Ever since my department started throwing around the idea of spam filtering, I insisted that we not use any outside blackhole services. With
Osirusoft and their SPEWS list going dark, my concerns about outside forces controlling my infrastructure were confirmed.

Ever since the idea of outside DNS blacklists started, I’d heard horror stories of people tarred with a too-broad brush. One friend of mine has been blacklisted because his cable modem shares IP real estate with some open relays. I didn’t want to put my company’s acceptance of inbound mail in the hands of others. I hadn’t even considered what would happen when the blacklist shut down and sent out erroneous DNS responses.

In a way, the blackhole lists are not at all open source. You can submit a “patch,” but if it’s not accepted by the powers that be, you’re out of luck. It’s not YOUR patches that you’re concerned about getting accepted, but the patches from others that you don’t know about. And just forget about being able to fork the codebase…

Until SMTP is replaced by something that’s up to the task of spam blocking in the 21st century, I’ll stick with Spam Assassin and other heuristic approaches.

On September 12, 2001,
Guillaume Laurent wrote a brief piece called ESR Doesn’t Speak For Me. I’d like to pick up the banner and say that ESR doesn’t speak for me, either.

ESR’s latest rant,
An Open Letter To Darl McBride, is chock full of ad hominem attacks that do nothing to forward his arguments. It seems ESR is more concerned with being clever and showing off than actually acheiving any real results. Choice gems of pointless agression:

I’d ask if you’d found the right sort of isolated wasteland for your citadel of dread yet, but that would be a silly question; you’re in Utah, after all.

So far your so-called “evidence” is crap; you’d better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you.

[I]f you don’t stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else we’ve worked for I guarantee you won’t like what our alliance is cooking up next.

Then, to close the screed, ESR tells McBride

You have my email, you can have my phone if you want it, and you have my word of honor that you’ll get a fair hearing for any truths you have to offer.

as if the 15 previous paragraphs of hostility didn’t just happen. Does ESR actually think that he’s likely to get a response, or is that offer just a sop?

It makes me frustrated to see the leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, of Open Source turn to tactics of insults. I may agree with ESR’s position, but there’s no way he speaks for me.

Does ESR speak for you?

Related link: http://www.accelerating.org/acc2003/conf_home.htm

What will happen if technology is, as Ray Kurzweil claims, exponentially accelerating?

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Most conferences covering the future look about 2 years ahead. What we will
do at the ACC2003
is take a step back, lift our eyes and look 5 to 30 years into the future. What
are the consequences if, as it looks like, Moore’s
Law continues to be true for the next 30 years? (More details further down.)

Full disclaimer, I am one of the organizers of the conference. I don’t get
any monetary benefits from it, I just strongly believe in it. If you bring bright
minds together, some of them experts in their fields, coming from different
walks of life with different viewpoints, magical things will happen.

For example, the Collective
Intelligence Dinner on Saturday evening is something I am totally looking
forward to. There will be many round tables in the room where 8 to 10 people
can sit. Every table has a sign posting a question from the 4 focus areas of
Science, Technology, Business and Humanities. For example one of the business
question will probably be: "How do we maximize the spread of individual
and corporate wealth in a sustainable and culturally appropriate manner in our
global economy?" Science: "Is modern humanity better characterized
as selective catalysts than as controllers of technological development?"
(Current
list of questions)

As a conference participant you sit down at the table with the question that
tickles your interest the most. That way more or less organically highly motivated
interest groups are formed. During the dinner there is a focused discussion
around the selected question. At the end every table presents for 5 minutes
the conclusions of the dinner talk. It’s the hive mind at work; absolute magic.

That experience alone is worth the $400 conference fee. You have read this
far, therefore you now know me more or less :-) and as an acquaintance you get
a $50 discount if you sign
up. Please use the discount code: ACC2003-O’Reilly.

See you all there, Mark.

P.S. Some more interesting details from the Institute for Accelerating Change
press release about the schedule:

TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION: A HIDDEN LAW OF NATURE?

Technologist and Singularity Researcher Kurzweil to debate Vitalist Denton
and Techno-Philosopher Tuomi at "Accelerating Change Conference"

STANFORD UNIVERSITY (August 18, 2003) - Ray Kurzweil, noted inventor, software
developer and futurist, will present his work on "the law of accelerating
returns" and debate its merits with biologist Michael Denton and innovation
theorist Ilkka Tuomi to kick off a weekend conference devoted to rigorous examination
of the apparent acceleration of technology’s development, and the way it affects
the human world. "Accelerating Change ‘03," organized by the Institute
for Accelerating Change (IAC), will be held at Stanford University’s Tresidder
Union, September 12-14. Twenty-four prominent thinkers will offer their insights
from across a broad spectrum of cutting edge disciplines, such as biological
computing, nanotech, interface design, cosmology, and futurism.

Is technological acceleration a hidden law of nature? Is Kurzweil on to the
ultimate "next big thing"? Is there a trend, as he believes, of increasing
technological acceleration that leads to a "singularity" - a change
so great that it can’t be understood before it occurs?

His data shows that many trends in technology’s development have accelerated
independent of economic conditions, marching to their own increasing efficiencies,
and periodically taking us into an "exponential economy." But can
this be extrapolated to all computational systems?

After his presentation, Kurzweil will debate Michael Denton, noted post-Darwinian
biologist and Platonist ("Protein Folds as Platonic Forms," J. Theoretical
Bio, 2002), who proposes that our living proteins have unique emergent properties
that will not easily, or perhaps ever, be modeled by technological systems.
Denton thus asks whether there is something "vital" to biological
systems that must remain inaccessible to technology.

Kurzweil will then debate Ilkka Tuomi, noted technology scholar and critic
of Moore’s Law (the apparent doubling of computer power every 18-24 months).
Tuomi contends that Moore’s famous "law" has been subject to both
cultural overstatements and bad data. He proposes that processor innovation
is not supply driven, but results from the paradoxical fact that the users of
information technology have been able to innovate new social uses for semiconductors
faster than engineers have been able to develop improved technology. Tuomi sees
the potential for stunning productivity increases through the intelligent use
of technology, but argues that the future of semiconductors is finally determined
by social innovation. An additional controversy of technological acceleration
is whether tomorrow’s technology will be increasingly more "autonomous"?
That is, will it be more self-repairing, self-adapting, and self-governing?

John Koza (Genetic Programming IV: Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence,
2003), another distinguished speaker at the event, will present the latest evidence
for self-organizing machine intelligence, and the increasing number of areas
where it matches or outcompetes biological intelligence.

"We are organizing ‘Accelerating Change ‘03′ to create broader awareness
of the way ‘offspring’ of complex systems always seem to accelerate over time,"
says John Smart, President of IAC, the nonprofit organization behind the event.
"Carl Sagan noted that replicating stars give rise to life-hospitable planets,
which give rise to genetic evolution, which gives rise to cultural evolution,
which gives rise to technological evolution, in a continual quickening process
that is still unexplained by our physics textbooks. And now, systems that exceed
even our own biologically-paced computation are pulling us toward an unknown
future." Smart continues, "Kurzweil is one of a growing number of
ground-breaking theorists from a broad range of fields who have important things
to say about the next 10 to 30 years. Even with many of the dot coms gone, the
economy and culture remain permanently on a new, faster ‘internet time.’ To
engineer sustained economic recovery, we must learn how to guide accelerating
change. It is our organization’s view that a multidisciplinary, big picture,
and long range view is necessary to really answer this question, which is the
reason for creating our new forum." More information about the conference
at the ACC2003 webpage.

