Surfin’ Safari: “As some of you may have heard at WWDC Monday, the Safari team is proud to announce that we are making significant changes in the way we operate, and these changes start today.”
Archive for the 'opensource' Category
After yesterday’s announcement, things are going really smooth. We added a bunch of projects and had some external submissions as well. I’d just like to invite people to be accurate when submitting a new item: Java is not the same as C++ and please write down a brief description for each new item. Copying an excerpt from a project’s website is OK, as long as you link to it.
If you don’t feel like contributing, please link to it. We badly need some traffic to test how it all behaves under stress.
We also released a couple bugfixes, but overall the application is behaving surprisingly well. Having few bugs to fix means I’ll have more time to develop new features or polish the UI.
See you on The Open Source Zone!
Sporting a new name and a new domain, The Open Source Zone (the website formerly known as Source.zone) is officially starting today its beta testing period.
Quoting from the home page:
The Open Source Zone’s aim is to create a storefront for access to Open Source projects. The storefront will have the same level of participation that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback in form of reviews, ratings, comments, developers who liked this project also liked this other one.
In the coming days, most of the work will consist of adding more content (which is sorely lacking) and fixing the (hopefully few) bugs that will pop up.
If you feel like contributing, the site is open in pure wiki style: no registration and no email confirmation. Just click on Add new project or contribute a review.
After Gosling, here’s another outsider who seems to have a strange opinion of Open Source communities:
IT giants accused of exploiting open source: ZDNet Australia: News: Software: “‘Open source communities need to take themselves seriously and realise they have contribution to themselves and society. From the moment they realise they are part of the evolution of society and try to influence it, we will be moving in the right direction,’ said Villasante.”
And again:
“Open source is a complete mess — many people do lots of different things. There’s total confusion today,” Villasante said.
What a load of crap! If there is one force that is trying hard to shape the IT landscape — and parts of society — today in ways that nobody could have foreseen only a few years ago, that’s Open Source. Not just Open Source software, but also “open-source-like” initiatives like Creative Commons, Wikipedia, podcasting, you name it.
If there’s a critique to be moved to OS developers, is that sometimes they take themselves too seriously and seem intent on conquering the world with their peculiar point of view.
As for “confusion”, we prefer to call it “freedom”.
This echoes what Gosling said some time ago and which I criticized here and here. To James’ credit, he now claims that he’s being misunderstood. So it might as well been that the ZDNet reporter misunderstood Villasante too.
Curiously, two out of three of the reports quoted here come from Australia. Can it be the case that the perspective from down under is a little bit reversed? 
Please forgive me. it’s been a while since I last wrote something here. I’ve been pretty busy with last-minute bug squashing and system administration tasks, in preparation for the launch of the first beta release of my Open Source related initiative.
No links for the moment, as we have a new domain name awaiting registration. As soon as DNS is set-up, I will do an announcement here.
I also found a couple of collaborators who will share the burden of filling the site with content, at least initially. I hope that a community will quickly form around the site, providing some more content. Stay tuned!
Timothy Fisher: “It seems like most of the cool end-user web applications are written in PHP. This is an area in which the Java community is way behind the PHP community.”
Having recently switched from a Java application (blojsom) to a PHP one (WordPress) for this blog, I might be tempted to agree. Particularly, it’s undeniably true that:
The open source Java community seems to be consumed with the creation of the latest and greatest framework.
Still, I’m Java programmer and I am writing my next great web application in Java. Having seen some of the PHP code from WordPress, I’m not eager to dive into more of it.
It seems now clear to me that James Gosling, as previously demostrated, does not have a clue when it comes to Open Source and his latest remarks confirm this.
Thanks to J Aaron Farr for nailing down his FUD about the GPL (since when has the ASF distributed GPL code?) and his ridiculous claim that by opensourcing Java, “any old person could check in stuff”.
