CQ2

Nicholas Carr, who has a new book coming out soon (”The Big Switch”, which argues for software as a service), has a good article in Booz Allen’s Strategy + Business magazine. The article, “The Ignorance of Crowds,” does a good job of looking at where we are with open source software development ten years after Eric Raymond first published “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

Carr argues that it’s not one or the other but a combination of both; good open source projects are like cathedrals in that they have a small group of leaders but the bazaar gives them advantages in certain areas, especially bug fixes.

He extends the analogy to one of his pet peeves, Wikipedia, which is an ultimate example of a bazaar, since there’s hardly any central authority at all, at least up until recently. I’m a much bigger fan of Wikipedia than Carr is, and I think his reaction partly reflects his editorial background; he was an editor at the Harvard Business Review and I would bet that he takes affront at the idea of a publication without editors.

But that aside, “The Ignorance of Crowds” is a recommended read.

I thought that Sun might announce something like Ubuntu on Solaris this week at the JavaOne conference, but it didn’t turn out that way. Still, “Project Indiana,” led by Ian Murdock, seems like it’s headed in that direction. Tom DiNaro pointed me at a ZDNet article from /. that discusses the possibility.

The basic idea here would be to graft the Debian/Ubuntu userland apps onto the Solaris rootstock, giving Sun the advantages of both: broad developer familiarity and ISV adoption from Linux and the stability (and familiarity on the infrastructure side) of Solaris. Murdock is quoted in the article as saying that he wants to make Solaris a better Linux than Linux.

[Later: the emphasis at the show seems to have been on Sun's RIA entrant, JavaFX. More here.]

From Eben Moglen, a video by Michael Wesch about web 2.0. I know that sounds bad, but trust me, it’s good.

From Jon Bultmeyer, tools for mapping complex networks.  And from the folks at Big Sky, a post about how to choose among many decision making visuals, including a link to a periodic table of visual elements.

From Gary Ardito, an eWeek article with some details on GPLv3. The latest draft is going to be released tomorrow but the final version won’t come out until the end late summer, “at the earliest.”

Interesting announcement from Sun today (Tim Bray had it first, I think) that Ian Murdock of Debian fame is joinging Sun as their “Chief Operating Platforms Officer.” Smart move by Sun; it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Ian’s got serious open source chops and even though Debian itself has been languishing of late (he blames the political process), Debian-based Ubuntu has been flourishing. Sal Darji last week pointed out that Canonical just released a server version of Ubuntu.

——————-

Hi all,It’s being announced today that I’m joining Sun as chief operating platforms officer, which basically means I’ll be in charge of Sun’s operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux. I just posted the announcement on my blog  http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining…), and it’ll likely be making the rounds soon. Just wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me and to introduce myself.First things first: I’m a long time Linux user, developer, and advocate.

I founded Debian in 1993, co-founded a Linux distribution company called Progeny in 1999, and most recently served as CTO of the new Linux Foundation, where I was (and still am) chair of the LSB, the Linux platform interoperability standard. I’m also a long time Sun fan.

As for what I’ll be doing: While I’m coming in with some fairly formed opinions about what Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris ought to do (peruse my blog a bit to learn more), I’m also a big believer in listening before talking, and I have a lot of listening to do in the weeks to come. So, please, feel free to drop me a line if you have anything to tell me. And, please, be gentle while I get settled. :-)

Gotta get on a call in a few minutes. In the meantime, I just wanted to say hello, and to make sure you heard the news directly from me.

Later,

-ian
–
Ian Murdock Tags: [FOS] · open source · strategy

Novell and OpenID

February 27th, 2007 · No Comments

Dale Olds has two (!) good blog entries today about Bandit, in which he describes how Bandit supports other open source identity projects, including OpenID, and adds authentication, authorization, and audit functionality. He writes,

You might say that accelerating convergence, contributing code to other projects, and some authentication code is necessary before we can build effective authorization and audit components. We need a cohesive, distributed identity system. But we also know that when we get such a system, some critical issues involving authentication, authorization, and audit will surface.

Bandit focuses on simple, reusable components for authentication, authorization, and audit. These capabilities are most recognized as needed in enterprise identity systems, but I think they will be needed in other places as well. The recent experiences of the Bandit team and others are confirming this. Once applications or services (web based or otherwise) start to actually be used by more than a few users and sources of identity, they immediately find they need a general, scalable solution for authorization and audit.

Posts here and here.

Tags: Novell · [FOS] · identity

Two new whitepapers from Novell’s consulting strategy practice

February 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

Human Resources: A Key Partner in Successful Identity Management Initiatives by Will Koenig & John Rothman (.pdf)

Smart Implementation of Role-Based Access Control by Bob Gifford (.pdf)

Tags: Novell · [FOS] · identity · open source

Dell Ideastorm

February 20th, 2007 · No Comments

Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Tags: [FOS] · enterprise web 2.0 · hardware

Two SmugMug bits: Sun and Amazon

February 13th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Interesting comparison of hardware vendors from a photo-sharing site, SmugMug:

Sun ended up winning their business, largely on the basis of the X2200 M2, which is interesting in of itself.  The list of pros and cons is worth reading.  Sun continues to be a fascinating company to watch, with great technology, but backed into a strategic corner with a questionable business model.

Separately, but also from Don McAskill’s blog, an interesting post on Amazon’s S3 service.  I’ve been looking around for a good S3-based backup offering but haven’t found one yet.  Jungledisk seems like it’s the closest, but I’d prefer something a bit more mature.

Tags: [FOS] · hardware · strategy

← Previous Entries