board of three people, who are appointed for six month terms." (2 appointed by community, 1 by Sun)." - sounds pretty good, but the doc seems a little vague.


• SunGrid governance: "The Board positions include the Community Leader, the Community Site Manager, and four general members, two Sun members and from the independent developer Community." - sounds good, again doc seems a little vague.


• Glassfish governance: "The GlassFish project has an overall Project Lead ... appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.


• OpenSSO governance (draft): "Project Managers make the final decision ... are appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.


• OpenDS governance: The OpenDS project has single, overall Project Lead [who is] appointed by Sun Microsystems." - Sun has final say.


• Mobile and embedded: "Sun may change its appointed Governance Board members at any time" - Sun has final say.

Looks to me like the trend is towards community governance and the most important projects are the ones getting the most attention and the most progressive governance. That's good and I sincerely hope the trend continues.

Tri-LUG announcement: Pat Patterson from Sun Microsystems will provide us with a developer perspective on digital identity, starting from the emergence of LDAP in the 90s, through single sign-on, SAML and the Liberty Alliance protocols to recent developments such as OpenID, Cardspace and OAuth. The emphasis will be on understanding the protocols and how they are implemented in the real world, with a particular focus on deciding which (if any!) approach to select for a given project.

Pat Patterson is a federation architect at Sun Microsystems, focusing on federation, identity-enabled Web services and OpenSSO, Sun's open-source implementation of those technologies. Pat's blog centers on identity-related topics.

Looks like a great talk and I've always wanted to meet SuperPat, so I'll be there.

Here are the details:

Speaker:   Pat Patterson
Title:     Digital Identity from LDAP to SAML and beyond
Date/time: 7PM Thursday Nov. 8, 2007
Location:  Red Hat HQ (map)
           1801 Varsity Drive
           Raleigh, North Carolina 27606
           Tel: +1-919-754-3700

Linda Skrocki: I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it's personal or not).

Todays news that Sun's stock ticker will change from SUNW to JAVA was met with pretty mixed reactions both inside and outside of Sun. On the day of the announcement, the more than 170 comments on Jonathan Schwartz's blog announcement were mostly negative and though there are some positive reactions in the interblogonet, they come mostly from Sun employees.

Below are the posts that I've seen in my feed reader so far.

• Barton George (Sun): "bold move"
• David Van Couvering (Sun): "Wow. Bold, audacious, wild."
• BlogBridge blog: "That’s good news for us" - reaction from a Java ISV
• Nick Wooler (Sun): "reinforces the brand"
• Jonathan Hawkins (Sun): "good idea"
• Bruce Hill (Sun): "certainly a cooler name"
• Glynn Foster (Sun): "massively supportive"
• Jason Beloro (Sun) "already a success"
• Fake Schwartz: "we're open sourcing the stock as well!"
• Marc Kossa (Sun): "I like it !"
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (Sun): "turning out to be a very good communication strategy"

• Evil Geir (ASF): "brilliant" (with extreme sarcasm)
• Geoff Arnold (formerly Sun): "This is simply silly"
• Sam Ruby (ASF): JCP (JCP with the C for Community crossed out)
• Shawn Ferry (Sun): "I preferred SUNW" via Twitter
• Dan Latcher (Sun): "don't see the point"
• Murphee's Rant: "Run for the hills, folks! "
• Dion Almer: "Oh momma"
• Paul Krill, InfoWorld: "likely to cause confusion"
• C. G. Walters: "army of hamsters" (sorry, that's my favorite part)
• Sanjiva Weerawarana (ASF): "incredibly bad idea"
• James Robertson: "dilutes Sun's brand"
• Daring Fireball: "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic"
• Catherine Helzerman: "Java isn’t just Sun"
• Tim Bray (Sun): "I hate it."

• James Gosling (Sun): "totally bizarre"
• James Duncan Davidson: "something not to be done lightly" (good story, don't miss it)
• Kevin Chu (Sun): "In light of our change..."
• Jim Jagielski : "The next several months will be very telling indeed."
• Garbage Collection blog (Sun): "Maybe it might work"
• Madhan Kumar Balasubramanian (Sun): "What is this?"
• C. Enrique Ortiz: "[Sun] is very committed to Java"

What do I think? I'm not sure what I think of the change. The ticker SUNW was out of date because "workstations" are so 80s man, so it's a good thing to update it. And Java ISVs like BlogBridge should like the vote of confidence in Java. On the negative side, it's easy to search for SUNW to get Sun news and that won't work as well with the new ticker. And Java's not all Sun does. One more point. I'm not sure most folks really care what the ticker name is. If they did, don't you think Sun would have changed it years ago?

By the way. I didn't mean the hit the post button on this entry so soon, but it's out there now so I might as well let it stand. I'll update over the next day or two as reactions roll in.

UPDATE: Ed Burnette has a positive, neutral, negative and funny breakdown of his 25 favorite comments from Jonathan's blog post. He says that "Stockholders and employees are among the most vocal critics." of the change.

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

Tim Bray: What’s more interesting is that we’re rolling out an OpenID provider at (last time I looked) openid.sun.com, but with a twist: You can’t get an OpenID there unless you’re a Sun employee, and if someone offers an OpenID whose URI is there, and it authenticates, you can be really sure that they’re a Sun employee. It doesn’t tell you their name or address or anything else; that’s up to the individual to provide (or not). The authentication relies on our Access Manager product, and it’s pretty strong; employees here have to use those crypto-magic SecureCard token generators for serious authentication, passwords aren’t good enough. 

