Blogging Roller

• OpenSolaris distributions show promise | eWeek
  "these distributions point to intriguing new directions for Solaris"
• New file system boosts the already excellent Solaris 10 | eWeek
  "One of the most impressive things about ZFS is how easy it is to use"
• Sun narrows loss significantly | InfoWorld
  "Stronger sales of its Solaris 10 operating system helped..."
  
  
• blojsom/Google Maps template mashup
  "You're looking at blog entries 'rendered' on a map of the earth"
  
  
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 1: Overview
  Overview of plans to transition Sun's portal server to an open source project at Java.Net
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 2: Portlet Repository
  Overview of Open Source Portlet Repo, which includes RSS feed viewing and blog editing portlets
  
  
• The dictator's free cookie day?
  Opening Move podcast with Simon Phipps, David Van Couvering and yours truly
  
  
• Wiley::Professional Apache Geronimo
  by Bruce "this one time, at band camp" Snyder, Jeff Gerender and Sing Li
• RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats
  Excerpts from Chapter 4 of RSS and Atom in Action, at WebReference.com

I'm finally back home after a week in Austin, TX attending ApacheCon during the weekdays and exploring the city with Andi over the weekend. I always find ApacheCon an enjoyable and very productive conference. Here are some highlights from my point of view.

Getting to know the Struts, MyFaces and Shale teams. I got to spend some time with the Struts, Shale and MyFaces folks at the hackathon and at the various parties. It's really cool how well the teams get along and even contribute to each other's projects, despite the fact that they're working on competing Java web application frameworks.

Don Brown's talk. Don gave a very professional and persuasive talk on Struts 2.0. His coverage of themes and plugins and the new tags convinced me that I've got to give Struts 2.0 a closer look before I go any farther with JSF.

Stefano Mazzocchi's talk on "patterns in community building for open development projects" drawn from his 9 years of involvement at the ASF was wonderful and full of lots of useful tips and memorable analogies. I'd read about the "good ideas and bad code" pattern before (here and here) and it was interesting to hear Stefano explain it himself.

Clifford Stoll put on quite a show in the opening keynote. He frantically raced and hopped around the room firing lasers through beam splitters and Crayola Markers at monkeys and actually measured the speed of light and the speed of sound right there in the room with amazing accuacy -- lots of thought provoking fun. He also stole Craig McClannahan's coffee, drank it up and claimed it was chocolate milk. Unfortunately, I missed the Benetech keynote.

The Sun UnBOF/open source smack down between Tom Marble and Gier Magnusson got off to a shaky start, but once other folks joined in it started to work, at least for me. It wasn't really a smackdown and there wasn't really a concrete outcome, but it was definitely an interesting discussion of open source community and licensing issues.

Getting to know my Sun co-workers. I work remotely, so I really enjoy spending time with Sun folks and getting to know my co-workers despite the fact  that they're from different areas of Sun. This time around, I spent time with the open source and Java DB teams.

I got together with Sun co-worker Tom Marble (and here) for dinner last night. We went to a nice Cuban restaurant called Cuba Libre only a short walk from the hotel. Shortly after we arrived, we just happened to run into Apache Harmony folks Geir Magnusson and Tim Ellison (from IBM Hursley). A little later Sara Dornsife showed up. We had a nice dinner and enjoyed the mojitos. If you know Tom and Gier, then you can probably guess the #1 topic of conversation. We talked about the pros and cons of various open source licenses for Java, the Linux ecosystem vs. the Java ecosystem, secret sauce and fair playing fields. All-and-all a very interesting conversation, but good grief, it's a complex issue -- I'm glad I'm not the one making that decision. 

I didn't bring my normal assortment of carry-on sauces, lotions, juices and pastes today so air travel was no problem at all. I made it to Austin and ApacheCon around two, checked in and made myself comfortable in the hackathon. Within minutes I was talking tech; bitching about my recent JSF experience with one of the MyFaces developers and discussing the upcoming Velocity release with members of the Velocity team. And hey look, there's the afternoon beer delivery. This is gonna be fun.

Tim Bray: I wonder if I’m weird, because I discover that my attitudes towards code and, non-code are different. The notion of restricting anyone from using code I contribute to feels entirely foreign, and if they want to use it to make some money, good on ’em. But I have strong negative feelings about other people making money from my words or pictures without involving me.

I don't think that's weird at all. I feel the same way and almost without thinking I chose the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license for my blog, but for my code I prefer the Apache license, which is just about the most commercial friendly license there is.

