When I saw this ZDNet blog headline in my RSS feed the other day…

ZDNet - Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney: Will Bill Gates’ departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft?

…my first thought was: Here we go again, another uninformed opinion. But, if you’ve opened the link in another tab and read their blog item already, you know that this was not the case. It was just a good attention grabbing blog title with some interesting quotes from players in the Open Source community.

My gut instinct is that Microsoft’s Open Source strategy will continue to follow the trajectory we’ve seen for the past three years or so. Like any complex undertaking, there will be three steps forward with the occasional two steps back every now and then.

I read about the U.S. government’s USAsearch.gov site using the Vivisimo engine for search federal, state, and local government sites in the U.S. This is the same engine used by the Clusty search site (which somehow always reminds me of Krusty the clown from the Simpsons :-).

The first phrase that came to mind to search for was Open Source. But, the result surprised me although I should not have been surprised. Why? The first hit was a site named OpenSource.gov. That makes sense, right? And, it does unless you are a tech geek (like me and most of you reading this) and always think of Open Source in terms of software. In government lingo Open Source means available sources of intelligence information (not in the espionage sense of the word). So, in their own words: OpenSource.gov provides timely and tailored translations, reporting and analysis on foreign policy and national security issues from the Open Source Center and its partners.

For some reason, after slapping my forehead and uttering a Homer-esque “Doh!” when I realized my error, I thought about Sam Ramji’s blog entry titled Managing Towards Open. And then, with all seriousness, it occurred to me that Microsoft’s Open Source Labs is performing somewhat similar work as OpenSource.gov by gathering intelligence about software countries (so to speak) with different philosophies like various Open Source licenses (both in the free as in freedom and free as in beer - or carbonated beverages in my case).

BTW: I found it a bit odd that my search on USAsearch.gov using both “open source” and “open source” + “software” didn’t actually result in many finds or of the ones kinds of results I expected (SELinux, NASA related projects, etc.).

Here’s something that’s a bit dated (a few weeks old) but something I’ve been meaning to mull over and comment on. On May 28, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that…

Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google (as reported on ZDNet by Mary-Jo Foley)

Mary Jo Foley goes on to report that: Ozzie said that competing with open source “made Microsoft a much stronger company.” He cited changes Microsoft has made to its business model — such as focusing on making its closed-source software interoperable with open-source products — as directly attributable to that competition.

If you take this view and combine it with the information we’ve been reading over on…

Microsoft Port 25

…it really looks like Open Source is not only a beneficial disruptive technology for Microsoft, it is also also becoming more of a “co-opetition” partner. Zend, Spikesource, and Novell/SUSE are just some recent examples. And, there are also the in-house projects like IronPython and IronRuby. There’s also cooperation between Microsoft and the Mozilla Firefox and Samba projects.

This is certainly better for all concerned than the Microsoft vs. Open Source situation just a few years ago. Is there a lot of work to be done? Sure. Are there going to be more issues and fireworks in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is :-)

The first Linux Plumbers Conference has just been announced. It takes place on September 17-19 in Portland, Oregon, back-to-back with this year’s Linux Kernel summit.

The scope of Linux Plumbers Conference goes a bit beyond the Linux kernel; it spills out to include interfaces with the X Window System and some other userspace features. The list of major topics, which will be the subjects of “microconfs” lasted about two and a half hours each and will be run by leaders in the Linux community, include a number of familiar obsessions in the world of Linux (power management, graphics, audio), plus a couple interesting explorations such as video input and Linux server management.

The Open Source Census is a collaborative project that collects Open Source usage information from companies that volunteer the information. The OSS Discovery tool requires Ruby to be installed on a system to be run. The tool collects fingerprints of many Open Source applications on the scanned computer (it does NOT crawl the network). The results are submitted anonymously to the project.

The project was started by OpenLogic and is sponsored by numerous entities including Collabnet, IDC, Microsoft, the Open Source Business Association, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.

The brand new IronRuby.net Wiki fired up yesterday (June 19). This wik.is Deki Wiki based site. This is the place to go for information about IronRuby. IronRuby currently requires you to download and build from source. But, as soon as the lazy geek version (pre-compiled and ready to install) binaries are ready, you can expect a lot of people heading to this site to learn more about IronRuby.

This is by no means new news, but I just read a blog from Matthew McKenzie about WRT54G-based open source routers and it got me thinking.

