Development

Before you read this, you should read this. I regretted this post shortly after posting it.

I think Miguel de Icaza is an exceptional developer. He's also a fantastically effective community leader. And, though he's never displayed his best side to me, personally, I understand that he's a quality person that people like to be around.

For these reasons I can't help but wonder why he's squandering his talents on writing largely irrelevant code (Mono, Moonlight) that appeals to himself, Novell, Microsoft, and no one else.

It's not that Microsoft is a bad company. It's that Miguel could be doing so much more for the industry if he stopped cloning the Microsoft experience on Linux and instead drove forward the Linux/open source experience. Sam Varghese writes:

For a long time de Icaza, who is now on the staff of Novell, appears to have been trying to please the people at Redmond. First it was with Mono, his implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment.… Read more

Marten Mickos has summarized his rules for how to disrupt an industry. This is advice worth heeding, especially when you consider that many of the companies recently acquired (or invested in) at outsized valuations (Zimbra, Blue Lithium, SurfControl, Hyperion, TellMe, Fotolog, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) have one core thing in common:

MySQL.

Marten's first rule for disruptors is also perhaps the most important: Follow no model.

There used to be a well-worn path to software success: build a proprietary product, sell a perpetual license, make service contracts imperative, and release a new version every few years in what amounted to a "mandatory" upgrade. This model worked for more than two decades.

What changed?… Read more

Nick Carr points to an insightful blog post by Khoi Vinh, a developer at The New York Times, in which Vinh effectively argues for open-source enterprise applications, perhaps without knowing it:

The market for unofficial third-party iPhone applications has been somewhat stagnant in recent weeks. After a flurry of initial activity, the pace slowed considerably, perhaps in part due to iPhone software/firmware 1.1.1's temporary disablement of easy third-party app installation methods.

Though there's now a method for adding native applications to 1.1.1 iPhones that is even easier than the original AppTapp method (and an unofficial SDK), other factors continue to mitigate the unofficial market:

While in Barcelona this weekend I was privileged to attend a match with Manel Sarasa, co-founder and CEO of OpenBravo (open-source ERP), who seems to know everyone in Barcelona, including the most important people, i.e., those with access to the presidential lounge at FC Barcelona so that we, too, could eat and meet there.

While it was great to gawk at famous Catalans, the best part of the match (aside from seeing Henry put one past the goalkeeper) may well have come after the final whistle blew.

Within 20 minutes the stadium had emptied, and Manel and I went out to sit in the president's chair. Opposite me were the words "Mes Que Un Club." More than a club.

Barcelona firmly believes that it is about football in the purest sense (well, Arsenal is the purest form of football, but I'll just have to disagree with Barca on this :-), but also about something more. About social responsibility (hence, it "advertises" UNICEF instead of some gambling company (Bwin, for example) on its jerseys). About giving back to its community.

Open source is the same. There are those who try to minimize its impact by saying, "It's just a development methodology. This is a great way to contain, to neuter its impact. It is not a good way to realize its potential.… Read more

I was fortunate to be asked to present to the Openbravo community today on how to build open-source communities, and make money with them. I've watched various companies go about this - from Alfresco to SugarCRM to MuleSource to JapserSoft and a range of others - and there are some consistent principles that play out in each case.

I've uploaded my slides (Open Document Format) and hope that you'll find them useful.

Good open-source communities are founded on good code, good people, and good licenses. But it is the intricate knitting together of these different things that separates good projects/companies from great ones. I don't pretend to know all the answers, I've noticed that those who err on the side of transparency usually come out OK, whereas those who are too protective tend to fail.… Read more

What do you get when you cross one of the world's premier news sources with open-source software? Increasingly, you get The New York Times, plus a dose of confusion from the development community as to why a newspaper would want to share source code.

New York Times senior software architects Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid say they've received a mixed reception from the community, because some people just can't understand why a print media company would jump feet first into the open source philosophy. But open source software use isn't new to the Times, says Gottfrid. "I've been here a number of years, and open source has always played an integral part in everything we do."

Recently, the team has experienced growth, according to Gottfrid, in that custom applications developed in-house are "shifting from a proprietary posture. As we were building out and replacing old infrastructure, there were some gaps, so we wrote additional code. And some of those things we're open-sourcing. It's a small, humble effort."

Oddly, it's an effort that hasn't been much appreciated within the open-source development community, for some inexplicable reason. Developers have been slow to grok the reasons behind the newspaper's development efforts. But, according to its developers, Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid, it's clear:… Read more

Apple's newly launched iPhone Dev Center (concerning the development of Web apps -- currently there's no information about native applications) for ADC members includes a section detailing changes in the version of Safari included with iPhone software/firmware 1.1.1. Among the "fixed problems" is a vague reference mentioning "improved performance of JavaScript."

In early July, we noted that JavaScript performance on the iPhone is (was) downright sluggish in most respects. Celtic Kane online offers a Javascript benchmark that tests various Javascript. In our informal tests, a MacBook Pro running at 1.83GHz … Read more

Alan Cox emailed me this morning to note a presentation he gave way back in 2000 called "Dear Mr Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world." It's no surprise to me that my recent blog post (on the topic of optimally sized development teams) was better articulated by Alan many years ago.

What was surprising is just how prescient Alan's talk was. And how informative. For anyone who has ever wondered how open-source software development works compared to proprietary-software development, this is an absolute must read. Alan is one of the most influential developers of the Linux kernel, and his experience shows through.

Among many other interesting points, I really liked Alan's discussion of how project momentum begins and how marketing is important but different in open source:

When you release a free software project, you do things in a different order. Firstly, you get some code. Hopefully, it just about works. And you document it as "Needs fixing, needs this, needs that."

But most free software code, to get other people involved in the project, it has to work. It doesn't matter if it's hard to compile. It doesn't matter if it only works on one machine in five. And it doesn't matter if it eats the data file every so often. So long as sometimes, the right results happen, people will start to pick up the project and use it. They start to use it, and then they have to fix it. … Read more