On the other hand, I still have doubts about the supposed “clear need” for an Open Source J2SE claimed by Harmony supporters.
To me, it’s all about risks. While there’s a risk of Sun folding down or being acquired and stopping all Java development, the risk of spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on a project that — assuming it ever produces a release — won’t deliver much more than what Sun’s JVM delivers right now is much bigger. Of course, I might be wrong.
I’ve been pretty quiet recently about my little pet project: Source.zone. Now, this quietness does not imply that the project is stagnating. Quite the contrary. In my copious free time— which mostly means in the weekends — I’ve been writing a significant amount of code, with interesting results, namely:
- Confluence is gone
- The current version relies on Atlassian Confluence to manage its contents, but the final one won’t. While Confluence is a nice product and it’s great to be able to use it under a free license (thanks, Atlassian friends), at the end of the day using a Wiki for what I need to do means having to twist and bend it beyond recognition. So, I went back to the tried and true way: a relational database with Hibernate and Spring on top for ease of development. This does not completely rule out using Confluence for something: a Wiki might be useful, after all, but not as the primary source of content.
- Tags
- On the heels of the success of del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, … I implemented tagging for projects. The interface for attaching tags to a project is still rudimentary, but it’s a start. Next in line is using the tags to link to del.icio.us, Technorati and maybe other services.
- RSS
- Every project category has an RSS feed, so you can keep up to date from the comfort of your favorite aggregator. Support for RSS feeds for tags and reviews is planned.
- Reviews
- Project reviews a-la Amazon are implemented. Since this was one of the primary features planned, I’m quite satisfied.
With all these features implemented, I’m really looking forward to a launch in the not too distant future. But what’s missing?
- Authentication and authorization
- The development version is completely open: no authentication and no authorization. I’m tempted to keep it like this, at least initially, in Wikipedia style. I’m sure abuse will soon ensue, but maybe it can be managed and kept at a reasonable level for a while. Anyway, it’s not my number-one priority right now.
- Look & feel
- I grew bored of the current website layout and style. I need to find something better. I’m starting to think a minimalist approach is better.
- Community features
- Forums, mailing lists, …
- Hosting
- I’m very satisfied with my current hosting provider: Bytemark. I will need a new virtual machine, with more memory and bandwidth before going live and if the website starts drawing some serious traffic, a dedicated host will probably be necessary. Nothing troubling here, but I don’t want to throw money at it. Using my free time without accounting for it is fine, but live expenses need to be recovered, so I’ll have to make a business plan that includes some form of revenue: For a start, Google AdSense and possibly some affiliate programs, like Amazon Associates, will do.
Actually, ApacheCon Europe 2005 starts on the 18th of July, but I just got this email:
From: Rodent of Unusual Size [...] 1. Session slides/handouts are due by 1 MAY 2005.
Gosh! I have less than a week to finish the slides and the handouts. I don’t even know how handouts are supposed to look like.
Fortunately, Monday is a national holiday here and I had already decided to take a day off on Tuesday anyhow, so I have plenty of free time before Sunday. I was thinking of devoting some of that time to doing development for Source.zone, but it’s priority will have to be lowered.
I can’t understand how this ad can possibly offend someone. Even with Pope Ratzi sitting right here in the center of Italy, it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. We’ve had a TV ad for a chewing gum, featuring a guy who couldn’t open a condom’s envelope with his — presumably rotten for lack of hygiene — teeth, running for months on national television. So much for being a traditional catholic country.
NevOn: Firefox blush at browser protection ad: “Anyway, I bet we do see that poster run. If not, at least the image repeated in blog posts like mine. Now that’s a an idea for some viral advertising…”
I’ll pick up the suggestion. Click on the ad to see the larger image.
Still on the subject of controversial ads that never did get shown, here’s a sexy video that was made for Microsoft but, so they say, Bill G. didn’t appreciate.
I’m presently doing some experiments with Nutch, the Open Source search engine that has recently been moved to the Apache Incubator.