Is technology accelerating exponentially?

Related link: http://tinyurl.com/kx52

When SAP member of the board Shai Agassi gave his keynote at the JavaOne conference
he nicely summed up how developers are viewing SAP and their fellow SAP developers:

"Most of you in the audience know SAP as the German Giant, the one
that you don’t really know what we do, but we are big, and we do stuff for
companies that you don’t want to work for."

He got a good chuckle from the audience. (Check out the Webcast)

That is how SAP developers are being perceived, doing stuff for the big corporations,
but not the real interesting, cutting edge developments like in open source
projects.

May be the last laugh has the SAP Developer. Read this article from the JobCenter
section of the Dallas Morning News: Recruiters
treat SAP pros as a precious commodity Quote:

"One programmer he recently placed ran SAP operations at a company
but didn’t feel that his personal ethics matched that of other company executives.
When recruiters contacted him about an opportunity, he opted for a similar
job that paid around $840,000. "

Personally I think this number is a bit high, or where can I sign up for this?
But it is good to know one works in an area, where people are in demand even
during this downturn.

What comes to your mind, when you read/hear about SAP Development?

I really admire Wine (more than I ever admired it during the past 10
years when it was floundering toward stability) and particularly
admire what
CodeWeavers
has achieved with Wine. I depend on CodeWeavers’ Linux product so I
can work on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files the same way my
Windows-addicted colleagues work on them. As impressive as OpenOffice
tools are, I’m just not confident I’ll get the results my colleagues
expect to see when I use OpenOffice to manipulate the MS Office
files I share with these people.

But sometimes Wine and CodeWeavers work too well. They can make Linux
bug-for-bug compatible with Windows. To illustrate this, I will
describe an amusing incident that just happened to me while I was
doing intensive work on a Word document.

Suddenly, during one of my attempts to save the file, I received the
dreaded error message familiar to every prisoner of Windows: “Out of
memory or disk space. Remove some files or close some applications…”The joke here is the error message was transparently lying–something
that wouldn’t be clear on a Windows system, but was clear here. I had
used up only 75% of the disk space on my partition (although
CodeWeavers does something strange I don’t quite understand with fake
Windows drives). And Linux was churning away happily; the
free program showed no strain on the system. The problem
was in Word and Word alone.

I plan to continue using MS Office products. In addition to the considerations I mentioned earlier, Word has some features I
wish OpenOffice Writer had, and from brief trials I can tell that
OpenOffice Impress is way behind PowerPoint in stability. But I don’t
like the realization that these office products have brought some of
the craziness of Windows with them.

Why would Word have memory problems on Linux?

Related link: http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

One interesting aspect of this article, on a reputable company that
had to pay $100,000 for software licensing violations they didn’t even
know about, is that it shows how far licensing has come from common
sense.

I’m sure most home computer users are in violation of their licenses
because they let family members use their computer.

The Ernie Ball company did what seemed perfectly reasonable and
natural–passing old computers to different staff–and found it was
against their Microsoft license. Who would know? And this happens even
though UCITA was largely defeated. No wonder software companies and
other so-called intellectual property providers say that education
about the “right” way to handle copyrights and licenses should start back in school!

Imagine if your carpeting company was allowed to determine everything
you could put on the carpet–or even if your bookseller was allowed to
tell you who could read the books you buy. (So far, you’re protected
by first sale rights–but of course DRM is threatening to erode that
right.)

Well, that’s what modern software licensing is like. (Meanwhile, the
click-to-accept licenses that come with downloaded software seem to be
getting longer and longer, as if they lawyers want to make sure you
couldn’t find the clause that bites you even if you took the time to
read the whole thing.) Licenses are out of touch with human nature,
even more than copyright law. To see how out-of-touch copyright law
is, I recommend Jessica Litman’s (hard-copy) book Digital Copyright.
Meanwhile, read the article to see how the manager of Ernie Ball
exercised choice.

Has the software industry departed from common sense?

Related link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3164861.stm

Sobig is back.

When I left my job as a system administrator back in 2000, I was glad never to deal with Windows boxes again, especially as two Windows viruses had recently decimated the internal network. (Yep, one in ten users had lost data.)

Several years later, only one computer I own has ever even had Windows on it, and that’s because I bought it from a failing dot-com. (The hard drive was wiped before I bought it.) I guarantee I’m not spreading Sobig because I know Outlook and Outlook Express won’t even install on any machine I own.

I can accept that there are Bad People on the Internet taking advantage of Unsecure Computers run by People Who Don’t Know Better. That’s why I have a firewall. I share a mail server with friends, and I read and send mail over a secure connection.

I also have mail filters, for obvious reasons. After I cleaned out over a hundred Sobig viruses this morning, I added a couple of rules to my filter and it’s humming away (seven in the last ten minutes).

With that digression out of the way, I’d like to propose a simple certification examination for people who’d like to write new mail filtering and response systems. It’s very simple, just one question. If you answer the question correctly, you’re free to write your software. If you answer the question incorrectly, you cannot ever write mail filtering software. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

The question is, can a From address be forged?.

There might be room for an advanced certification test that asks one more question, namely, if you detect a virus that forges From addresses, should you respond to the From address, knowing that it’s likely forged?.

If the answers are obvious, you’re probably overqualified to work on e-mail scanning software.

Related link: http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/2003/08/16.html#a221

Just about a week ago I posted a rant on XML-DEV in response to a gentleman who had lately taken to punctuating posts on every topic with a declaration that Open Source was toast if it didn’t indemnify its users against IP claims. I’m glad to read a similar, general response from a more knowledgeable source.

To those who like to sprinkle such FUD about, why is this issue any different from the Unisys LZW patent jackpot game in which Unisys declared their intentions to sue Web sites that posted GIFs? Back then all the talk was about how image processing vendors would protect their users from such suits and how this would spell the death of projects such as GIMP and ImageMagick? Last I checked, these projects are still thriving. Bah. FUD.

Related link: http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030714/demachy_01.shtml

Quick, name a software development industry known for working long hours on unmaintainable code that has to ship on quarterly deadlines, releasing patch after patch, occasionally losing source code, and burning out scores of young programmers every year.

With few exceptions, it seems the game development industry is about five years behind the rest of the software industry, at least when it comes to new tools and development techniques. Sure, games drive adoption of new hardware, new interfaces, and interesting new ideas (cel shading!), but consider when the bulk of new development moved from assembler to slightly-higher level languages. It hasn’t been that long.

The past couple of years have been promising in the rest of the industry. If you follow trends, you know that automated testing, refactoring, and agility keep moving into the mainstream. IDE support for the popular refactorings? People who understand what I mean when I say “story card”? That’s wonderful!

