Negative Approach

Fring--VoIP, Skype, IM and more on your iPhone (Verdict: very cool so far)

Never one to shy away from bleeding edge technology, my co-worker Dan Diephouse (of open source web services frameworks Xfire and CXF fame) is running Fring on his iPhone and we both agree that it's pretty fringing cool.

I was able to dial Dan on Skype and he was able to call me via Skype all on our corporate wifi. He was also able to use his VZW laptop card to connect to the iPhone. Very cool and extremely useful when traveling abroad or generally on the road.

ZDnet has video demos and Fring themselves have a demo video … Read more

Why would you think that SaaS companies won't pay for open source?

When Gartner analyst Robert Desisto wrote this week on the idea that SaaS companies are going to adopt tons of open source I was thrilled. And yet some of the blogosphere seemed to think that meant they wouldn't pay for support and services offered by open source vendors.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

From an open source vendor perspective, I can tell you that the interest we are seeing from SaaS companies is tremendous. In my case Mule offers the integration/abstraction layer for SaaS to bridge internal applications and data structures (and really if a SaaS architecture is not service-oriented the vendors are going to have serious problems) and Galaxy provides the governance and lifecycle to manage the services. (Disclosure: I am CEO of MuleSource)

But that's just one example--If you consider that Adobe is using Alfresco as part of its online PDF product or that MySQL powers a great many SaaS applications and that both of these companies make money as open source providers I think it shows there is a great opportunity. … Read more

Salesforce-Google collaboration paves way for Web-oriented architecture

Salesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.

But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.

While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.

The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now. … Read more

Open Season Episode 15 - Open Source and Cloud Computing

I haven't been able to kick this back problem (2 weeks with a slipped disc) but we did manage to record episode 15 of the Open Season podcast series.

This time we talk about: - The Cloud and why we need Java there - The inevitable fall-out from Microsoft's Yahoo tomfoolery - Google AppEngine - and so much more!

If anyone out there has a better way to record these things we're open to suggestion. Ashlee's latest Skype move (port forwarding and all that) is pretty much crap.

Open Season Series

Zorro, underground master of your open source project

I spoke with Gavin Clarke over at The Register about his piece "Fresh blood - the new fight for open source" several times over the last few weeks about how there are a great many corporate developers creating additions and such for open source projects but how it's difficult for them to get the code out of the corporate boundaries and back into the project.

The real challenge facing open source is how to bring in fresh contributors and code contributions to sustain projects and meet users' needs. Without fresh blood, projects progress relatively slowly and are … Read more

Why is IBM avoiding Open Source in SOA discussions?

Cote at RedMonk noted that IBM didn't once mention open source at their SOA-focused Impact 2008 Conference. My guess? IBM wants the SOA paradigm to remain a rich-man's sport and they want their army of consultants to put IBM products into place. As such they focus on "the Business" instead of just solving the problem.

Instead of embracing open source as a part of SOA, IBM is choosing to push only it's own expensive and cumbersome products, which simply doesn't make sense.

To be puckish, I bet the open source world would have a … Read more

"Java-in-the-cloud" will lead us to "Platform-as-a-Service"

There is a key missing piece for cloud computing to really go mainstream--a higher-level programming language to be able to do more advanced logic and functionality.

I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.

Maybe Sun just doesn't get it or care enough? This concept to me is the key to making the cloud a reality--and making Sun relevant again (MySQL was exciting for five minutes, but is almost … Read more

Levanta is dead. Just like LinuxCare.

Levanta, a Linux data center automation company that was reborn from the ashes of Linuxcare, has closed its doors.

I wrote about Levanta and LinuxCare for Slashdot back in December 2005. The company never seemed to get its mojo back from the LinuxCare debacle, despite having a pretty cool product.

The demise of LinuxCare can be attributed to many factors. The first was that enterprises were slow to adopt Linux - in the early '00s, IT spending came to a grinding halt with the dot-com and stock market crash. But the key factor to LinuxCare's spectacular death spiral was … Read more

Google unburdens Atom and AtomPub from patents

Good news for those who love Atom and AtomPub as Google announced that they are removing any patent implications to help further adoption.

We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions.

I'm a fan of the AtomPub API … Read more