I’ve been reading about how Nutch’s Open Source ranking algorithm is supposed to be better being open, but I couldn’t find — either googling around or nutching around — a complete description of how it ranks pages. Does it take into consideration inbound links like Google’s or not? I’d really like to know.
For the life of me, I can’t make heads nor tails of this article:
Tom Yager: “But no matter how much money and dedication is poured into Linux, it will never put a dent in Windows’ mind share or market share because Linux is an operating system, a way — and probably the best way — to make system hardware do what it’s told. But you can’t turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it.”
One thing is to kill Windows — which I agree won’t happen anytime soon — quite another is to put a dent in it’s market share, especially if we’re talking about server market share, as seems to be the case here. I think Linux is quite happily putting a big dent in the server market share. Someone might argue that this is at the expense of other Unices, like Solaris or SCO, but I tend to think that traditional Unix would have lost that market anyway, and to Windows mostly. So, Linux is taking away potential Windows market share, at least.
And more:
Businesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions. Windows wins.
I never thought Windows could have been dubbed “consistent, predictable, scalable”. Might have been smoking something all these years, seeing lots and lots of Linux installations delivering consistent, predictable and scalable results. Hmmm…
There is only one platform that can stand toe-to-toe with Windows, and that’s the combination of OS X and Java.
As much as I love developing in Java under OS X, there’s no doubt that when it comes to deploying on a server, Linux + Java wins hands down over OS X, especially if you want Java5 or if you want as many MHz as money can buy. And if you’re talking about the client, how many Java applications are you running on OS X day in, day out?
Perplexed.
New DivaBlog: Leaving Sun: “After the flurry of stories on Friday and over the weekend (my favorites being Jim Grisanzio's lovely farewell, Matt Asay's surprising testimonial and the original blog written by David Berlind), it will come to no surprise that I'm leaving Sun. I'm off to see if I can have any influence at Intel, a company which has benefitted hugely from the increased popularity of Free and Open Source software around the world. I'm quite sad to leave the many good friends I've made over the years at Sun. Change it always hard.”
I remember meeting Danese at OSCOM 4 last September, where she gave a talk on blogging at Sun, telling the story of how they got Tim Bray and Dave Johnson on board.
The question that's on my mind now is: Will she retain the “Open Source Diva” title she had printed on her business card?
I've just opened the Source.zone blog. It's basically a linkblog where I'll collect pointers to articles and blog posts about Open Source in general, not tied to any specific project or technology.
The look of it leaves much to be desired, but it's the best I could come up with given the limitations of the RSS 0.92 feed generated by Confluence. Just to name one, it does not include post dates, author or any other info besides permalink, title and description.
If you prefer to aggregate it, the RSS feed is here.
It sure needs more work, but I've decided to bite the bullet and go live with the new Source.zone website. I hope that this announcement will generate some traffic and maybe uncover some bugs.
The new website is nothing more than a simpleminded proxy made with Apache Cocoon that queries a Confluence wiki in the backend using XML-RPC and dresses it up in nice colors. You can still get at the wiki using wiki.sourcezone.info as a hostname. If traffic starts building up I will need to implement some form of caching, but for now this will do, as the proxy and the wiki are running on the same machine.
Feature-wise, the current version of Source.zone is nothing more than a wiki with a pretty frontend. Planned features like reviews, ratings, comments, blogs and other collaborative, social tools will come in the next months. Stay tuned!
What is Source.zone?
If you are a developer looking for an Open Source library, framework or toolkit which might help you with your current project, there is probably something out there that fits your needs, if only you could find it.
Sure, there are some places like Freshmeat or SourceForge, that list a large number of products. The problem is that sometimes it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see which projects are alive rather than dormant or dead; which ones have a diverse, thriving community behind and which ones are basically one-man-jobs; which ones grew from real needs and which ones are simply abandonware products that some company decided to opensource rather than bury at the end of their lives.
