I’ve spent too much time in airport lounges this week and I’ve been trying to avoid the mainstream news – I think I’ll just read the dumbed down summary of the credit-meltdown in Men’s Health in a couple of months time.
As such there were only a couple of items in my del.icio.us queue this week – here they are.
First up – SpringSource have announced their new support model for Spring Framework (also see thread on TSS). Spring Source has a God-given right to make money from the Spring Framework – they’ve invested in it and now they’re looking for their return. I also respect their transparency in communicating their intention. What I’m not sure about is their approach. Converting ‘users’ to ‘customers’ has to be about pull, not push; about carrot not stick. I think Spring Source might force some users to become customers but they’ll likely piss-off their overall installed-base in the process; and their installed-based is their future pipeline.
There’s a chunk of text in VMWare’s latest 10-Q filing dedicated to their, er, position on Open Source. Of course the statement ‘Our use of “open source” software could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to possible litigation.’ wouldn’t be necessary or true if they’d understood both their obligations to and the overwhelming benefits of Open Source in the first place.
Manik has a good introductory article at DZone on the challenges of achieving performance and scale. I’ve worked on a number of big (multi-year) projects where we didn’t effectively account for Moore’s law and worked hard to solve tough scale, throughput and performance problems that didn’t exist by the time we deployed and commissioned the system.