Occasionally, there are flashes of hope in game development. The move toward more powerful scripting languages is nice, especially as developers say “We hope to move more game logic into the scripting language, because it helps mod makers.” That’s maintainability, of a sort. Some people are even using good languages such as Ruby and Python instead of inventing their own little languages.

I’ll take it. (When Parrot arrives, I’ll start banging the drum for embedding that and building a little dynamic language on top. Try THAT with the JVM or the CLR.)

One thing the game developers have been doing well in the past few years is writing up postmortems, though the name should indicate that something’s up. The next trick is to say, “You know, everyone’s having trouble with managing change. Everyone’s having trouble integrating. Everyone has trouble meeting deadlines. Maybe we should be doing something a little differently.”

Maybe Demachy’s an early adopter and it’ll be another three years before a significant chunk of projects start improving their development processes. I bet the agile projects start eating the industry’s lunch sooner, though, and I’m not talking about leftover pizza and caffeine at 2 am.

Care to confirm, deny, or clarify my thoughts? What’ll it take for game studios to adopt better development practices?

Related link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/13/1516209

The article author says “Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own.” The headline on Slashdot blares “Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes.” I’m not sure which is better. It reminds me of the Aamco commercial that said “Half the cars brought in don’t need a new transmission,” which says to me that if I take my car in, it’s 50/50 that I’ll need a new tranny.

This new MSBlaster worm attacking Windows XP and 2003 operating systems is so bad that even the Department of Homeland Security has issued advisories against it.

Instead of applying a patch for this problem — only to have to apply another patch as soon as the next vulnerability is exploited — why not just move to Linux?

Recent innovations in the Linux community have made this easier than ever. Ease of use is better, installation is easier, hardware support is better, and there are more and better applications available. If you’ve ever considered making the switch, now is the time.

Here are a few really easy Linux versions you can install yourself without too much worry. In many cases, these installations are now actually easier than installing Microsoft Windows.

• Mandrake Linux. Mandrake was one of the original ‘easy to use and install’ versions of Linux. I recently installed it on a Toshiba laptop and can say it’s definitely continuing to get better and better. Their new MandrakeClub provides access to even more applications as well as a community of other Mandrake users to help you if you need it. I recommend the Mandrake Linux PowerPack Edition 9.1.
• Lindows OS. Lindows is determined to become the ‘America On-Line’ of Linux versions. They are consumer friendly and have made their applications very easy to install and use. Another real advantage for Lindows is the ‘Click-N-Run Technology’ they use for installing new applications and upgrading. I recommend Lindows OS 4.0.
• Xandros Desktop. The Xandros claim to fame is Windows compatibility and ease of switching from Windows. Xandros cost $99, but comes with ‘CodeWeavers CrossOver Office’ which allows you to literally run Microsoft Office and other windows applications right on your Linux machine. Xandros is getting rave reviews from their customers. I recommend the Xandros Desktop Deluxe Edition.

And you won’t have to worry about going out and buying new software for Linux either. All these versions come with a full-featured office suite that can read and write MS Office files (OpenOffice), a full-featured money management application (GNUCash), media and entertainment applications and most of the software that an average user needs.

Stop worrying about patching — get Linux instead.

I moved into a new house last week. The whole time we prepared for the big day, my project management gears were in overdrive. We had day-by-day checklists stuck on the walls of what had to be done each day, with the movers packing us up on Tuesday, two closings on Wednesday and then moving in on Thursday. Everything went smoothly until last night, when I went to set up the network. I’d put all cabling, keyboards, mice, routers, etc into one box, labeled it “COMPUTER — OFFICE — BASEMENT” and put a big star on it, so that it would wind up where I would need it.

Too bad I didn’t tell the movers.

I spent a couple of hours last night (hours that I should have been spent writing for an upcoming ORA book) trying to find the box. Finally I found it, in the far back of the storage space under the stairs, behind a couple of Rubbermaid containers of maternity clothes.

---

All this hassle with moving day got me thinking about problems with modules, specifically WWW::Mechanize. Every few days, I get email from someone with some Mechanize question, and they include sample code. Most of the time, that sample code is missing some obvious shortcuts, or what I would consider the Right Way To Do Something. For example:

my $response = $mech->get( "http://someurl.com" );
die unless $response->status == 200;

is better written as

$mech->get( "http://someurl.com" );
die unless $mech->success;

Why don’t people use the convenience methods I built in? I assume it’s because they’re unaware of their existence. So how do I let people know about them?

---

And then, in one of those great little synchronicities of life, I went through the last week of the perl5porters mailing list, and it seems quick refs and cheat sheets are popping up all over the place. Iain Truskett wrote a
Perl Regular Expression Reference, and Juerd Wallboer has a Perl 5 cheat sheet both of which will be in perl 5.8.1’s distro, and Casey West just showed me his
cheat sheet for the Test::More module.

I see the cheat sheet as different, and in some ways better, than the FAQ. The FAQ is often long and windy, but rarely gives one the feel of how to use the software. The cheat sheet puts everything within a quick eyescan.
The cheat sheet isn’t a new idea, of course.
O’Reilly’s been binding them as pocket references for years. Andrew Ford has created reference cards for C, Emacs, Apache and mod_perl.

Here’s hoping that other software authors pick up the ball and include cheat sheets. I guess I better write one for WWW::Mechanize to set a good example… :-)

How do you make sure people are aware of how things work in your projects?

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/technology/11PORN.html

It seems that to anyone familiar with the range of nastiness that a Trojan’s capabilities encompass, depositing some child porn is a not-unexpected problem. Yet Julian Green fought an uphill battle to use this as a defense.

Good forensic analysis should make it both easy to validate this defense for innocents that are accused as well as to invalidate this defense for actual porn-hounds that are claiming it falsely. In fact, the talk I saw at the eGovOS conference last March by a computer forensics investigator from the Air Force specifically addressed the “Trojan horse defense” as a possibility that they entertain.

The worry on the horizon is, I suppose, a Trojan horse that is better at camouflaging itself than the investigator is at finding it. When combined with a targeted attack instead of random infection from a sketchy web site, this would certainly make the accused’s pleas of “I’m innocent!” seem hollow. Child porn is good for discrediting political or business opponents; classified information for framing an government enemy; one criminal could use documents about entering the witness protection program to put false suspicion on another criminal; the list goes on.

What data, Trojan-horsed to whom, do you think would be damaging/amusing/frightening?

Related link: http://linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny03/V40/index.cvn

The environment of a trade show is blaringly inorganic. But I sometimes felt at LinuxWorld as if I was running back and forth through a garden, checking the progress of each sapling. I used the three brief days of the show to track the growth of Linux in several types of applications:

• Embedded
• Desktop and enterprise
• Cluster
• Mainframe

Embedded Linux

Proponents of embedded Linux seem satisfied with its rate of adoption. There’s no way to be sure how many companies are using it, given the lack of licensing and the tendency of companies to treat their choice of embedded system as a competitive secret. But I heard lots of praise at the conference for the qualities of Linux that help it win over other embedded systems.