The problem is that it's currently hard to find the correct project that suits your needs. But really that's only because someone hasn't come up with the Amazon type storefront and built that in front of the repositories, so you can search and find the project you may need. And even if the project is run by someone on a remote island on his own - who cares - it might be exactly what you were looking for to build that particular solution someone really needs.
Source.zone's aim is to create a storefront for access to Open Source projects. The storefront will have the same level of participation that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback in form of reviews, ratings, comments, developers who liked this project also liked this other one.
Our intended audience is developers and we focus on infrastructure software: libraries, toolkits, frameworks and environments that can help a developer build applications quickly, reusing robust, tested and widely used components.
In the last hour or so I've been having fun trying to come up with a decent design for the Source.zone website. Here's what I've come up with so far (click on the image to enlarge it):
I have to thank:
- For the layout: The Forgettable Mister Ruthsarian.
- For the color scheme: Matthew Buchanan (via CSS Zen Garden).
- For the headline graphic: an unknown photographer.
All the above mentioned works should be in the Public Domain or covered by a Creative Commons license. Let me know if this is not the case.
It's just a first attempt and needs some more work, but if you want to comment on it, please do.
Filippo: “Anyhow, I promised Ugo a contribution a month ago; this is my first contribution. It briefly covers Marathon, one of the tools we evaluated in our current project for writing non-regression tests.”
(Via Travelling, and not arriving.)
By the way, the correct link to my blog is http://agylen.com/blojsom/blog/.
It's Raining Code! (Hallelujah?) - OPEN-SOURCE - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005: “One of the challenges of using open source is simply finding a product that meets your needs and your quality standards. While many developers need an e-mail client or Web browser (hence, the rabid developer base for open-source projects such as Mozilla's Thunderbird and FireFox), finding a spontaneously developed tool to integrate your three retail-specific supply chain applications isn't as likely. And even if your SourceForge search uncovered such a tool, there's no guarantee that the developers wrote it with the care your enterprise requires.”
This is exactly the main goal of Source.zone!
(Via Matthew.)
Hypergene - Amazoning The News:
There are 5 basic goals that users come to the web for:
- Share […]
- Inform […]
- Create […]
- Entertain […]
- Transact […]
I'm noting this because these five goals might help to focus onto what I want to reach with Source.zone:
- Share: Let users share their knowledge and opinions about Open Source projecs.
- Inform: Of course providing information is the main goal of Source.zone.
- Create: Users must be able to participate in the creation of the information that the site provides.
- Entertain: Software need not be boring. We can use some of the mockups on the article's site as sources of inspiration.
- Transact: Buy and sell? Not products for money, probably, but maybe some kind of reputation.
In one of the next posts, I will try to explain how we can use the Five Rules for Net Engagement as tools that will allow us to reach the five goals.
(Hat tip to Robin Good for the link)
I've just written, with the help of one of my coworkers, a couple of small Cocoon components whose purpose in life is to suck in pages from a Confluence wiki via XML-RPC, turn the HTML into well-formed XHTML and spit it out. Putting an XSL-T transformation in front of it allows one to build a Cocoon webapp that uses Confluence as a backend repository, or a small CMS if you dare to call it such. Wiki content can be thus styled at leisure, aggregated with other data sources or manipulated in any way that you like, all without touching Confluence's Velocity-based templates (yick!).
The idea is to start putting a new face to Source.zone and pave the way for adding other features. If I find some time, I'd like to tinker a bit with JavaBB, for example. A forum could be useful. The original Confluence GUI will still be used for editing content in the backend.
Of course, the new face will need to be pretty. Nobody wants to browse web pages that suck. So I need to spend some time this week-end thinking about the best design, which entails a lot of “view-sourcing” around, of course. Suggestions are welcome.
I will also need to find a new logo. Since I have a nephew who is studying design, I think a bit of “nephew art” might be the final result.
