Development

The benefits of opening up

I don't mean to pat myself/my company on the back, but I wanted to share some data that indicates just how important it is to open up. In two years my company, Alfresco, has grown from 0 to 29,500 active deployments of our software (and tens of millions of end users). To put that in perspective, it took FileNet/IBM 25 years to get to the same number.

Not too shabby.

But it's not just about users. It's about speed of development. Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan, the multi-billion dollar testing company, notes that it took Alfresco just three days to integrate with the (open) Facebook API and make a meaningful integration of the two. What he doesn't note is that it took Alfresco just six months to get to a code release that several billion-dollar enterprises thought worth buying.

Again, not too shabby. How did we get so many users? A great product and open distribution. How did we get that great product so fast? By building on exceptional open-source components like Hibernate, Spring, Lucene, and others. We're just one example among many open-source examples, too. Look no farther than MuleSource, Zimbra, SugarCRM, etc. to find others.… Read more

How open source can help the SaaS company

Sometimes we think that the reasons for Software as a Service and open-source success are mutually exclusive. According to David Heinemeier, founder and developer of the various 37Signals' projects and products, however, open source is integral to 37Signals' success.

In fact, it's fair to say by David's reasoning there's very little to recommend a proprietary software strategy anymore:

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter how productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure.… Read more

Building the Bazaar: coding community into software

There is a persistent myth that open source operates like Linux, with a global team of developers holding hands and praying for world code peace. Most open-source projects don't work this way, looking much more like Eric Raymond's "cathedral" rather than the holy grail, the "bazaar," as Juergen of SnapLogic points out in an exceptionally insightful post on open-source software development.

The problem with many open-source projects is that while familiarity may not breed contempt, it can certainly breed institutional incompetence:

Why do so many open-source projects not have the active community of external contributors they are hoping for? Because they have been largely developed by co-located teams of hired software engineers, 100% dedicated to the project, managed and organized like any traditional software development effort. This seems to be especially true for the new crop of 'custom build' open-source companies, which would like to take advantage of the open-source business model. They might hope to also enjoy the advantages of the open-source development model one day, but achieving that requires a conscious effort.… Read more

Linux without commercial backing = failure, says Linus Torvalds

Some developers think that free and open-source software would go along its merry way without commercial interest. Not Linus Torvalds. In an interesting interview, he suggests that Linux would have been dead on arrival had it not been for commercial backing:

Linux really wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting at all if it hadn't been released as an open source product. I also think that the change to the GPLv2 from my original "no money" license was important, because the commercial interests were actually very important from the beginning. The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers and pushed people to improve usability. You need a balance between pure technology and the kinds of pressures you get from users through the market.

What we don't need, however, is the commercial interest of the kind Microsoft brings to the table:… Read more

Google's open-source mobile platform: the best of the blog chatter

There are so many good (and bad) things to say about Google's decision to open up the mobile market with an open-source mobile software platform that I'll just let others do the talking:

Sergey Brin (via OpenDotDot):

As I look at it I reflect, ten years ago I was sitting at a graduate student cubicle. We were able to build incredible things. There was a set of tools that allowed us to do that. It was all open technologies. It was based on Linux, GNU, Apache. All those pieces and many more allowed us to do great things and distribute it to the world. That is what we are doing today, to allow people to innovate on today's mobile devices. Today's mobile devices are more powerful than those computers I was working on just ten years ago. I cannot wait to see what today's innovators will build.

And they will all build on open-source technologies, just as Google has. Why? Because reinventing the platform wheels, piece by piece, vendor by vendor, is inane and inefficient.

Jonathon Schwartz:… Read more

Want more money? Learn Java or .Net

Web scripting languages like PHP are hot, but it's Java and .Net that pay the bills, according to a new survey by Robert Half Technology's 2008 Salary Guide:

Next year, application developers and senior web developers skilled in Java, Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft's C# and VisualBasic.NET look likely to have more leverage in salary negotiations and pull in more cash than those armed with Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) or AJAX, according to a new salary survey.

IT employment specialist Robert Half Technology's 2008 Salary Guide found application and senior web … Read more

VMware's mistaken understanding of open source

Wow. I guess for those who have yet to be forced to compete with open source, it's permissible to come out with grossly inaccurate comments about open source. Even Microsoft would never say something like this, which Diane Greene (VMware's CEO) said to The Register:

There is still a lot of innovation going into our hypervisor. As long as there is a lot of innovation going in, (open source) is not the right model.

What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you're purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff.

Um...no. That is completely false. It's not even a little, teensie weensie bit true. In fact, it's when one is in the midst of innovation that open source makes the most sense. Ms. Greene seems to be suggesting that open source makes sense when you're ready to put code out to pasture because it has passed its prime. Quite the opposite is true, if you're hoping to derive value from community, which is the whole point of open sourcing code.

Community-influenced innovation.

What Ms. Greene ought to have said is something like this:… Read more

Microsoft may self-proclaim IE a 'standard'

"No man is an island, entire of itself," wrote poet John Donne. But Microsoft apparently doesn't like poetry.

The company is currently mulling over whether to get in line with JavaScript standards for Internet Explorer, or whether to go it alone and crown itself a standard.

This is particularly tricky since every browser implements the JavaScript standard in different ways. So, the problem isn't exclusive to Microsoft.

It's more nettlesome with Microsoft, however, given its dominant browser market share. In some ways, it already is a standard unto itself. But I'm not sure the industry is ready for Microsoft to veer from the quasi-beaten path. According to an article posted Thursday on The Register:

Microsoft's browser is renowned as being a basket case on standards compliance, being less compliant than other leading standards in recent years according to the group monitoring this issue--The Web Standards Project (WASP).… Read more

Windows vs. Linux: Security

Linux isn't perfectly secure, but Microsoft Windows is architected for security failure, as IT Wire points out. Good design decisions in Linux may well account for the glaring difference between security in Linux and insecurity in Windows:

The reality is Windows is naturally insecure for a variety of reasons, not least being Windows' users were always conditioned to login and run programs as the administrator user. Windows Vista has made an attempt, too late, to stifle this behaviour but the far number of complaints about the intrusive UAC box is testament to how many ordinary, daily, Windows tasks require administrative privileges - not necessarily due to legitimate need, but often just bad programming.… Read more