Chief among the qualities cited are Linux’s sophisticated network stack, which supports an impressive range of the latest standards from Bluetooth to IPv6. I heard, at a presentation on Carrier Grade Linux by Glenn Sieler of
MontaVista Software, that Linux’s support for IPv6 was attracting the interest of the telecom industry (which he estimated as 30% of the embedded Linux market), particularly in Korea and Japan where they cannot ignore the looming threat of a shortage of IPv4 addresses.

Sieler laid out a laundry list of Linux’s advantages for telecom devices, both technical and social:

• Ample technical support.
• A wide range of supported hardware, offering easy portability of applications to new platforms.
• Availability of source code.
• Royalty-free use.
• Powerful development tools.
• Small footprint and modular design.

One key player in embedded Linux is the uClinux project (where the “u” stands for “micro”), a port of Linux to chips without memory management units. Building a microprocessor without an MMU, according to uClinux maintainer Greg Ungerer, allows it to be cheaper and even a bit faster than conventional chips. The disadvantages of doing without an MMU, such as static-sized stacks and the lack of memory protection, are often unimportant to embedded developers. uClinux will be integrated into the core Linux 2.6 distribution.

Ungerer and another uClinux maintainer, David McCullough, work at
SnapGear,
a company that makes a feature-rich firewall and routing appliance so compact you can practically twirl it on one finger.

Sangoma goes even farther in shrinking the router, providing a single network interface card that, according to founder David Mandelstam, allows typical desktop systems to replace specialized routers and telecommunications equipment. Mandelstam, one of the more passionately evangelical CEOs I met, declared that he wanted to demystify routers. Vanilla Linux already provides routing and firewall software as full-featured as most people would want, and typically runs with much more memory and CPU power than high-priced, specialized routers. As for protocols, Sangoma cards support ADSL, Frame Relay, ATM–you name it. And while it plugs into many types of systems, Mandelstam considers Linux the best choice for this application.

(I already mentioned the OpenPDA in
Thursday’s weblog.)

Desktop and enterprise Linux

The consensus among most observers, outside of the most enthusiastic Linux proponents, is that it will take a long time for Linux to be adopted by the average knowledge worker or home user. Thus, companies seem to be focusing on selling into the enterprise, with desktop Linux as an option to provide a consistent environment with Linux on servers. I believe this strategy lay behind Red Hat’s recent announcement that it would no longer sell its personal workstation version in shrinkwrapped CD form. SuSE is also focusing on the enterprise. However, see the successes I cited for the
Linux Terminal Server Project
in Thursday’s weblog.

Linux clusters

While most uses of Linux examined in this article consist of entries into existing markets and applications, clustering is an area where it has opened up exciting new possibilities. Although clustering existed before Linux, it has broken new ground by enabling the use of cheap commodity hardware without software license fees.

It appeared to me at LinuxWorld that Linux clustering has become almost ubiquitous where solutions for large enterprises are found. IBM advertises that its DB2 database management system (the database behind
SourceForge)
can run on a cluster of shared-nothing (independent storage) Linux systems. Stalker’s CommuniGate (mentioned in
Thursday’s weblog) uses clusters. Many more instances could be cited.

Emic Networks, which markets Linux clustering solutions for Apache and MySQL to permit load-balancing and high availability, imposes very stringent requirements on its clusters. Each node within the cluster can handle a MySQL update and inform the user that it has finished, but before the cluster can handle any further queries, the update is propagated to all the other nodes so they move forward in lockstep. In this manner, different parts of a transaction (as well as overlapping queries and updates) can be handled by different nodes without the danger of dirty or phantom reads. A reliable protocol is layered on top of a UDP broadcast to accomplish the synchronization.

Incidentally, the appearance on Monday of an article in the New York Times promoting the importance of traditional Cray-style supercomputers has no bearing on this Linux clustering trend. It’s not surprising that certain applications traditionally run on big-metal supercomputers require that architecture. The important point is that commodity hardware and license-free software is discovering an unexpectedly wide range of new applications.

Linux on mainframes

Surprised? I wasn’t expecting originally to include a section on mainframes either. But Linux, which has always been a way to extend the life of old Windows and Macintosh hardware, has been thriving on legacy IBM mainframes for the same reason. According to VP of Marketing for Linuxcare, Beat Knecht, sites are even buying new mainframes to run Linux. IBM continues to push its mainframe and even announced a port of Lotus’s Domino server to Linux on the zSeries mainframe.

While Linux has been ported to the bare hardware, it is apparently more common to run several instances of Linux on top of IBM’s native MVS. Knecht explained that Linux, even though it is a multiuser operating system, does better running only one service at a time when the large applications that are popular nowadays are involved, such as databases and web servers.

Linuxcare, one of the earliest commercial names in the Linux space, has been extending the life of mainframes and doing a pretty good job of extending its own life as well by turning into a vendor of management software called Levanta for Linux on the mainframe. What was remarkable to me is that some 45 conference attendees took the trouble to cross the street and slip into the gothic industrial-nostalgia interior design of the W Hotel to hear CEO Avery Lyford’s pitch.

Conclusion

LinuxWorld is an important show, a good place to pick up what’s hot fast. It’s also loud, high-pressure, and sometimes vulgar. The temptation to hype one’s product may be overwhelming, just to make it stand out among the din of competing messages, and I may have succumbed once or twice to the heady brew.

Among the marketing materials that IBM handed out at LinuxWorld was the factlet that the world produced two exabytes of information in 1999. I hope that the weblogs I’ve generated at this conference add a little to this information. The other weblogs I wrote at the conference are:

• Linux becomes a commodity at LinuxWorld
• .com strategies and .org forays at LinuxWorld

What other trends in Linux and free software should be noted?

I believe the organizing power of the Internet is really just dawning. One great example is the ‘Flash Mob’ phenomenon where people organize over the Internet and appear at some location at a predetermined time to do — as a group — something pointless and unusual.

I believe that this phenomena will grow into a ’social movement’ similar, but much larger, than the open source software movement. I believe that ‘Super Mobs’ will self-organize around large social issues. MoveOn.org I believe will be looked back on as the first ‘Super Mob’.

The Howard Dean campaign is much more highly developed than the current Flash Mob movement and is approaching the organizational maturity of MoveOn.org. The Dean campaign is using the Internet as an organizing tool and have over 70,000 people meeting monthly around the country at ‘meetups’ organized by Meetup.com.

I visited the Dean campaign’s New Hampshire state headquarters and met with his ‘e-communications director’ (who was actually swamped doing database work at the time — they need volunteers!). After he realized I knew a bit about the open source community he immediately asked me if I’d read The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Eric Raymond’s book on the open source community — a required read for anyone interested in open source). He said he thought Dean’s campaign was like the Bazaar while the other dems campaigns were run like Cathedrals.

A similar and more mature model is the open source software community (that develops, for example, the Linux OS). In that model, a ‘meritocracy’ develops in which the people who contribute the most value to the community through the work they do become the leaders of the community. Yet they are open to anyone’s involvement, pay and employ noone, and are completely self organzizing.

(Given that model, I believe a great role model for leadership and organizational development of Super Mobs would be Linus Torvolds - the creator of the Linux OS. He’s developed a world-wide team of volunteers that contribute hundreds of thousands of hours a year to help build Linux; yet he is tightly in control of the end product.)

