Negative Approach

InfoWorld's Paul Krill interviewed Ian Murdock at JavaOne and got some good tidbits including Murdocks' thoughts on making money with open source and the licensing issues associated with CDDL and GPL.

I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything you could possibly need to put an application into production. So you don't monetize at the point of acquisition of software any longer, you have to monetize at a different place.

Apparently JavaOne got an infection. Here is the note from the conference team.

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.

For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website at http://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm

I had a few minutes today and I went to the Verizon store on Van Ness to see if I could get the new Blackberry Curve that just came out. After standing there for 9 minutes (I checked on my existing BB) someone finally asked if they could help. Here is my experience as verbatim as I can recall.

"Did you guys get the Curve."
"Yes."
"Can I get one"
"What is your cell #?"
"Does it matter?"
"No."

Then he bounded off to the backroom to return without the Curve.

"Yup, we have them."
"Can I get one?"
"What is your cell #?"

I give him my number and he tells me that I am not eligible, I have only had this phone for a year and 2 months.

"Can I change my plan and get it?"
"No."
"How is the camera."
"It's Ok like the Pearl."
"This is why people get annoyed with cellphone carriers."
"This is how the wireless industry works in the US."

Thanks for the lesson in mobility and economics. There is nothing more I enjoy than having a moron in a bad tie give me life lessons. I spared us all the heartache of explaining to him that I spent several years in mobile and telecom.

There are few things in life more infuriating than dealing with cell carriers. I am sure I will never hear from VZW on this--or RIM for that matter, whose 9000 I just blogged about earlier today!! That's it. ... Read more

The fine folks at Crackberry.com have just put up a video tour of the new Blackberry 9000. And while it's not an iPhone killer it looks like a must-have for the Blackberry addict. I wonder how long I will have to wait for VZW to get these suckers.

BlackBerry 9000 Smartphone Review

I have been to nearly every JavaOne event its gone through some ups and downs. In the last two years it seems like JavaOne is meaningful again. Contrary to what many people think Java is thriving more than I would have expected. The biggest distraction is Sun themselves who continue to mix messages and project relevance with marketing and strategic confusion.

On the positive side we met a lot of developers who are still excited about Java and there were many new companies on the show floor that I hadn't seen in the past.

Java is still the language of choice in the enterprise. Even with the rise of LAMP Java remains important and makes up huge swaths of the IT landscape in major enterprises--at least those who are not .NET. Even open source Java applications on Windows are popular. As an example, a full 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows.

And yet, the last 2-3 years the messages I have taken from Sun can be summed up as "Someday, you will have a mobile device and it will run Java. And it will be cool." FX is kinda cool, but when you have 15,000 enterprise geeks at an event I would think they would lead with something cooler. Cote mentioned they did some neat things with ZFS the 2nd day, but all my friends avoided the keynotes after the first one was lame (minus Neil Young.)

Regarding Sun's open source initiatives. I cruised through the ... Read more

A great many open-source projects and companies have started on SourceForge.net. There's currently about 176,000 registered projects and 1.8 million registered users. Sure, not all of them are active or essential software, but if you want to build an open-source project, it can be a great place to get up and going. You may not go to SourceForge directly very often, but if you download open-source software, it's often sitting on SourceForge servers.

If there's been one knock against them, it's that their infrastructure is just average, not the latest-greatest. That may be changing. This past year they've added wikis and other functionality that helps with collaboration around projects. There's also Marketplace, which allows you to buy and sell related products and services.

Continuing in the vein of bringing new technology and functionality to its army of open-source users, today SourceForge is announcing implementation of OpenID. OpenID is an open-source single sign-on technology that allows an individual to jump between online accounts without re-entering a username and password each time. That's handy. Even better, they're doing it the right way: They're starting by accepting OpenID log-ins, not providing them. This follows nicely in the spirit of the open-source community. Many big name companies have declared OpenID support, but often only as Identity Providers. Meaning, they're happy to extend their user log-ins, but won't accept OpenIDs created elsewhere. What's open about that? (Google's Blogger is ... Read more

One company that continues to baffle me with their non-presence in SaaS is SAP. Nearly two years ago Matt Asay and I sat shocked on a CSFB panel just after Shai Agassi proclaimed that SAP had spent over $1 billion on BBD before it even got out the door.

Over on the Enterprise Anti-matter blog Josh Greenbaum finally finds out why SAP BBD is so late and potentially DOA--a fundamental design flaw in the system, along with what seems to be a misunderstanding of building large-scale applications.

The main issue regarding the delay of BBD has to do with operationalizing the on-demand model in a cost-effective way. This translates to a realization that the existing release of BBD, now in use by some 150 customers, can't be scaled up to handle thousands of customers in a cost-effective manner. This is a major operational problem to be sure: SAP can ill afford to ramp up to a massive deployment of BBD if it's not cost-effective to do so. Klaey mentioned that these operational issues seem to have been dealt with in the next release, which is slated to come on line in the "next few months."

Delicious Pizza

(Credit: Chow.com)

In the Chow Pizza Obsessives feature, you can watch seven videos of my friend and pizza hero Anthony Mangieri discuss the world of pizza and you too will become obsessed.

In the meantime you might want to try out Pazzia on 3rd @ Folsom.

With JavaOne starting tomorrow I have been waiting to see what kind of interesting things Sun will be launching. If OpenSolaris + EC2 is the best they've got it may be a long week.

Open Solaris

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

It also makes sense to run Zmanda in the Cloud, as there is really no reason why you shouldn't back up your databases online and offsite.

I guess the big question is if it matters that it's OpenSolaris underlying what is effectively semi-sophisticated web hosting?

My take is that it matters in the sense of Sun now has table stakes for Clound infrastructure, but that the operating system is not the important part. What matters is the ability to run a wide variety of applications with no necessary knowledge of what's underlying the apps or where they are physically located. Sun is definitely going in the right direction but this isn't earth-shattering just yet.

BEA's Peter Laird just posted a great overview of Cloud Computing, SaaS, and Platform-as-a-Service PaaS for those who are still struggling to figure it out (and really who isn't?)

As always, the definitions are vague, yet arguable but I think they do a good job in establishing what we are talking about.

Mapping the Cloud/SaaS/PaaS Universe

(Credit: Peter Laird, Kent Dickson)

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing refers to the virtualization of the data center, such that server machines are not thought of individually but as just a commodity in a greater collection of server machines. Cloud computing solutions in general strive to eliminate the need for an application deployer to be aware of the actual physical machines that are used to host the application. Some have called this idea "hardware as a service".

SaaS
An application that is delivered through the SaaS model typically is done so:
-Over the internet
-Remotely by a third party, with little/no opportunity to bring that application in-house
-With a usage-based pricing model

PaaS
When a vendor offers a Platform as a Service, they are offering an integrated platform to build, test, and deploy custom applications.

The fullsize map is available here.