Geir talked again about Apache, Harmony, and Geronimo. It was
again basically the same talk, so I didn’t note much. He did say that
Intel’s contribution of the JCE framework (no providers, they use GNU
Crypto, Jessie, and Bouncy Castle for that) included 3000 test cases
— definitely need to investigate that for Mauve.

He also said that “Apache is not out to compete with anyone else”.
I don’t recall if this came from the Harmony part or the Geronimo part
of the talk. It seems to apply equally well to either. I’m not
really sure what this means, as in a way some kinds of competition are
inevitable and not contingent on our intentions. In the Classpath
world we’ve (for the most part) handled this by recognizing that,
while the VMs do compete in some ways, in general our interests — in
a solid, complete class library and in free Java implementations in
general — outweigh our differences. Start with that, work
together for a while, have a few beers and late night chats together,
and one day you wake up with real trust and a real community. (I know
Geir understands this in a deep way. This is for any journalists out
there looking for a controversy 🙂

One way not to compete would be to work harder to cooperate, i.e.,
move license harmony back to the front burner instead of the current
situation, which is that the majority of folks on both sides (me
included) are just hoping it will magically fix itself. Magical fixes
just don’t happen.

Max Rydahl Andersen, JBoss

Max is a Dane living in Switzerland. Sometime I wonder whether
giving these personal details of the speakers crosses some line of
etiquette. I do it just to personalize these writeups in a small way.

This was about Hibernate 3.1 — what’s next. My first note is
that his powerpoint presentation was cool, in that he could highlight
parts of a slide with a yellow highlighter (software) pen, which
marked up the slide as if it were an image (i.e., not restricted to
textual selections). I wonder what program that is.

So what is new? JBoss is writing NHibernate, for one thing. I
wonder whether stuff like this makes Sun nervous. Maybe not — the
crowd at this event was pretty rah-rah-Java; and just like at the
Denver JUG I didn’t find anybody planning to move development to .NET,
which rather surprised me (e.g., I talked to a guy from a Delphi shop
that is moving to Java — not C#).

I don’t know diddly about Hibernate and I didn’t take many notes
on it as a result. The Hibernate eclipse plugin that he demoed looks
nice, though I don’t recall why. And, he said on the Hibernate web
site there is a “help wanted” search you can do, to see how you can
help out. This struck me as a nice idea and I think for Classpath we
should either have an automated “FIXME finder”, or perhaps “stub
finder”. Or, change the cpbot to assign you a “FIXME” to fix on
request. In case you’re, like, bored or taskless or something. Ha,
ha.

Sun’s View of Open Source

Simon Phipps gave a nice presentation on Sun’s view of open
source. This covered a lot of ground, with a lot of ideas, and
unfortunately my notes on it are rather fragmentary since I was sleep
deprived. Bah.

Early in the talk he made a prediction, which is that due to Peter
Jackson’s engagement with the fans (the parallel to an open source
company is obvious — breaking down barriers between supplier and
customer, having a conversation instead of an ivory tower), King Kong
is going to make money. Hmm. I will make a counter prediction, which
is that since monster movies are intrinsically boring, and that since
we’re all deadly tired of remakes, it will not do very well. This
film, sorry Peter, is already on my must-miss list.

Simon talked about one important aspect of standards, which is
that standards mean substitutability. The idea here is that if there
is a governing standard then you can switch implementations with
little cost.

However, according to Simon, neither open source nor open
standards is enough. And, dammit, my notes are so vague here as to be
useless.

My recollection is that this was a somewhat pro-Java (there are
standards) and anti-Linux (LSB being what it is) approach. He didn’t
say what standards cover Open Solaris though :-). My notes say that
he did tout the Debian/Solaris project. That was interesting to me
since I thought there would be a licensing smackdown here. Maybe that
will come from the FSF instead. Simon also talked a lot about the
CIO’s point of view, which is super important if you’re delivering to
enterprise customers. And, he made the point that the needs of
development are not the same as the needs of deployment (I think
meaning something like, open source alone is great for development,
but freedom in deployment requires the substitutability delivered by
standards).

I felt bad that I didn’t take better notes. This was an important
talk. I disagreed with a lot of it; as I remember it many of the
assertions were a bit too binary, whereas in reality there is a
continuum of, say, compatibility even if standards are in force — a
quick survey of C++ compilers is instructive (Simon, I suspect, would
argue, correctly, that C++’s approach is a poor one and that
Java-style test compatibility kits are more useful). Anyway, it is
hard to express one’s disagreement cogently when one doesn’t even
remember the material. Sigh.

ObjectWeb Consortium

François Letellier gave a talk. He represents the ObjectWeb
Consortium, the makers of JoNAS. His talk was not very technical but
instead more economically focused. He was the only person at the
whole conference to mention the 4 Freedoms — bravo! And, any slide
about free software that mentions Nash equilibria and societal
externalities is cool by me. (Yes. Any slide.)

Once again though I fell down on the note-taking. He described
ObjectWeb’s approach as “open source with governance”. I think that
is pretty smart, as in general I prefer explicitness and transparency.
The GNU style (cf GCC) is more anarchic — there is governance but it
is often implicit, or largely embodied in tradition, or simply not
discussed much as if it were my crazy aunt who I keep locked in the
attic.

He said the software industry can best be viewed as competing
networks of firms. Good observation.

Update

Graydon pointed out I inverted the sense of an important clause.
Fixed.