First though, for those not in the know, the Linksys WRT54G can be loaded with a custom Linux kernel and other features so that instead of getting the stock Linksys feature-set, you can run a more powerful router package and do everything from IP- and port-forwarding (most Linksys routers only do port-forwarding) to web filtering (well, to some limited extent because of the limited memory available).

Anyway, the real question: Where are the open source ENTERPRISE routers?

Matthew mentions that it is viable to run a custom WRT54G for a SMB, but I do not see this happening in the enterprise arena anytime soon. That said though, why isn’t there a big move toward open source enterprise routers?

I understand that the big profit in the network world, even for mostly hardware vendors like Cisco, are the up-sells of software, but it does seem to me that a hardware market is a hardware market, and that having a suite of routers that are based on open source could be a viable route to go.

Anandeep just wrote a little blog questioning the long-term link between High Performance Computing (HPC) and open source. His logic boils down to this:

1. HPC, like many other technologies, starts with the need for a small set of people to do something new.
2. Those people build the tools that they need.
3. When they let others use those tools, they assume the other people have the domain knowledge to properly deploy and use them.
4. Power, flexibility, and control are key at this stage and so open source has a strong hold
5. Over time, more and more people use the tools, so ease-of-use becomes more important.
6. Ease-of-use becomes more critical, so whether a platform or application is open source becomes less important.

I do not think I necessarily agree with this logic, at least not totally. I do think it is true that over time that ease-of-use will become more and more important (actually, it is already becoming the case). However, HPC is a very special beast. For one thing, hardware is still the ruling champion in HPC, and will be for some time to come. Therefore, the issue becomes how the owner of a HPC environment maximizes their hardware investment. Generally, they have to tweak the software to best fit that environment. Thus, the need for open source.

Now, I can see how there is convergence, even in HPC, toward a few specific hardware platforms and models of computing. So software vendors will be able to narrow down their scope, and thus the need for flexibility and control will diminish over time. However, that is going to be quite a while.

I just read through “Technical Analysis: Security Considerations for rdesktop and Windows Terminal Services” at Technet. Nothing too big here. The security issues of rdesktop are no different than that of Microsoft’s mstsc.exe client.

However, the paper did leave me with a few questions:

1. There is a not that rdesktop supports an -E option which prevents encryption of the login packet, which could potentially expose a password. Let us ignore the client for now. Why does RDP even support this?

2. Why doesn’t RDP, the protocol, support Kerberos? That is something I have never been able to understand. If it did, then you would get automatic logics from a client to server, regardless of whether you were using mstsc.exe or rdesktop, assuming you had your Windows desktop as part of AD or setup Kerberos between your Linux/UNIX workstation and AD (which is quite doable).

The author, Chris Travers, makes note of the fact that RDP was built around the OSI model instead of TCP/IP, thus it approaches things differently (e.g., not supporting Kerberos). I just do not follow this logic. Kerberos support can be added. What is taking so long?

I was just reading Chris Travers’…

Technical Analysis: Remote Administration of Windows Systems with SSH (9 page PDF)

…which discusses using SSHWindows in a minimal installation of Cygwin. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable installing Cygwin for just a single function (even one as important as allowing secure SSH access). But, Chris’ analysis makes it worthwhile to look at this method if you want to use SSH to work with a remote Microsoft Windows system.

There is an alternative, however. freeSSHd is a freeware ssh server for Microsoft Windows. It seems a little unstable. So, I wouldn’t recommend it for serious systems work at this stage of its development. However, it does not need Cygwin to be installed to work and seems to work well enough when it is up and running (it has crashed on me a few times). I’m going to keep my eye on future freeSSHd development and hope it becomes more stable in the near future.

One other item: In his closing thoughts section of the paper, Chris says: SSH is not as useful on Windows as it is on Linux, in part due the differences between how remote access to graphical applications is handled, and in part due to the fact that Windows is not generally as command-line oriented as Linux.

While I agree with Chris in general, I think that Microsoft PowerShell is a game changer. Microsoft PowerShell gives system administrators deep system access at the command line level. It basically makes a command line window a usable shell in the way UNIX/Linux shells are. I found that I could start PowerShell up after logging in to a Windows XP box. xterm looked a little odd after starting PowerShell. However, switching the xterm color scheme from black-on-white to white-on-black (old school terminal look) took care of most of the viewing problems (though not all).

