Blogging Roller

Simon Phipps: Today in 2005 we've reached a milestone. Sun's stated direction is to use an open source model for all its software, and it's become necessary to have a formal co-ordination point for all this activity. So today Sun created a new "Open Source Office" (OSO) to act as the meeting-point for all its open source activities. It's not the first time we've had full-time staff devoted to the care and nurture of open source activity - my good friend Danese Cooper did this for several years before her recent job switch, for example - but having a cross-functional, cross-Sun Open Source Office with a Chief Open Source Officer at its helm is new. I'm thrilled to have the chance to play that role.

I'm thrilled too. Congrats Simon!

Rafe Colburn: I don't know about you, but I'm much more like to port my PHP applications to Ruby on Rails than my Java applications.

To me, Ruby is a lot like C#. Not in terms of syntax or language features, but as a pleasant improvement over what was there before. See, if I ever have to do any Windows programming again, I'll be thankful for C# and .Net. They're a great improvement over C++/MFC and Visual Basic. And likewise, if I ever have to work in the world of the scripty web P languages, I'll be thankful there's Ruby. It looks like an improvement as well. And like C#, Ruby looks pretty easy to learn.

Atom Publishing Format is now an official IETF standard. The only thing it lacks is an RFC number. Congrats to everybody who helped make this happen. Finally, we have a standard.