I agree with Mark Pilgrim that chosing a license with a no-commercial-use restriction is by definition more restrictive than chosing an open source license, but I wouldn't say it's overly restrictive. And I hold no grudge against Creative Commons. Writers, artists and musicians should be free to choose the license terms they like and that's why Creative Commons is a good thing -- it helps folks to do just that.

I'm glad to hear that Socialtext Open is now the first "commercial open source" wiki and I'm interested to see how the Socialtext move plays out. I do wonder why they choose MPL instead of CDDL, which is basically MPL plus bug fixes (see the summary of changes).

Tags: topic:[CDDL], topic:[Open Source], topic:[wiki]

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I've been thinking about doing the very same thing that Mark Pilgrim just did, switching from a Mac to a Linux laptop. I wasn't thinking about Freedom 0 so much as I was thinking about my lap and my wallet. I don't want to burn a hole in either one. I've read too many blog entries about Mac Books running too hot, too loud or not running at all. And all the while, I've been seeing rave reviews of Ubuntu everywhere I look.

I don't want to give up on Macs altogether. I like the multimedia stuff like iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand, but I don't necessarily need those on my laptop. I can buy a Mac Mini for that stuff. I use my laptop for work and everything I need for development would run just fine on Ubuntu or maybe even Solaris/x86 (see Sun's HCL and the one at Bolthole.com). What I need is speed, Java, Netbeans and sometimes Open Office (which I know will run better on Linux). Clearly I need to do some research. Are the Mac Books really too hot and flakey? Will be savings be significant? Will wifi and sleep-mode work as flawlessly on Linux as with Mac OS, what about Solaris? Will I be able to live without NetNewsWire?

ApacheCon.com blog: It’s only a few days left until June 6th, the deadline for the Early Bird Discount! Sign up today and save 220 EUR to be part of the ultimate Apache experience in Europe.

ApacheCon Europe 2006 will be held at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, June 26-30, 2006. The conference offers more than 70 top-quality sessions and 20 tutorials covering the whole spectrum of Apache projects and technologies.

We look forward to seeing you in Dublin.

It's been a while since my last status, CC:World post, so here's an update on the things I'm working on these days.

RSS and Atom in Action. Because I added those two new chapters on Windows RSS and ROME, Manning had to renumber about 3/4 of the book. That took a bit longer than expected, but now the work is done and I've got the whole book in one big PDF file. I'll do one final review this weekend and, if we can quickly wrap up the loose ends and the index, we'll be off to the printers before the end of June.

Blogapps is the Java.Net project that I started to manage and support the Java and C# example code for RSS and Atom in Action. Now that the book is essentially done, it's time for the Blogapps 1.0 release. I'll create a 1.0 branch so that I can do bug fix releases like 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. -- but the code in that 1.0 branch will always match the code in the book.

Once Atom protocol is complete, I'll make the changes necessary to support it in a separate branch of the Blogapps project, because those changes may diverge significantly from the code in the book. Perhaps I'll call that branch Blogapps 1.5 or even 2.0 depending on how different the new code is. After that, I hope to continune to improve the apps but making use of newer releases of ROME and perhaps Abdera.

Roller@Apache. Roller has been in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator for almost a year now. We've been in limbo because Roller depends on a 3rd party library (Hibernate) that is licensed under the LGPL and ASF doesn't like LGPL, but it's still not clear if that LGPL dependency will prevent Roller fom graduating from the incubator. Recently, our ASF mentors told us that we can temporarily depend on LGPL components, but we cannot ship them. So we removed Hibernate from the release, added instructions to the installation guide explaining how download Hibernate separately and, thanks to Craig Russell, we've got the beginnings of a plan to eventually replace Hibernate with either JDO or EJB3/JPA.

Apache Roller 2.3 (incubating). We've been trying to get the 2.3 release out for quite a while, ever since 2.2 in fact. Now that we've removed Hibernate from our release, we've been cleared to release 2.3 via Apache infrastructure (i.e. make the release files avialable on an apache.org site). That should happen very soon.

Apache Roller 3.0 (incubating). The 3.0 release isn't due for deployment or release until July, but this week I've been working like crazy to get the new Atlas frontpage stuff into a usable state so we can get some early feedback. Tomorrow is my self-imposed deadline and I'm just about ready to put together a test build.

ApacheCon EU 2006. I'm giving a talk titled Roller: an open source blog server, which is essentiually a primer for new Roller users and developers. It's the same talk I gave at ApacheCon US 2005, but I'm going to update it to cover the major changes in Roller since then (and fast, the slides were due last week).

Back in 2004 I linked to a blog post authored by JBoss exec Mark Fleury that called Red Hat "open source wannabes" and "girly men." According to my referrers, people are looking for that old post using those keywords. Apparently, they're not finding it because it's been removed (but not from the Google Cache Wayback Machine). I wonder why.