I’m may have a bit more free time than usual in July and August. So, I may take more time looking at remotely managing Windows workstations and servers from a command line (shelled in through SSH) using PowerShell. I think this is the way I will prefer to manage Windows servers in the future (especially since that is the way I work with Linux boxes right now).

FYI: The screen-cap above is a CentOS 4 Linux installing running in a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine accessing the host Windows XP through an ssh session to freeSSHd running on XP.

code_swarm is an animated visualization of the development of software. Its site currently has animated visualizations for Apache httpd, Eclipse, PostgreSQL, and Python.

code_swarm: An experiment in organic software visualization

You can see code and developers in the animations. Really fascinating to watch.

A while ago, I published a teaser on this blog about using the Web as a whole as a data storage object. At that time I said that “the Web right now is cut down into a million pieces that don’t talk to each other properly”. Almost two years have gone by since that article and it looks like not much has changed.

One of the early questions was how interoperable are Web services when they’re not envisioned and created by them same company. This problem lead to a number of initiatives that are trying to push forward Web services creation standards. DataPortability, for example, is evangelizing a number of different standards that will create a better interoperable Web:

• end user authentication through OpenID;
• inter-application authorization through OAuth;
• information syndication and distribution through RSS, RDF and OPML;
• information meaning and automatic extraction through microformats;
• user attention profiling through APML;
• messaging and information brokerage through XMPP.

This collection of standards and best practices is great when a large number of companies start following them. For us, developers, it means that by following these standards our Web services will be interoperable with all other Web services that use the same standards. It means that creating a Web service now is much easier than it would have been two years ago.

What about the end users? How can they take advantage of this interoperability? I’m not just talking about Web services that let you consume data, because that problem was solved a long time ago by aggregators. Aggregators are a good example of a class of Web application that survives because there’s a de facto standard in place: RSS.

So, my point is, how can end users take advantage of Web services that let you publish, transform and assemble information? We’re moving to a point where a number of emerging services give you a one-to-many publishing approach:

• Ping.fm and HelloTxt publish your status across multiple services, like twitter, jaiku and Pownce;
• Typepad’s Blog It publishes blog articles across different platforms and also announces them on different status services;
• twitxr publishes your pictures across different services like flickr and Picasa.

Is it just me or there’s a pattern emerging here? Users see value in these services because they save you precious time by automating repeatable actions, like publishing a picture across different services. One thing to notice, though, is that these services only provide half of all that’s possible with the existing Web.

All these services let you choose among a number of services and then broadcast your information to all of them. Forgetting minor format and content adaptations, they won’t give you the possibility of programming the flow of your information. One thing is to shoot a picture and send it to different services, another thing is letting users tell how that picture flows through different services.

One service that’s offering you the capability of configuring this flow of information is switchAbit. It evolved from an original idea by Dave Winer that you could grab your pictures from flickr and post a tweet for each one of them. Quoting Dave’s original post:

The SwitchABit platform was developed because we noticed that an ever more complex flow of ideas and information is being facilitated by editorial systems and aggregators such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Ustream, YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, Disqus, Wordpress, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger, etc.

switchAbit is basically an RSS to publish mechanism. It’s built around the pub-sub paradigm which means that it will get your information from a number of services, filter it according to your instructions and publish part of it into other services.

With this approach you’d still have to publish your information on at least one supported service, so that switchAbit grabs it and routes it somewhere else. Another approach is acting like a reverse aggregator, extending the functionalities of Ping.fm and others by adding the possibility of configuring information flow.

You could, for instance, add a watermark or a copyright notice to the picture, extract EXIF geo-location information and send it to Fire Eagle, publish the transformed picture on a number of services, and announce it to your contacts on some social networks. And this is just an example of what can be done in the near future.

I’ve been working since January on such an application. It has an interface similar to Yahoo! Pipes, but it lets you compose the flow of information from a starting point through a set of Web services that exist on the cloud. Because of the obvious similarities of this concept with the familiar UNIX pipe, it’s called tarpipe. Quoting tarpipe’s blog original post:

tarpipe will also create an ecosystem where Web applications and services will be able to receive and transform media content. Users will take advantage of this ecosystem by defining delivery and transformation workflows for their documents.

With tarpipe you can direct the output of one Web service into the input of another one. This makes different services virtually interoperable, even if they’re not able to talk to each other individually. It also gives end users the ability to compose flows of actions (or workflows) for their information. It currently accepts information sent through email and a REST endpoint, meaning you can extend your application by connecting it to tarpipe.