As usual ApacheCon was a blast. I showed-up on Tuesday, made myself at home in the hackathon room and started reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. I arrived at the members reception a little late and missed the beer, but was not too late to meet Lars Trieloff of Mindquarry, a startup that's working on an interesting open source product suite that combines content management, task management and wiki functionality. Behind the scenes the product combines Subversion, Apache Jackrabbit and other open source products. Apparently everything is tied together via the Java Content Repository (JCR) API and that's why Lars is interested in the possibility of hooking Roller up with a JCR backend.

Talks began Wednesday and I sat in the business track for most of the day. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Hansen's talk Better than free: Strategic opportunities in open source and Bill Stoddards talk on Best Practices for Incorporating Open Source Code in Commercial Production. I also enjoyed Alexandru Popescu talk on Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit. I attended Stefano Machacci's excellent Community Building Practices talk again -- I think it should be required for all Apache contributors.

Thursday night was the Sun party at Lloyd Hotel, which was was quite successful. I had an interesting Roller-related chat with Paolo Castagna of HP, who is investigating new ways to integrate blogs, planets and wikis -- so we had a lot to talk about. I'm hoping he'll find that Roller is a good foundation for his work and encouraged him to collaborate with us via the Roller mailing lists. By the way, like Lars Trieloff, he is also interested in JCR as a back-end for blog/wiki data.

My talk Roller and blogs as a web development platform was scheduled for 10:30 Friday morning. It didn't go so well. Power went out at around 10AM and didn't come back until about 20 minutes into the talk. That left me a bit frazzled and feeling rushed, so I don't think I gave my best performance. If you'd like more information on the talk, you can find the outline here and the slides here (1.6MB PDF).

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!

Finally! Roller has graduated to become a top-level Apache project and we've shipped the long awaited Apache Roller 3.1 release. You can find the full announcement on the Roller mailing list and on the Roller project blog and our new top-level site at http://roller.apache.org.

We haven't released the standalone Roller-Planet application yet, but the .Sun Engineering team quietly deployed the latest bits at planet.sun.com a couple of weeks ago in response to requests from the Glassfish, SWDP and other teams for planet-style web sites. You can follow the links on the main page to find planets for Glassfish, SWDP, Sun India, Sun Alumni, Sun Java System Web Server, web services and globalization bloggers.

What's Roller-Planet? It's a community aggregation server, similar to Planet-Planet but with some key differences: it's got a web UI that enables groups of users to run their own planet sites, it's based on Java and it uses the ROME feed parser and fetcher. I've written about it before. We don't have a release plan yet for Roller-Planet so if you really want to try it you'll have to fetch and build it from the Apache Roller SVN repo.

I've really been enjoying Geertjan's blog recently. Lots of interesting details, screenshots and his passion for his work really comes through. His posts on the Netbeans Schliemann generic languages framework and today's Capturing Matisse make me want to drop everything and start hacking Netbeans. And I'm especially happy to see that somebody is interesting in Breathing Life Back into a Dead Coyote (part 1 and part 2), which is currently the main vehicle for Groovy language support in Netbeans -- I'd hate to see Groovy dropped in the mad rush to Ruby.

• ZDNet: GPL 3 isn't the 'last call'
  "here are some key changes in the latest GPL draft and how they're designed to target the Microsoft-Novell partnership"
• Allison Randal: GPLv3, Third Draft
  "I'm beginning to lose confidence in the FSF as the primary defender of free software principles"
• Simon Phipps, SunMink: GPLv3 Third Draft
  "All very interesting, I know there will be a lot of discussion about this inside Sun over the next few weeks."

• Slashdot | Linux Preinstalled Dell Available Soon
  in the comments: "So I'm wondering if this is an actual effort to offer Linux boxes or another PR stunt?"
• Ian Murdock: Making Solaris more like Linux
  "There is no reason we can't make Solaris look and feel more like Linux"

• InfoWorld: Dell division will design Web 2.0 datacenters
  "Dell hopes to sell the service to only the largest Web-based companies, the top dozen or two dozen hyper-scale datacenters of the business world"
• Sun HPC Watercooler: Rackable Clones Black Box
  "a 40-foot by 8-foot mobile data center with the capacity to hold up to 1,200 of company's rack-mount 1U (1.75-inch) servers"

• fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Blogging & RSS
  "I think personal blogging, even on corporate topics, tends to be more real and honest."
• fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Plans
  Plans include Blogging, RSS and aggregation
• BCOM 522: Corporate Blogs: Sun Corporate Blogs Case Study
  "blogs also give Sun engineers an outlet for showcasing and getting credit for the work they're doing"
• Discovering Identity: Treo Blogging Attempts
  Mark tried u*Blog, HBlogger, BlogPlanet, and mo:Blog -- "This little exercise has fallen way short of my expectations"

• Breathing Life into a Dead Coyote (Part 1)
  Geerjan works to bring the Coyote project back to life for Netbeans 6.0
• Southeast VC: Calling All Entrepreneurs
  "I still keep hearing from entrepreneurs that VCs are hard to reach"
• Ben Rockwood: Web 2.0 Mashup: Define it and win a prize
  "people like Tim Bray lay the foundations for greatness and people like Michael reap rewards not due to them"

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

Complete instructions for Running Roller Weblogger on Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 by Seema Alevoor and Marina Sum. Via The Aquarium.

James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the company’s announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. That’s now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.

I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.

Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.

A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.