Last year I managed to only publish one article! Ouch, not too impressive. This year I'm hoping to do better because my notes are already (mostly) in a digital form, thanks to FreeMind and a Mac.
So, without further ado, here's the first installment.
Intro
- Overall observations
I have to say that last year seemed a little more interesting. Perhaps it's just because it was my first QCon.
But there was at least the Un-conference, which there isn't this year. Too bad. Last year it had to compete with highly interesting sessions with high-profile speakers, so I only found time to attend one or two sessions.
However, this year, I would have attended at least two just in the first day.
I still think the conference is very interesting and useful, but it's not quite the same.
- Corporate Opensource
- This year seems to be a year of corporate opensource. Or maybe it's opensourced corporativeness?
- Not sure how to say it right.
- Not sure how to say it right.
- Exhibit 1: SpringSource
SpringSource, which was actually purchased this summer by VMWare.
- The whole thing about the VMWare acquisition seems odd.
- + -
I had a chance to talk with some of the falks from Spring and they spin it like this:VMWare needed development community to compete with Microsoft (on the cloud offering presumeably)
I guess if MS builds Azure support in the Visual Studio / .NET, then it will lead to natural use of MS products instead of VMWare's.
I guess. So what, does VMWare propose to build VMWare support into Spring? What exactly to Spring applications need to know about VMWare? Isn't the whole point of VMWare to be transparent?
The only angle would be with some kind of cloud management / deployment tools. That must be it.
Second point they make is that it's actually good that there is no overlap between VMWare's core expertise and the Spring's. Right...
The argument goes that this way Spring can continue doing what they do without interference form VMWare.
And yet, Rod is no longer a CEO but has some strange title along the lines of "VP of the Middle Tier" or something.
Third point they make is that now that they are part of a large company with actual revenue, they can feel free-er to spend their time on the opensource work.
- Ok, so that sounds like they ran out of money.
I don't know. I'm sure I'm missing something, but it looks a lot like eBay and Skype.
Spring is huge. It's the new Java EE. It's the new standard library for Java.
On the bright side, they are building great stuff and it tends to really solve real problems and be really useful.It is also trully opensourced. So we do get all of the code and we are free to make changes and build it and distributed it, etc. It's Apache licened.
So if SpringSource decided to go crazy and build something silly or try to move the project away from usefulness, there are planty of other projects that will be able to pick apart the codebase and take what's useful (not to say anything about the actual userbase which could also control their own destiny).
However, they are pushing ahead at a break-neck speed. Perhaps it's just me, but I'm still not sure of all the pieces that are in Spring 2.5, which was released last year, let alone having had an opportunity to have used them.
This year - Spring 3.0 comes out. And it has a lot more cool stuff that looks very interesting.
As a user, I'm finding it hard to keep up with them. As an opensource developer, it's not possible to compete with the full-time staff of SpringSource building the Spring platform.
- The whole thing about the VMWare acquisition seems odd.
- Exhibit 2: Terracotta
Terracotta, which has just acquired ehcache this summer.
I don't have as much to say about them, except that it's yet another open source project that has a community but not is a community.
They are not as well established as Spring yet. But they have made significant changes since I looked at them last.
They apparently have a better clustering story. To the point where clients no longer stall and crash when there is a problem on the server.
They also now position themselves as a Hibernate plugin that simply does better caching than ehcache. This makes for a straight (and fully opensourced) upgrade path from Hibernate with nothing, to Hibernate with ehcache, to Hibernate with Terracotta.
Sounds a lot better than what I remember from before. I believe that before you had to write to their API directly or else it was a different VM that had to be used? Not sure.
- Exhibit N: Google with it's many projects
- Firefox
- Android
- Chrome / Chromium
- etc
- Firefox
- Is this bad?
If there is no free lunch, it follows that somehow we are paying for all of this.
Is that bad? Probably not. But it's good to be aware of the motives of those paying for the pizza.
I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand, I find that it's still open source and it's still good, even if it's not quite the kind of (maybe fictional?) opensource that we are used to.
On the other hand, there seems to be something sinister about the whole thing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but basically these corporations are giving out free stuff (code, products) in order to cause developers to behave in certain ways (i.e. use the products), which somehow leads into the company's business model.
But on the whole, I think this model still leads to better software being built, code being open and available for learning and improvement, engineers having a free hand in what they use, and business success of these companies being more closely tied to the actual value they deliver.
So on the whole - I think we are good.
- This year seems to be a year of corporate opensource. Or maybe it's opensourced corporativeness?
