What's In Your Code?

Change at Sun

The rumors were right - scott mcnealy has turned over his 22 year ceo job to jonathan schwartz. As I've written about before, I spent about 10 years at sun, some of that time working directly for scott. He is a smart, personable guy - I wish him well in this next phase of his career. The story of Sun can be written by others, but as I often thought during my 10 years, the computer industry is better with Sun in it. There are a lot of hardworking, dedicated people there - and I hope this change works out well for them.

Open Source Leaders

Last week, SourceForge.net held is first annual Community Choice Awards at LinuxWorld. The competition generated nearly 250,000 votes in 13 categories ranging from clustering to games. You can read an InfoWeek article about it here.

Following are the winning projects from the competition:

Best Overall – Azureus BitTorrent Client
Enterprise Winner – Zimbra Collaboration Suite
Networking - FileZilla – FTP and SFTP client for Windows
Clustering – BitTorrent Queue Manager
Financial – aPai – a PHP PayPal API
Security – WinSCP – a SFTP and SCP client for Windows using SSH.
Gaming – Xbox Media Center
Desktop – WINE – runs Windows on Mac OS X
Hardware – Linux on the Microsoft Xbox
VOIP – Asterisk GUI client
Database and SysAdmin categories – phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration

We’re also starting to see open source-based leaders emerge in the application categories, like Intalio for business process management, Groundwork for IT operations management and Pentaho for business intelligence. In a short time, we can expect to see open source vendors in every major application category.

Red Hat Wins JBoss

The fact that JBoss was on the market has been one of the worst kept secrets in the tech world….and the story is out today. The winner is Red Hat. And in this case winner is the correct term. It always seemed to me that Red Hat was the natural fit – in fact it seemed surprising that Red Had had not made this move earlier. The normal “sedimentation” is at work. By that I mean that operating systems tend to accumulate functions that started in a stand-alone fashion. App servers are the poster child. So it now will be interesting to watch the response of the other app server vendors – BEA, IBM, Sun et al. It will be more important now that they prove the value of an app server separate from the OS.

Open Source-Based Intelligence Analysis?

I’ve been meaning to write about this ever since it popped up a couple of weeks back.

The Bush administration opted to release millions of pages of documents, recordings and other media captured in Iraq. I can only assume that someone thought that it was better to offer the world the opportunity to look, as opposed to doing nothing. (The U.S. has 48,000 boxes of documents stored in a desert warehouse in the Persian Gulf.)

U.S. Rep. Pete Koekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it this way:

“By placing these documents online and allowing the public the opportunity to review them, we can cut years off the time it will take to gain knowledge from this potential treasure trove of information. This decision effectively places a collar on the bureaucracy and unleashes the power of people and the Internet to help speed this process.”

Hiawatha Bray at The Boston Globe picked up on the same angle that came to my mind:

“It's the same ''open source" principle that drove the successful development of the Internet and of powerful free software like the Linux operating system. Instead of hiring a team of brilliant professionals to analyze Iraqi documents in secret, the open source systems will use hundreds of clever amateurs, who'll publish their work for anyone to analyze and improve upon.”

I think we are seeing the shape of things to come…

Microsoft to Support Linux – Wow

Yesterday’s LinuxWorld/Boston keynote by Microsoft’s Bill Hilf, director of Microsoft’s Platform Technology Strategy, made an announcement of support for Linux running on Virtual Server 2005 R2. The company will release plug-ins that will allow users to run leading distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SuSE Linux. In addition, this release of Virtual Server will be available as a free download.

Here it is on Microsoft’s site:

“Starting today, customers can consolidate their Linux-based applications on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and receive 24-hour support from Microsoft.”

Jeremy Geelan makes this observation: “LinuxWorld has never hosted a more extraordinary or unexpected set of announcements.”

While it may have been unexpected – it’s a smart and pragmatic move by Microsoft.