The End of OpenOffice ?

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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I’ve been a mostly happy OO user for the most part of the last decade (ever since my then employer – Sun acquired StarOffice) – it’s really been the only office application I’ve used consistently at home and at work and I’ve used it across many operating systems – Winders, many Linux variants and OS/X. I haven’t use the ‘other’ popular office suite for more than a decade.

But I have been grumbling more than usual lately about the various annoying bugs and inconsistencies and have moved a lot of my professional use to proprietary tools like OmniGraffle and Keynote. Even though I’d consider myself as an OO power user – OO is not just looking extremely dated but I find other tools on the Mac *way* more productive and that unfortunately trumps my desire to support Open Source.

I don’t think it will be long before I drop OO completely.

But maybe there’s a glimmer of hope. With Oracle’s takeover of the Open Office project (courtesy of Sun) and their clumsy handling of open source communities it seems there has been a mass defection from the Oracle controlled OO project to The Document Foundation. Maybe this is the kind of shake-up the OO needs – here’s hoping.

Oracle on OpenJDK

Posted on by Rich Sharples

These are encouraging signs that Oracle will continue to invest in OpenJDK and that it won’t follow the same fate as some other Sun Open Source projects like Open Solaris. I’ve long believed that OpenJDK has the opportunity to become the Linux Kernel for Enterprise developers.

Kurian discussed the roadmap for JDK 7 and JDK 8, which will be based on OpenJDK

“In addition, Oracle remains committed to OpenJDK as the the best open source Java implementation and we will continue to improve OpenJDK and welcome external contributors.”
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173712

“Oracle will work with the OpenJDK code base and the OpenJDK community
like Sun did. We will continue to develop the JDK in the open under a
GPL license. We welcome the cooperation and contribution of any member
of the community – individuals as well as organizations – who would
like to be part of moving the most widely used software platform
forward.”

http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, …

Posted on by Rich Sharples

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

– with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

2010 Cary Road Race

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I think I may be becoming a ‘runner’.

Late on Friday night, one of my drinking / poker buddies told me he was running in the Cary Road Race (10k) starting at 8.30a the next day. I switched from beer to water (admittedly a bit late) and decided to enter as well.

The start is at Koka Amphitheater, just over a mile from my house so I jumped on my bike and headed down to register. It was a little chilly – but otherwise an awesome Spring morning.

I had no real target time or pace (didn’t even wear a watch) I just went along for the run. It’s basically two laps of a circuit starting with a decent hill.

My final time was 52.08 – that’s an 8.24 pace. That doesn’t break any records but was actually pretty fast for me. A 10k is a nice run – not long-enough to get really knackered but long enough to settle into a pace.

So now I have something to beat next year !

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Posted on by Rich Sharples

First some insight into how my twisted mind works. I rarely believe any bar chart, pie-chart, percentage I see presented unless I can access the raw data myself and draw my own conclusions. I’m not a statistician by trade or education but I’ve spent a lot of time running surveys and analyzing large data sets; so I have the benefit of some experience.

Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.

There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.

The original report has this chart :

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Update – Sunday 4/11/10

My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.

So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot 😉 By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.

Screen shot 2010-04-11 at 8.25.17 AM.png

[As percentages of respondents – that’s : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]

These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.

My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !

JBoss, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs !

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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The JBoss team is expanding again – we’re looking to fill four PM / PMM roles – strong preference for location is Greater Boston (Westford, MA) :

Product Manager – Application Platforms

Product Marketing Manager – Middleware
Solutions Marketing Manager – Middleware
Technical Marketing Manager – Middleware

Submit your resume online via the above links and ping me if we’ve worked together in the past.


Oracle’s loss could be Rackspace’s gain

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I previously highlighted the fate of OpenSSO – a test case for Oracle and a living experiment for Open Source – possibly allowing us to understand how or whether a project really can outlive it’s corporate backer.

Well, it seems that another piece of the Sun OSS portfolio has floated adrift from the Oracle mother-ship. Some of the key developers have left / are leaving Oracle and have joined Rackspace. With this Rackspace essentially becomes the guardian of one of the major development branches of MySQL. It would be interesting to know what Oracle would price their MySQL assets at today.

Happy Birthday Apache HTTP Server

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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Apparently it was Apache Web Server’s 15th birthday yesterday – congratulations to anyone who’s ever been involved in the project. I doubt any would have thought that 15 years on, Apache would have become the dominant Web Server on the Web and the foundation of one of the most successful and recognized Open Source forges. For a history of the Apache Web Server and the Apache Software Foundation, head over to the ASF Blog.

Red Hat has been a supporter of Apache Web Server for a long time and has shipped and supported a version in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux for as long as I’ve been noodling with it. Last year we started shipping a standalone, multi-platform distribution as well – JBoss Enterprise Web Server. Earlier today we released the latest version of it and expanded our support for Apache HTTP Server to 14 different Operating System / architecture combinations. The exact component versions are listed here and there’s more information in the Release Notes. If you’re deploying Apache HTTP or Tomcat at scale – Red Hat also supports management of Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat alongside all JBoss products via JBoss Operations Network.

JBoss AS 6.0 Milestone 2 released

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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The JBoss AS team moved to a more rapid and incremental release cycle with the 6.x family and the second milestone was released today (release notes, download, repo.). The release was lead by Brian Stansberry and new features include :

  • Servlet 3.0 / JBoss Web 3.0
  • JPA 2.0 / Hibernate 3.5
  • JAX-RS 1.0 / RESTEasy 2.0
  • Microcontainer 2.2

More detail in blogs from Ales, Brian, Steve and Rémy. Congratulations to Brian on another on-time release and good luck to Jason and team for the next milestone release in a couple of months time.

Immortality of Code / Life beyond Snoracle

Posted on by Rich Sharples

One of the benefits we talk about with Open Source is that the license and collaborative nature can offer some protection for users should the main supporter disappear. Rarely has this been put to test but here’s an example that came across in my feeds today. OpenSSO was a Sun project that Oracle seemingly killed last week as part of their assimilation / refactoring process. In less than a week, it seems there’s already a commercial organization twilling support the code-base. From ForgeRock’s web page :

ForgeRock OpenAM is the market leading open source Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation product. ForgeRock is providing the community with a new home for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSSO product.

Good luck to ForgeRock – I recognize quite a few of the names as fellow Sun / iPlanet / Netscape Alumni. It will be interesting to see how this plays out – it got ugly the last time something like this happened.