I believe in time that very large groups of millions of people will develop. Eventually, ways of orgnizing these groups will be found using free software and the Internet. Leaders will likely appear in a similar ‘meritocracy’ method. Individuals will initiate their own projects and efforts using tools provided by the community and based on the ‘values’ of the community.

But I believe there will also be very large efforts as well coordinated by these ’super mobs’. I believe they will be larger than any demonstrations in history.

So what can we learn from this:

• Provide tools to organize. Allow the community to develop and contribute tools as well
• Define (and live up to) ‘values’ for the community. These should also include what *not* to do.
• Allow the development of a ‘meritocracy’. That is, allow those who work hard and demonstrate the values of the community to gain visibility and help plan and guide the community. These people will be your greatest asset and they will work for free.
• Think big. Facilitate local community projects, but have a few really big tricks to pull out your hat that could have a million or more participants.

There is a fundamental difference in the economic interests of people and corporations. Corporations need to maximize economic benefits for their owners and those who control them. The People, for example, may prefer pristine wilderness over land developed for energy interests.

Super Mobs of millions of people may provide the best opportunity for the people to counterbalance the power of these corporations.

Am I crazy or what?

Imagine that you owned a bakery and someone wrote you a letter asking for $100,000 because they said they owned a patent that your ovens violated. If you didn’t pay, they might say, you’ll be sued for significantly more and have your business shut down. What would you do?

Sound incredible? Well these kinds of lawsuits may be on the verge of exploding in the software industry.

How would it work? Well, imagine that someone filed for a patent on some area of XML parsing - or on some enhancement to web server software that later got incorporated into Apache. Or maybe they held a patent on some underlying technology incorporated in Linux.

These people could then ‘pull an SCO’, but potentially with a stronger case (some might say, with a *real* case when you consider what the SCO case is built on).

Worse, they could go after the open source developers themselves and potentially take their homes and savings (if they have any).

One of the best defenses against patent infringement is the establishment of what’s called “Prior Art”, or a demonstration that the patent the person holds is invalid because they tried to patent something that others had already done. In other words, Prior Art can render a patent invalid.

So how is Prior Art shown? Well, when you have a suit filed against you, you go out and try to determine what specifically the patent you’re being sued under is about, then you try to find examples where software was available prior to the the patent filing that already implemented the technology that the patent covers.

If you can show Prior Art, then you’re protected because the patent is the shown to be invalid.

Now, I’m not a lawyer and I may be misrepresenting some of the nuances of the process, but essentially that’s how I understand it. Establishment of Prior Art is a critical strategy when defending yourself against patent lawsuits.

So here’s my question: Why wait until the lawsuits strt flying for us (the open source community) to begin collecting Prior Art evidence? Why not begin now? Maybe more importantly, why haven’t we already begun?

For example, someone in the open source community likely can determine when the first ‘journaled file system’ woas deployed in an open source project. A lot of that information is available in the old cvs trees of existing or dead open source projects.

Then if anyone ever filed a patent lawsuit on a journalled file system patent, we’d already have the information we need to etablish Pior Art in that case (if it were available).

There would be a huge benefit to the community if this were done. For example:

• It would save open source projects potentially many thousands of dollars in doing this research on their own if they were sued for patent infringement.
• It would avoid lawsuits being filed if this information were made publically available and patent holders could see that Prior Art had been found that preceeded the patents they held. If they knew they would lose, they wouldn’t file suit.
• If would make it much easier for open source projects to ensure they weren’t violating patents. If there were place they could go to research what Prior Art exited in the specific area they were writing software for, then it would help them avoid infringing patents to begin with.

This kind of resource would go a long way toward helping the open source community minimize its patent lawsuit exposure.

And we need to get started. A lot of the ‘Pior Art’ may exist in the source trees of projects that are currently no longer in use. These old source trees — and the innovative algorithms they contain — may eventually be needed to establish Prior Art and protect an open source developer in the future. If they are lost or deleted, we may lose the Prior Art they can establish forever.

So, what would a ‘Prior Art Project’ contain? I believe it would contain an encyclopedia (wiki?) of algorithms sorted and retrievable in different ways. We need people who are familiar with old projects and old innovations to come forward and tell us of early and historical examples of particular algorithms for data communications, file management, I/O management, etc.

It might even be of use to identify all software patents in existence and build teams of people with the specific charge to invalidate them all by establishing specific Prior Art for each of them. At least then we’d know which of these patents were truly valid.

You see — the Patent Office doesn’t do a great job (putting it mildly here) of researching Prior Art in software patents. Their attitude is ‘let the courts sort it out’.

Letting the courts sort it out gives the upper hand to patent holders that have legal staffs and deep pockets. It puts the open source community at an extreme advantage because most of us can’t afford the million or so dollars it may cost to defend a patent lawsuit.

So why can’t we take things into our own hands? Why can’t we control our own destiny on this issue? If we as a community can find a way to organize this information in a usable way, then it may be our best defense once the lawsuits start flying.

The information is there — it’s just spread across the minds and old cvs trees of the developers who originally crafted these innovations. Why should we let corporations holding patents get credit for this work? Let’s find a way to organize the information for our own protection before some critical pieces of it are lost forever.

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t plan that seem to have the most impact.

Today was one of those days. I’d been talking with Bruce Perens earlier in the day after attending a talk he gave on a bunch of issues including software patents and the dangers they pose to the Open Source Community — as well as to individual open source developers. It was a fascinating talk that covered a bunch of issues including his take on the current SCO debacle. (I’ve gotten his permission to reprint the talk in the next issue of LinuxWorld Magazine.)

A bit later, I ran into Zak Welch. Zak is ‘Chairman of the Board’ of The Zynot Foundation — a group of open source developers that are working on a new Linux distribution that has been forked from the Gentoo distribution.

The Zynot Foundation booth was over in the ‘.org pavilion’ of the LinuxWorld show floor. This is the area where all the open source developers and non-profits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation hang out. Zak’s area was filled with a bunch of hard-core coders. There were ideas flying everywhere and acoustic guitars stashed in the corner. The place was a hotbed of innovation.

Zak is setting up this new group and has a bunch of innovative ideas on how to structure his project so that developers can make money from their work and also be protected from software patent lawsuits. He’s incorporated as a 501.c.3 corporation and even has a lawyer on his board of directors.

So I got talking to Zak about some of Bruce’s ideas on protecting the open source community and individual developers from patent lawsuits and that got him even more excited. We arranged to get together and meet Bruce later to discuss it more.

So later when we got together with Bruce, what followed was a really interesting and cutting edge discussion on what open source groups (and the companies that benefit from their work) can do to protect themselves from patent lawsuit liability and ensure they aren’t knocked out of business by some deep-pocketed corporation using patent law to shut down competition from the open source community.

Of course, it all needs to begin with the developers themselves making sure they aren’t violating patents with the work they are doing. Zak’s approach to that is to come up with a “commiter’s agreement” that all commiters sign saying they won’t do so. In addition, both Bruce and Zak agreed that incorporation as a 501.c.3 corporation provides at least some ’shield’ for developers themselves.

