Red Hat’s Spacewalk (the upstream OSS project for RHN Satellite) seems to be doing pretty well – they have a very active mailing list and are already getting external contributions. Mat Asay casts his perspective over on c-net.
Talking of growing communities – interest in JBoss in China is really picking up – there’s a new site dedicated to JBoss – Kava which contains translations of many JBoss related blogs and articles you’d find in North America and Europe.
GNU is twenty five years old this month – and Stephen Fry (English comedian, author, actor, columnist and tech. blogger) has a short video celebrating the event and introducing free software. btw. his podcasts are pretty good as well; if you’re a Stephen Fry fan and enjoy a light-hearted perspective on technology.
This week the Web is aflutter with the launch of Google’s browser – Chrome. Just for the record – I don’t think that Microsoft will win this browser war – give it 3-5 years and IE users will be in the minority – they’ve failed to innovate at the pace of the competition (Firefox) and haven’t established a Mobile Web foothold; and their desktop monopoly is finally being challenged (by OS/X, Linux and the mobile web). The thing is – IE won’t be the only victim in this war – other’s will get caught in the cross-fire – I think Safari will go down pretty quickly – probably within a year of Chrome being ported to the iPhone. Firefox (the only browser I’ve used for as long as I can remember) will be next. That bothers me – but only a little – that’s techology evolution – survival of the fittest (despite illegal monopolies). I’m happy for *any* free, multi-platform alternative to IE.
Finally, I think I pissed off a few ex-colleagues at Sun with my recent post. Thing is, I’m right. If you thought my post was overly critical (or wrong) – read this analysis on Forbes.com and try and argue against the fundamental arithmetic. It’s worth repeating my position – I’m not saying that Sun’s OSS efforts are wasted – I’m just saying they won’t save Sun. The projects and the people who’ve pushed them so hard will continue to flourish long after Sun has been dismantled and sold off.