So, my initial thought that “the Web right now is cut down into a million pieces that don’t talk to each other properly” is not so true anymore. There are ways of making the Web more interoperable, like following de facto standards and creating programmable service adapters.

A project was recently removed from Codeplex because it was not offering the source code. The project, Sandcastle, apparently violated Microsoft’s “Open Source policy”. Thus, Microsoft removed the project.

That’s cool and all, but that is not what is really of note. The big news item here is that “A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code.”

That’s notable.

The moral of the story here is not that Microsoft removed an offending non-open source project from Codeplex, but that members of the community noticed and their comments made a difference.

And that, to me, is one of the big wins about open source and collaborative efforts that [try] to build communities: The community can self-police.

If Microsoft, IBM, or any company, no matter how big, tries to police this type of community, it will not work. The problem? There just is not enough money put into these online communities/efforts to enable them to review every piece of software. Instead, the community that is being built around the effort must do the job.

John Lam (of IronRuby fame) started summarizing his TechEd 08 experience at…

IronRuby at Tech Ed 2008

Be sure to click on the whiteboard photo in his blog entry. The higher resolution images on Flickr will let you read the whiteboarded IronRuby FAQ intended for the mostly enterprise-oriented TechEd attendees, many of whom had never heard of Ruby or IronRuby. I do wonder, though, if the IronRuby.com scrawled in the middle of a whiteboard is a typo of sorts. Shouldn’t that be IronRuby.net?

Port 25 Ruby related blog items

They listened! I just blogged yesterday about the UI of Codeplex (well, a bit) and apparently there is at least some effort in getting the Codeplex community to help better design the way that Codeplex works.

I should add a caveat to this blog though: I just lied. Paula wrote her blog a few days ago, so she beat me to the punch. Damn. Well, better late than never.

Anyway, Codeplex really does need a better interface. There is just something not-so-usable about it. For one, SF tends to have a better idea of how to organize their projects. I hope Codeplex follows their lead. (Freshmeat isn’t bad at this either.)

I thought I would officially announce that Mike Orr and I are writting a book for Manning on Google App Engine.

It is a bit strange to be working on a new book, when the first book I wrote isn’t even released yet, but Mike and I plan to finish this book around December08/Jan 09, which is a very aggressive writing schedule. We will be releasing PDF’s of each chapter approximately every month until the book is finished. Stay tuned for more.

Official Google App Engine Book Blog

Okay, okay, so Microsoft makes forays into open source now and then, including both Codeplex and even some sponsored projects that are hosted on Sourceforge. It looks like they made a bit of a more high-profile push, in marketing terms, by becoming a “Diamond Sponsor” of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards. Nifty. Nice to see a little money thrown in the pot, even if it is not a significant amount of money. (We takes what we can gets, eh?)

While thinking on Codeplex, have you taken a look lately? It has grown since I last looked. Frankly, I have never really liked the interface of the site, but then again some people don’t like Sourceforge’s UI either (I do).

(The main page is mostly useless. Use this link instead.)

I just looked through some of the projects, and… hmm, well, there needs to be more on there. For one thing, I cannot believe that an AJAX library is #1 on the site. I mean, AJAX? Sure, it’s big and cool and all Web 2.0, but #1?

Oh, and where are the Powershell projects!? I’ve complained about scripting under Windows before, and, obviously, I’ll need to blog about it again, but I just still don’t see a huge Powershell community developing. I hope one develops, but I don’t see a grassroots effort yet, and that’s when you get momentum.

Hmm, Powershell..

Microsoft has a PDF paper describing the history of the IronPython project at…

IronPython: Engaging the Python Community in Its Own Language (5 page PDF)

The paper describes the germ IronPython in 2003 when Jim Hugunin began wondering if Python could run on the .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR), his work at Microsoft leading to IronPython 0.7 in 2005, the 2007 1.1 version release, and the community input that helped solve dealing with the different .Net and native Python string types.

The final section of the paper describes the IronPython based dynamic spreadsheets developed by Resolver Systems.

Microsoft recently posted a 5 page PDF (3 pages of content) titled…

PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance (5 page PDF download)

The paper focuses on the background of two projects that enhanced the use of PHP on Windows Servers. The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

Two other projects are briefly mentioned at the end of the paper. The first is the Phalanger project which is a PHP compiler for the .NET Framework (and Mono). The other is the PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library.