But corporations need to play a part in this as well. In today’s world, the amount of open source software in use in corporations is staggering. If this free resource were to be suddenly threatened, it could literally cause billions of dollars of damage to economies around the world. Even if you are outside America, if an American corporation’s lawsuit shuts down an open source project that you use software from, you’re going to be impacted.

Bruce indicated that there is a recently passed Volunteer Protection Act that may be able to protect members of a non-profit group. He indicated it hadn’t been tested, but that it should protect developers as long as they and their project meet the criteria set out in the bill.

Zak is convinced, however, that the existing laws governing the structure of non-profits don’t fit the model of open source software groups. He’s concerned that by having to ’shoe-horn’ his business into one of the models provided it will cost more money than need be — and that none of the types of non-profit structures available really fit with the organization he’s trying to build.

The great thing was we recorded the whole conversation and it can be found (all 20 minutes of it) in mp3 format on the LinuxWorld.com website. If you have more interest it will be there for you to listen to.

It was a great dialog of cutting edge ideas that are all critical for the open source community at this point in time. If you think your open source group doesn’t need to worry about patent lawsuits, think again. And listen to the mp3.

And the discussion was all on the spur of the moment. That’s what happens when you hang out in the “.org pavilion” area.

You don’t have to look far to find innovation in the .org pavillion, it finds you.

Related link: http://linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny03/V40/index.cvn

Today’s report from
LinuxWorld
covers such disparate issues as:

• 
  Why companies are here to show their support for Linux
  

• 
  Why Microsoft in particular is here (with a sizeable pavilion, too)
  

• 
  A report on attempts by LPI and the new Open Source and Industry
  Alliance to promote a public policy that’s friendly to software
  freedom.
  

Why Linux?

It might go without saying that most companies at LinuxWorld are not
selling Linux, but rather selling products that run under Linux, on
Linux, or with Linux. So I amused myself over the past three days
asking them–why Linux? Here are some responses.

• John Sarsgard, VP of the Linux Sales Program at
  IBM,
  focused first on the widespread ports of Linux. By offering products
  that run on Linux, IBM can offer them for an unusually broad range of
  hardware–whatever the customer has.

  To Sarsgard, Linux (which can be used for the DB2 database engine,
  among other products) and Apache (which underlies WebSphere) are
  contributors to the IBM focus on solutions rather than individual
  pieces of software. If free software projects fill a need, IBM is
  happy to use them.

• A staff person from
  Metrowerks Corporation
  explained the appeal of Linux (along with Java and, for the GUI, Qt
  Embedded) for the
  OpenPDA
  recently announced by
  AMD.
  Metrowerks likes the way these standards (and other free software)
  work together to make a platform that’s easy to develop for and a
  system where it’s easy to download and run the resulting
  applications. The staff person also praised the speed of the AMD
  processor, which allows unusually high-quality video displays on the
  PDA.

• Stalker Software,
  which puts out a mail server and drop-in replacement for Microsoft
  Exchange called CommuniGate Pro, is outflanking Microsoft by
  supporting a wider variety of operating systems: Linux and the Mac in
  addition to Windows. Linux is the system used by over 30% of
  CommuniGate Pro users (which constitute some 28 million active seats
  at 6,500 customer sites). CommuniGate Pro won the LinuxWorld award for
  best network server application.

• Phillipe Roussel, CEO of
  Arkeia,
  a company with an enterprise network backup product that runs on many
  platforms, called Linux an “honest operating system” where you know
  what it does and can go in to fix it if necessary. He thinks that his
  product, like Samba, provides an underground channel for introducing
  Linux into an organization whose management is not sympathetic to
  Linux.

• Staff at
  BakBone software,
  which also offers a backup system for many platforms and was a
  finalist for the “Best Storage Solution” prize at LinuxWorld, went
  into more detail about the technical merits of Linux. Its flexible
  block size lets them define blocks of up to 256K, leading to faster
  data transfers. Other features, including the standard Unix memory
  mapping calls, make it one of the fastest systems for doing back-ups
  to disk (with the option of subsequently storing to tape).

Neck and .NET

It was notable that two very different speakers at sessions I attended
made the same claim: that Linux is not yet taking market share from
Microsoft.

The first speaker, Jeremy White, CEO of
CodeWeavers
(a company that makes the popular Wine-based product CrossOver Office,
which I depend on routinely to run Word and PowerPoint), claimed that
the majority of conversions to Linux are former Unix users, not former
Windows users. He also offered the candid reminder that Wine, for all
its successes, is still pre-beta software and runs only a moderate
percentage of Windows applications.

The second speaker, Dan Kusnetzky of the well-known research firm IDC,
pointed out that Windows is steadily increasing its market share along
with Linux, both doing so at the expense of Unix and the Mac. In
fact, Windows server sales are increasing. He said, “Linux is not
competing with Windows in people’s minds; it’s competing with Unix.”

Kusnetzky estimated that training costs would be so high for a switch
to Linux that cost savings would not be noticeable until five years
had passed.

I’ve heard it before–that it will be a few more years at least before
Linux is ready to replace Windows for average users. But I don’t know
whether that’s the only story. There is too much anecdotal evidence to
the contrary.

For instance, Ali Liptrot of Stalker Software (mentioned earlier) said
that potential customers are constantly saying they want to mix
Windows and Linux at their sites, or (especially recently) to replace
Windows with Linux.

Even more impressive are the success stories told by adopters
(carefully picked, to be sure) of the
Linux Terminal Server Project.
The need for system administration went down precipitously when
Windows systems (or sometimes other stand-alone systems) were replaced
by thin Linux clients. Schools found the migration particularly
valuable. One administrator said that students could become productive
after a single training session on the Linux applications at the
beginning of the year. (Teachers, he admitted, showed more resistance
to change.) And another administrator replaced thousands of Windows
systems and just let the students loose. Soon enough, they showed a
preference for Linux even in environments where both Windows and Linux
were available.

The LTSP press conference was attended by one of the fathers of the X
Window System, Jim Gettys, who said that LTSP was fulfilling the
promise that Project Athena and other networked solutions proposed
decades ago. What’s different now is that we have a “basic critical
infrastructure” of applications average people want to use on these
systems. LTSP also won the LinuxWorld award for best open source
software solution.

The testimonials by LTSP adopters, even if they are unusually
enthusiastic, suggest to me a potentially industry-shaking role for
LTSP that goes even beyond the disruptive potential of Linux
itself. All it takes is the presence a single educated and intrepid
system administrator (because more and more of them are becoming
comfortable with Linux) for an organization to make the switch. While
my own conservative nature conditions me to agree with the observers
who grant Microsoft a long lease on the desktops of America’s
corporations, I suspect they don’t take all the relevant factors into
account.

