Thursday, 29 November 2007

Hello, Android

I'm totally going to buy one of the new Android phones when they come out. Today in less than 5 minutes I managed to get the SDK, Eclipse plugin installed and create the Hello, Android application. I managed to write an app for their emulator and run it before the phone even came out whereas it took me an entire day just to figure out how to get my palm to work with bluetooth on Linux. Better yet, it looks like they're licensing the important parts under open source licenses. It looks like these will be real open source licenses that we're familiar with already (not just some license sanctioned in a secret meeting by a closed and non-representative body pushed by some VC afraid that open source will screw up his "enterprise upgrade" strategy). Contrast this with the Palm where they freaking make it hard to even do hello world with their horrible SDKs or the iPhone which is a monstrous "all your data are belong to us" plan by apple. I think Android is probably going to do for phones what the IBM PC did for microcomputers. The evidence is there. When something doesn't matter, no one comments on it. When something matters they comment on why and how much it doesn't matter.

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Posted by acoliver at 2:58 PM in Open Source
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007

Does OpenDS need a fork

This is a pretty disturbing read. Early on I voiced my concerns that maybe OpenDS was only pseudo-open source. This seems to confirm that. Maybe we made the right technical choice in using it, but maybe we do need to consider the community aspects a little more closely in our technology choices. Alex K. can laugh at me now...if only the ApacheDS build and config process wasn't ass.

PS. Who in their right mind would relocate open source development to Europe right now...from a financial standpoint the move seems...stupid (anyone notice the Euro vs Dollar right now)...not to mention the "IK" factor...Sun never seems to miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.

UPDATE: my original post had a broken link (ref is not valid ;-) )... This is fixed. The "IK" factor is a Marc Fleuryism that explained why...a certain company...got it wrong...if I recall correctly. JBoss did not need "Intellectual Property" IP because we had "Intellectual Knowledge". Meaning we had all the guys who wrote the thing and had been working in it and knew RIGHT where the ins and outs of the code were without having to even look at it. Building a new open source developer is really actually very expensive. Losing a good one for no reason is not cheap. I say "no reason" because Sun is doing this to...SPEND EUROS as opposed to DOLLARS? Where is THAT business sense. The importance of co-location is greatly diminished in open source. It might not be 0 but certainly isn't worth the loss of IK, relationships and good will. I'm hoping Marc picks this up and expounds on "IK" a bit.

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Posted by acoliver at 7:08 PM in Open Source
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Friday, 9 November 2007

Audio/slides of Pat Patterson on Digital Identity, SSO, LDAP, Liberty, etc

Last night TriLUG hosted Pat Patterson (the identity expert and not the wrestler) on identity. This was what many, including myself, thought was one of the best talks we'd attended. I could tell Pat was sweating it as the announcements and time ticked off (I'd promised him close to 2 hours as our announcements and AV setup usually take less time). He managed in 90 minutes to bring over 60 people up to speed on the whole of the "Digital Identity" space, at least from a high-level perspective. You can find the slides: here and the audio: here. I'm the guy who asked all the stupid questions (as usual).

My only complaint is that Pat is a "Font Sinner". He used "Arial Narrow" on his iMac which renders differently on my Ubuntu box. Ideally, he'd have used a free and multi-platform font like: Red Hat's Liberation fonts or the BitStream fonts. This is less of a problem with his PDF rendering, but initially he gave us ODP files which rendered poorly. In essence, when distributing a PPT or ODP or whatever, use a free/multi-platform/unique named font set like Red Hat's Liberation Fonts or the BitStream fonts. When distributing PDF it only matters ideologically (my issue is that stuff doesn't render right rather than the ideological issues).

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Posted by acoliver at 3:39 PM in Open Source
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