Ed Burnette: If you really want to ensure true freedom of your code, put it under the control of a Foundation like Apache or Eclipse. Foundations are not controlled by any one company so you can feel comfortable about being on a level playing field with your competitors.

Update: I've gotten a couple of backchannel comments about this post, so I should say that I don't necessarily agree with all quotes I post on my blog. I post quotes representing viewpoints that I find interesting and worthy of consideration.

I do agree with Ed that independent foundations are very important to open source, but I disagree or find fault in some of the rest of his post. For example, Ed seems to imply that GPL is used only by greedy companies. I don't agree with that sentiment at all. Ed also said that foundations can't be bought and (like James) I don't agree with that either. And finally, Ed groups Eclipse Foundation with the Apache Software Foundation and I don't think Eclipse is quite as independent as Apache (and how much does it cost to join Eclipse again?).

I've been exchanging emails with a developer who has integrated my old Relay-IRC chat client into his gaming web site. The guy doesn't understand the Mozilla Public License and I'm not sure I'm smart enough to explain it to him, but I tried just the same. Along the way, I came up with this.

Dave's dumbed-down explanation of open source licenses.

Here's what you're telling your downstream users when you pick one of the three levels of open source licenses:

• Level 1: Gimme credit (APL, BSD, MIT)
  You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me credit (actually, modern BSD doesn't even require credit).
  
• Level 2: Gimme fixes (MPL, CDDL, LGPL)
  You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me the source for any fixes you make to it.
  
• Level 3: Gimme it ALL! (GPL)
  You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me your entire product's  source code.

What do you think; is it too dumbed-down to be useful?

I'm definitely suffering from some ApacheCon-fatigue, a combination of information overload and lack of sleep. I just can't sleep past 6AM when I'm on the west coast, no matter how late I stay up. Oh well, today was the last day.

I only attended one talk this morning: Michael Radwin's HTTP Cache and Cache Busting for Content Publishers. I think I learned more Roller-relevant stuff from this talk than any other at the conference. After that, I spent the rest of the morning and lunch-time helping Craig Russell and Ian Kallen get their Roller development environments set up. As I mentioned yesterday, Craig wants to help create a JDO implementation of the Roller backend. Ian (who works for Technorati) wants to contribute to Roller in the areas of tagging and micro-formats.

In the afternoon I tuned in to the Ruby for Java Developers talk and Brian McAllister's Ruby on Rails talk. Brian's talk was my favorite of the two and I especially liked the way he illustrated the talk with screencasts (via Snapz Pro X). One of these days, I'll have some time to play with Ruby -- probably right around the time it's no longer cool with the shiny new object hipsters. After the Ruby talks, the conference ended with a key-note by Jaron Lanier. Jaron's talk was little too rambling for my taste, "mono-directional blabbing" he called it, but got a lot better when he started telling jokes and doing Al Sharpton and Steve Ballmer immitations.

That's all for my ApacheCon/US 2005 blogging. Thanks to the ApacheCon organizers and all Apache-folk for another great conference. I'm already trying to figure out how I can get myself to the next one.

Microsoft flexes more open-source muscle | CNET News.com: "FlexWiki is the third piece of Microsoft code that the company has released this year under an open-source license, all under the Common Public License (CPL). In April, Microsoft posted its Windows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge.net, following up a month later with the posting of the Windows Template Library (WTL) project."

Russell Beattie We need a license that says something like "I agree, by using this code, never to bug author with any questions, comments, thanks or support-related issues after TWO months of release date when said author has moved on to other more interesting things to work on."

Open source is not like a second unpaid job for me, as Russell suggested, because there is no real pressure for me to do anything. I could run off to the islands at any time and live off of coconut water and breadfruit if I wanted. Well, maybe not, but Roller is not the thing that is stopping me. Those questions, comments, thanks, and support issues are not irritants. They keep me interested. Still, I like Russell's OSS Prototype License idea. There is a place for that too.

Prompted by Dan Sickles' post on side projects and The Hacker Ethic (clearly a book which I need to add to my queue), Russell writes about balancing free-time tinkering and open source development with the other parts of life. I like this part:

<a href= "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20030105#125855">Russell Beattie: Like I've told my wife (and this is true) there's not a single technology that I've ever started messing around with in my spare time that I eventually didn't use for work or even to get a new job. Linux and Java for me were like that... I was doing M$ VB work until I decided one day to install a Linux box at home then started looking at Java as a way to program for it... the rest is history. All this mobile stuff that I'm obsessed about now is the same thing. Blogging too. Hopefully it'll come back around for me.