So I strolled over to the Microsoft area to get an official story
about their presence at LinuxWorld from Microsoft representative Jason
Matusow. He said that, by distributing free CDs of software for
Windows/Unix integration, they are showing that they understand a lot
of customers are using mixed environments and consider integration a
good thing. Second, they think the operating system is of less
interest to customers than the whole “solution stack” (a phrase
reminiscent of my earlier conversation with John Sarsgard of IBM, and
of the Red Hat press conference announcing support for Web software,
which I mentioned in
Tuesday’s weblog).
All in all, my exchange with Matusow suggested a Microsoft that is
pulling its punches and trying to present a less “you’re either with
us or against us” attitude than some of its spokespeople have in the
past.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to attend Tuesday’s keynote by
Jonathan Schwartz of Sun, but I sensed that the very name of the
keynote–”Java and Linux”–portended the change in attitude that Sun
has been undergoing over the past year or so about where it should put
its efforts and make its alliances. It is intriguing, though, to set
this shift next to the list of major projects that Red Hat announced
as being at the center of their new strategy. The featured Red Hat
choices are J2SE, Eclipse, and Jakarta–Java projects every one.

It’s not hard to guess why Linux has become so important to the
creators of Java, or Java so important to the biggest company in the
area of Linux. The hottest topic in the field of software right now is
Web Services, and the two main contenders there–Microsoft’s .NET and
a collection of Java-based technologies–are running neck and
neck. Each side is scared out of their wits at a possible victory of
the other side.

Is Web Services really going to determine the fate of software? Well,
I think Web Services offer a superb opportunity for reducing costs.
Just watching all the paperwork my doctor’s office has to fill out,
and the constant stream of faxed referrals, makes whatever pain I have
worse whenever I’m there. If they could run a simple application that
grabbed my data (in ways approved the HIPPA privacy regulations) and
sent an insurance form over the Internet to a database on the other
side, countless hours and dollars would be saved.

So I’m a believer in Web Services, to a modest extent. The grander
vision of businesses routinely searching each other out and carrying
on transactions without the touch of human hands leaves me skeptical.

And I’ve heard doubts about the ultimate value of Web Services
expressed by some of the old hands in the Web and XML. But if Web
Services don’t take off, things are even scarier for those of us still
in the computer field, because what hot new initiative can take its
place?

Well, there’s still a strong need for all the traditional services
we’re used to. And there’s a whole new world opening up of tiny
personal devices. As they shrink the ratio between computing power and
network bandwidth, new areas for application development will open up
too. Individuals will want to control these applications and schedule
their own activities on these personal devices. I hope that scripting
languages–old or new–will fill the programming gap. And both Linux
and open source software may turn out to be the engine behind the new
creativity.

A summit emerges from the clouds

Although the International Telecommunication Union deals in crucial
standards that make the world’s satellite transmissions work and its
telephone networks interoperate, most people are perfectly safe
ignoring its existence. Most of us also let various United Nations
symposia go by without a thought. But it looks like one initiative by
the ITU and the United Nations, the

World Summit on the Information Society,
may be worthy of attention. In a pair of meetings (one in Switzerland
in December 2003, and another in Tunisia in November 2005) they will
discuss such weighty issues as bridging the digital divide, promoting
free speech and access to information, and creating an environment for
innovation.

More and more, I’ve been hearing references to WSIS and the importance
of people who care about Internet policy to make their voices heard
there. In the past two days, WSIS came up in two different forums at
LinuxWorld by people who didn’t even know each other.

The first was a Birds-of-a-Feather session held to promote an exciting
new policy group, the
Open Source and Industry Alliance.
This looks like a real chance to fill the policy vacuum that so many
in the free software and digital rights communities have been unable
to fill; a chance to put lobbyists for these causes in Washington with
meaningful access to legislators and regulators; a chance to make real
inroads against software patents and regulations discriminating
against free software. The group is inspired and guided by the
Computer and Communications Industry Association, which has been
taking good positions and playing the Washington insider game for
years. A list of prominent free software figures who have praised the
new OSAIA and called for support can be found on its Web site; they
are joined by Tim O’Reilly and some other leaders of the movement who
appeared at Tuesday’s BOF. One speaker emphasized that WSIS would take
stands on many issues of importance to our communities, and that we
need representatives at their meetings.

The second forum was a meeting of the
Linux Professional Institute,
known for its tests of Linux proficiency. President Evan Leibovitch
mentioned that LPI had applied for the right to represent the free
software community at WSIS (the only other such organization that
applied, to his knowledge, is Software in the Public Interest).

All fired up by my new conversion, I went around the conference
talking up WSIS. The initiative is heavy on the organizational
infrastructure, as one would expect from its founders, so not many
will be able to participate, but we can all watch and comment.

Leibovitch believes that LPI itself is helping to bring computer
technology to underdeveloped countries. In these countries, far more
than in North America and Europe, free software is the only option for
many organizations and individuals. Out of caution or inertia, many of
these organizations say they can’t install free software because they
have no way of determining the competency of administrative
staff. Hence the value of LPI.

(I have also heard that recent heightened efforts by Microsoft and
others to cut off unlicensed use of their software in underdeveloped
countries is making more organizations look seriously at open source
software. Maybe the proprietary vendors should have listened to
economists who say that unlicensed use benefits the vendor in the long
run.)

Its credibility is enhanced by it being a vendor-independent
.org. Evan points out that LPI is breaking the common pattern in the
computer field (but nowhere else) where vendors offer certification
for their own products. People don’t get driver’s licenses from Ford,
nor do doctors get their licenses to practice from Squibb–so why
should you get certified by a vendor with a vested interest?

Many people dismiss the value of certification in the computer
industry, but no one can get around its importance in the eyes of
human resource departments. Whatever you think of certification in
general, it’s part of the mainstreaming of Linux–but like everything
else with Linux, how it’s being done is critically different from
other systems.

This is amazing. I’ve never been to a major trade show where there was so much buzz and energy out on the show floor!

I’m writing this from a pod of computers provided by HP that are all running Red Hat - a sweet setup seeing so many machines all running Linux.

Everyone’s talking about the SCO debacle. People are beginning to wonder out loud if they could’ve possibly realized the can of worms they were opening! I interviewed to one of the two analysts that actually saw the code that SCO claims was infringed - you can hear the interview via an mp3 recording on the LinuxWorld.com site at : http://www.linuxworld.com/page/interviews.htm

Some of the other cool interviews were with John Fowler, CTO for Software at Sun Microsystems, Paul Cormier (EVP Engineering at Red Hat, Inc), and Charles Samuals (a committer on the KDE project). All these interviews and a bunch more are in mp3 format at the link above.

Went to an interesting talk this morning by Bruce Perens. He had some intersting thoughts on some of the major challenges facing the open source community right now. I’ll be interviewing him tomorrow for a piece to run in LniuxWorld Magazine — but I’ll post info here as well. This is great stuff!

Other than that, it’s the usual stuff. People in Penguin suits, guys with old DefCon badges selling “No SCO” shirts in the aisles, and the usual crop of t-shirts with sayings like, “I read your e-mail!”.

But the biggest story is just how big Linux has become and how every major company I’m interviewing also says they are giving back to the open source community - IBM has 300 developers working only on committing to open source, Sun has many more as well, Veritas has some, everyone does.

Open Source’s time has come. It’s like a coming out party!

