Copacetic

From InfoWorld, “SCO seeks bankrupty protection“, Sweet!

I see Microsoft has taken the gloves off in the Open Source/Closed Source battle. Surprise, Surprise they found the infringing patents in the three areas where Microsoft makes most of its revenue, operating systems, Office and the Windows user interface.

But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

Watching this from the sidelines is gonna be a hoot.

Addendum: Of course the real reason for this may to head off the new version of the GPL at the pass.

Joel Spolsky yet again seems to divine whats in my head and articulate it ten times better than I could, when talking about what programming language you should use for your development project.

When I started Secantus (now PutPlace.com) at the start of this year we had several candidates for development,

• C#/.NET
• J2EE
• PHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• Perl

We had a few constraints and some previous knowledge that allowed us to make some rapid eliminations.

1. We wanted tight integration with the local file system (Windows, OS-X and Linux, and mobile phones to follow)
2. We wanted to produce a downloadable component that ran on the users local system
3. We wanted a good set of infrastructure libraries so we weren’t constantly reinventing the wheel
4. We wanted to make sure to choose a technology that wouldn’t have investment partners spitting the dummy

Tight integration ruled out Java due to its execreable I/O libraries. .NET fell at the OS-X hurdle. PHP is really only suitable for webside applications and even then its dire for writing daemons. Ruby on Rails was a contender, but its just a little to immature and still reeks of its UNIX/Linux heritage. Perl I like personally, but the OO support is pretty awful and the risk to a project while they have the engine out on blocks building the next version of the language was too great.

That left Python, Python! I hear you say? Well the language is nearly 15 years old, its got the sweetest syntax, great platform support (including Nokia phones), wonderful infrastructure libraries and a Rails like environment in Django.

We’ve been using it for 6 months now and are very happy with it. I expect to incur some recruitment costs in converting existing Java/.NET programmers to the language, but this is a small price to pay for the flexibility and portability that Python buys.

John Keyes has come up with a sweet hack to a problem I’ve been seeing since we switched to gmail for domains. He uses the stylish plugin for FireFox to restyle the google fixed font to be courier. Without this hack any formatting (e.g. —+ style boxes so beloved by Trac) all get screwed up. Run over there and try it out.

If you use IE your SOL….

So now you have unbounded programmatic access to computing and storage resources via EC2 and S3. Anybody who has a moderate amount of programming skill (skilled in the art as the patent people say) and has access to a credit card can slap together their own grid in no time at all. More importantly you can resell a grid to a vertical market.

Now a whole plethora of companies have been trying to flog Open Source stacks to corporate America, and to my mind corporate America (and corporate everywhere else) is not ready to take these companies offerings on board for a number of reasons,

• Certification is no good without delta change detection. Your stack might be good the day it deploys, but is it good after 6 months of production tinkering?
• Most customers need some kind of customised stack, rather than an off the shelf offering, so configurations proliferate and the costs for both the vendor and the customer escalates
• None of these guys wants to play nice with the rest, so how do you integrate stacks from different vendors
• Isn’t Open Source supposed to be free as in beer

However the whole game changes if instead of offering an installable package you offer a managed EC2 image with all the good juice pre-canned and ready to go, and you manage the customers application deployment on top of that image and then cut a new precanned EC2 image with all the good stuff in one bundle. Tinker away all you want and deltas can easily be identified by comparing the production image with a clean install of the original.

Customisation becomes delta management with everything being a managed delta of a base kit and integration of different stacks can be easily tested because the base infrastructure is already deployed into an image ready for merging.

Expect to see lots of people offering layered services on EC2 fairly rapidly with simple Apache, MySQL and J2EE and ESB instances appearing in short order and more complex three tier and N-tier packages  following on rapidly. Also expect the monitoring and management vendors to offer layer packages that plug straight into these environments.

Can Google trump this?

…Heatseek, (via techcrunch) a porn focused browser , I guess its the oldest money making business on the Internet…

If you are an old UNIX hacker like mean you’ll have come across the du command. Its short for Disk Usage. Well du is fine for C programmers but the rest of us probably would prefer a gentler, friendlier tool. Enter stage left JDiskReport a wonderful little Java utility that scans your disk at any point you choose in the file tree and generates nice graphical report of disk usage in either a bar pie chart,

or as a bar chart,

You can also get a date modified distribution,

and a file size distribution,

Final sweet spot, it runs on just about anything.

I run a small startup called Secantus. We are running on a tight budget and are currently focussed on development. I recently inquired as to the price of joining the Irish Software Association. Get this, the special deal startup price for companies like mine is €800!

To put it in perspective, my subversion hosting, and a dedicated hosted server costs about the same price. The loose rule of thumb is you can get a Web 2.0 company started for around $100,000. €800 is about $1000 at todays prices so I’m going to blow 1% of my share capital on membership of a local club.

The HotHouse incubator program in Dublin stamps out ten to fifteen new startups every six months, a significant proportion of which are Software companies. I don’t know of any that have joined the ISA. If the ISA truely wants to represent the Irish Software community then they are going to have to make a bigger effort to include the startups.

Is there even an appetite to recruit this kind of member in the ISA? You would think in this Web 2.0 world they would have a click here to join button on the website with a credit card form and integrated wiki, email and forums. But no its a very sedate email and inquiry form (no mailto: links for these guys, you’ll cut and paste the address like we did in the old days) an once you get access, rest assured its no Alice and Wonderland website in the members area.

So what could they do,

• Drop the fees to something that doesn’t make me sweat, think less than €100
• Take credit card bookings directly on the site
• Add wiki, forums, mail groups, blogs and company editable web pages to this site. All this technology is freeable available and can even be purchased for next to nothing as a hosted option.
• Target the startup companies, these companies are the future of the industry. Where was the ISA are the recent Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 event? Will they be at the next one in Cork?

If they did this I’d join, what about you?

ApacheCon 2006 is being held in Dublin this year. Hard to turn down an opportunity to tech up, especially with no flight or hotel costs to stuff up your justification email.

• Freshmeat announcement page (update : fixed borked link)
• Celtix Home Page
• Product page from the Iona Website
• The Celtix Demo page