In preparation for my OSCON talk, I’ve been unearthing some of the fx enhancements that were added to Dojo’s gfx module back when version 1.1 landed. Some of these enhancements are pretty neat, and I thought they might make for a good excuse to get you started with a part of the toolkit you may not have ventured into quite yet.

If you are a ZSH nut like me, you find it is the first thing you setup on a new virtual machine. One thing that stumped me recently with a virtual machine running Ubuntu from an OS X Leopard terminal and ZSH, was getting the delete key to work. The quick fix is to do this:

1. Go to the terminal preferences
2. Go to settings
3. Under advanced click Delete sends Ctrl-H

Now you can run a super charged ZSH without a hitch!

Python For Unix and Linux coming in August!

I’ve been mostly interested in Ruby for the past couple of years. But, before developing that interest, I spent a lot of time writing little utilities (and a few not so little ones) in Python. I decided to check where the IronPython project is these days and found that they released IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 last month on May 2. You can find it on Codeplex (installable binary, source code, and documentation) at…

IronPython 2.0 Beta 2

Here’s the 2.0 Beta 2 Release Notes.

Nifty! So Asus is set to have an Instant “On” Linux for a line of their notebooks. (And, yes, it supports instant “Off” as well.)

Going back a few years.. well, a few decades.. the whole instant “On” concept is certainly not new. I am trying desperately to remember the name of an 8-bit system that would “instantly” turn on or off and always have your work sitting there waiting for you where you left off.

But we’ve all become so accustomed to having to wait on computers to boot software which we then use to run other software which we have to wait on to do anything. Sigh. It is a little sad.

Anyway, I am hoping this marks a wider trend of focusing more on having computers that act like typical electronic devices and less like, well, computers.

Funny article:

http://www.bspcn.com/2007/12/03/5-things-we-miss-about-old-school-computing/

I wanted to learn more about using Microsoft Silverlight with IronRuby. So, I turned to Jimmy Schementi’s blog jimmy.thinking. Why Jimmy’s blog? Because he is a Program Manager for Dynamic Language Runtime. If anyone knows something about this stuff, it is Jimmy. One of the things I learned from his blog (and there’s a lot to learn there) is that the Microsoft Silverlight.net site now has an area for…

Microsoft Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK

You can download the Silverlight SDK to develop Silverlight applications using IronPython or IronRuby. You’ll also find samples, documentation, and video talks/demonstrations here. The link to the Getting Started with Silverlight MSDN area seems slightly broken. Try this MSDN Silverlight link instead. And, be sure to check out the Breaking Changes in Silverlight 2 MSDN page too.

There is nothing new these days about virtualization, whether at the server- or desktop-level. Nevertheless, a recent announcement by Virtual Iron and 2X did remind me yet again that virtualization is starting to change the very foundation of how software companies, including Microsoft, can position and profit off the desktop experience.

One of the big issues with Linux, even to this day, is compatibility and accessibility. However, as we see more widespread use of virtualized desktop environments and remote access to terminal service-based applications (including the whole “seamless windows” experience), the underlying core OS on the desktop under someone’s desk becomes less and less relevant.

That is a big win for Linux because it is obviously the low-cost solution and it can be well managed across a large set of systems via automated systems.

But, the money is always going to be in the OS and applications that are in front of the user, not the underlying OS on which virtualization software is running. That is where terminal services and seamless windows will help push Linux over the edge in terms of accessibility, compatibility, and, in real business terms, usability for end-users that are generating the revenue to keep businesses in the black.

My point: virtualization and server-based computing will help push Linux on the desktop.

Ostatic posed four Open Source related questions to three key Microsoft people: Sam Ramji (Director of the Open Source Labs), Ori Amiga (Live Developer Platform Group Product Manager), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). The questions were:

• Microsoft has, in the past, employed key open source development concepts such as modular architectures in its own products. Do you foresee more of this, including developing directly on top of existing open source platforms?
  
• What do you think is missing in the open source community as a whole? Better marketing for commercial efforts? Better compatibility?
  
• Does Microsoft’s recently announced Live Mesh platform have implications that the open source community ought to know about?
  
• What goals do you have for Microsoft’s interoperability alliance with Novell, and what’s behind the goal of converting Linux users in the Chinese market to SUSE Linux Enterprise?