Related link: http://linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny03/V40/index.cvn

Perhaps the clearest indication that operating systems are becoming a
commodity (a
prediction that many made
at the latest O’Reilly Open Source conference and elsewhere, to sound
the end of the Microsoft Windows era)
was Red Hat’s

announcement today
that it was going to spend considerable effort on application-level
software such as IBM’s Eclipse and Apache’s Jakarta.
I attended a Red Hat press conference at Linuxworld today where the
spokesperson made it clear that Red Hat was “moving up the stack.” In
other words, they felt they could do for other parts of the Open
Source infrastructure what they did for Linux, increasing its
visibility and pitching it successfully to a corporate market.

I deduce from this new initiative that pitching Linux is no longer
enough for Red Hat’s continued growth–despite the gratifying growth
of the Linux market. (According to another source, Linux sales are
predicted to surpass the sales of all commercial Unix systems
combined, by the end of 2003.)

Business is brisk and action is lively here at Moscone Center, a pair
of concrete boxes shoved like huge desk drawers into the more
convivial parkland in the middle of San Francisco’s downtown. In
further weblogs this week, I will summarize the conversations I’ve had
and draw more conclusions for which nobody but myself should be
blamed.

Related link: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10872

In an open letter, Greg Stein, Chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, today announced the incubation of a new Apache project: “Geronimo”. He writes:

AS YOU MAY have heard by now, the Apache Software Foundation has initiated a project to develop an open source, Apache-licensed implementation of the J2EE specification. In addition, the project is committed to certifying the implementation as J2EE compliant. This is an ambitious goal and will present a formidable challenge for the people involved, given the wide range of technologies covered by the specification.

The project (tentatively named “Apache Geronimo”) builds upon the many Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, the project is bringing together leading members of the Castor, JBoss, MX4J and OpenEJB communities. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone involved in the J2EE space, both commercial entities and talented individuals, to join the community and build a world-class J2EE implementation.

Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-5059541.html?tag=fd_top

A couple of hackers from the Shmoo Group have unveiled their new prototype “autonomous hacker droid” — a two-wheeled, Wi-Fi-enabled robot, designed to seek out and record insecure wireless transmissions. (Thanks to MattW for the link.)

Related link: http://ao2003.com

Often the most interesting things at a conference are the side remarks given
by the speakers or by the people asking the questions. Here are the ones that
I picked up from the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit.

Tony
Perkins: "The total amount I paid for the software we use to run our
AlwaysOn site was $145".
Wow, how many minutes of a developer can you pay for this? To be fair he added:
"Well, services, that is another thing. But I felt so guilty, that I donated
some money to an open source organization." Clearly the business model
of giving away the software and making it up with services.

When people explain open source software licensing you often hear the terms
"free as in beer"
or "free as in speech". I think it was Chris
Stone from Novell that referred to it with: "Free as in puppy".
It made me smile, because it nailed one of the aspects of open source software:
It’s oh so cute and you take it, not realizing what a commitment it can be.

A very Bay Area experience was the performance of the ultra
gypsy belly dancers in front of the Rodin’s
Gate to Hell. If you are ever at Stanford don’t miss the Rodin Garden especially
the Gate
to Hell, with all the little demons and devils it is a great piece of art. To
have tattooed belly dancers with fire and swords perform in front of it was
just magnificent.

Having
an AOL email account is like putting a learner plate on the back of your car,
or still having training wheels on your bicycle and your mom told you: "Drive
only on the sidewalk of this block and be home when it’s getting dark."
Interesting side note: Child safety is one of the top five requests of AOL users,
but 97% of the parents don’t even use the provided features.

Jonathan Miller CEO of AOL presented some of the interesting features of their
9.0 release. There will be blogs, called AOL Journal (Here Dan
Gillmor is testing it by posting his first AOL
blog/journal entry). People were intrigued, and someone asked will they
offer me my own email/web address (anything but @aol.com). Jonathan said something
like "Yes, they are thinking about it, but no not yet [or not really]."

In the same week AOL
dropped the Netscape/Mozilla development team from their payroll with a
fig leaf of 2
million dollars to enable them to make it on their own.

Will I sign up for AOL, after seeing the presentation? Yes, I was thinking
about it, but not yet, or not really.

Related link: http://www.bofh.org.uk/articles/2003/08/01/the-fine-art-of-complexity-management

Piers Cawley, Perl 6 summarizer and passionate advocate of good programming practices, suggests that hiding complexity behind simplicity is the mark of a master craftsman.

Related link: http://www.aggregate.org/KASY0/

Researchers at the University of Kentucky have built a 128-node Beowulf cluster using commodity hardware, which they anticipate will break former price/performance records, at less than US$100 per gigaflop. The kicker? The cluster’s network topology was designed by a genetic algorithm. (Thanks to Wes Felter for the link.)

About a year ago, I wrote this in my use.perl.org journal:

I grate my teeth any time I hear a sentence that starts “Can’t you just?” If those words come out of your mouth, stop and think. You’re missing something important.

“Can’t you just” is usually said when discussing a problem with someone else. The other person will explain the problem, and you’ll jump in with the handy, simple and obvious answer. Some examples:

• “I’m not sure how we’re going to get that server onto the network. Turns out that this wall jack is dead.”
  “Can’t you just run an extension cable over to that jack over there?”
• “The system needs to support users that have control over other users. I think we need to have some sort of table that tracks relationships.”
  “Can’t we just add a flag to the USER table?”
• “I don’t have enough for an NT license in the budget, but I have to get print services up and running by the end of the week.”
  “Why don’t you just run Linux on the server?”

In each case, someone has a complex problem, with the not-very-helpful suggestion of an obvious, quick-win solution. The suggester has undoubtedly not taken all the issues into account. The response in each case will be one of the following:

• “I thought of that, but that leaves open the possibility that…”,
  
… and then a list of the reasons why that simple, obvious solution is not workable.
• “Ooooh, yeah, that’s a good one. Let’s do that.”
  
This doesn’t mean that the simple, obvious solution is any more viable, only that the listener hasn’t thought of the reasons why yet.

It’s rare that a complex problem has a simple solution, or that the simple solution doesn’t have far-ranging side effects. Running an extension cable adds to the rat’s nest of cabling in the server room, or the user flag will soon have to be a set of flags that become a maintenance headache, or the Linux server causes problems in an all-NT shop.

As programmers, we’re used to doing magic and making things work right. As Perl programmers, especially, we are Lazy and Impatient, and expect the problem to be easily solved. However, if someone has been struggling with the problem for a while, the chances that they’ve missed an obvious, painless solution are small. It’s also somewhat insulting to presume that the answer is right there in front of the person, unseen. Rephrase “Can’t you just” as “Have you not noticed that the obvious solution is to”, and you’ll see what I mean. You’re probably not that much better of a problem-solver than the other person.

There’s nothing wrong with being helpful when colleagues are faced with a problem. Just keep the enthusiasm for your solution balanced with a healthy amount of skepticism, and expect that they’re not blind.

Now, Piers Cawley has expanded his OSCON 2003 Lightning Talk into a thoughtful essay called “The Fine Art Of Complexity Management” where he argues that the word “just” is an excellent design tool. Read on as he discusses test-driven development, refactoring, Exegesis 6 and clarified butter.