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 Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise. How long have you been working on KDE how has the project developed in that time? I started contributing patches during the 2.0 development time frame and slowly became more involved with each release after that. In that time, the project has grown along three avenues: technology, community and organization. The code base has grown in complexity as well as capability. Today we have far more applications than we did when I first got involved and they are capable of so much more. While 2.0 was a capable desktop, it was really the promise of it that drew me to it: it was obvious that one day KDE would be a very complete set of products, and we've mostly arrived there by now. Community-wise, there are not only more people involved but more kinds of involvement. When I first got involved we had relatively few non-coders involved on a regular basis, and if you weren't a coder you were certainly something of a second class citizen. These days not only do non-coders get treated much more equitably, but we have impressive numbers of artists, translators, writers, communicators/marketeers, coordinators, etc. The user community has also grown substantially, to say the least, and has resulted in many thriving user-centric resources on the web such as kde-look.org, kde-apps.org and dot.kde.org . The growth in diversity and numbers in the community has been nothing short of phenominal. As informed in my penultimate post, I’ve contacted ISO and IEC (actually Mr. Gabriel Barta from ITTF), and he stated that he only “recommended” that the details were not revealed, and that him cannot do anything against it ( nor against Microsoft, or against this poor delegate). Furthermore he told me that I can speak what I want, but he keep his recommendation… OK… Thanks for the advice… Seen that between SHALL and SHOULD there is a huge difference, hey, ho, lets go… To beging the history, on sunday evening, before the beginning of the BRM, at the Heads of Delegations (HoD) meeting they were warned that on Wednesday we would have to make a decision about “what to do with the ECMA’s responses that could not be discussed”. The working methods adopted in the first two days of meeting (and at the paper it works very good), each country (in fact the so-called National Bodies or NBs and if I am not mistaken was 33) could present for discussion one of the ECMA’s responses of their interest (ie, in alphabetical order each NB presented a problem). The debate then started and if the theme was controversial and causes more than 10 or 15 minutes of discussion, the NBs involved in the discussion were invited to discuss “off-line” and the proposals was recorded in a backlog. Any discussion ended in “editing instructions to the editor” and anything that does not contain “editing instructions to the editor” was simply ignored (so resolved…). The result of that is that until Friday, even two complete rounds were held (ie that there was NBs that only proposed one discussion)… explanation to that: lack of time (which incidentally, explains all other decisions taken there, ok?). COMPUTER hardware manufacturers obviously feel there’s a large untapped market among the world’s young: Witness, the Eee, the Cloudbook, the One. The European Commission has just published the following document in a very timely fashion.
Egyedi, a researcher of technical standards, at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, doubts whether ISO should have a taken into consideration a second standard for electronic documents at all. ISO approved the Open Document Format ODF in 2006, says Egyedi: “What are we to do with a second standard, which is overlapping the first? This conflicts with rules of the World Trade Organisation.” The standards specialist refers to the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, which states that duplication or overlap should be avoided. I could not help but recalling a discussion that I had a couple of months ago. The evidence that had been gathered by a friend (preferably unnamed until permission is granted) showed the very same thing, which we shall present here. It was never published anywhere. (Update: the evidence had been gathered by Russell Ossendryver of Fanaticattack, who sent me the following a few weeks ago and has just allowed me to reveal his identity) There should be an immediate freeze on a vote put forth by the JTC 1 Microsoft’s proposal that its Office Open XML specification become an International Standard is ineligible for further preparation as a standard on grounds that it would create an unnecessary obstacle to international trade. “…OOXML as an ISO has become illegitimate and any vote on it should be placed on hold until all anti-trust litigations are resolved.”Microsoft wants this process to be "left to the experts" and that the discussion should be only technical in nature. But the whole point of the ISO status is economic in nature: ISO is first and foremost about lowering obstacles to trade. Microsoft’s OOXML would RAISE obstacles to trade by giving ISO status to only one vendor: Microsoft. |
The company's CTO, Ari Zilka, said it was important that Terracotta go open source with its products.
LAS VEGAS – Ari Zilka, co-founder and chief technology officer at Terracotta, a Java clustering solution provider, says the company is poised for growth in an era where clusters, grids and cloud computing are becoming commonplace. Zilka, who once held the position of chief architect at Walmart.com, spoke with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft at TheServerSide Java Symposium here. Can you summarize what Terracotta's mission is and what its software does? I know you have a clustering solution, but what's your claim to fame? Terracotta's claim to fame is having been the first purveyors of networked attached memory or JVM-level [Java Virtual Machine] clustering in the market. Terracotta helps you scale Java applications linearly across a bunch of machines without making code changes. Further, we help you start simple on one or two nodes and stay simple as you grow. This saves you time and money. The way we deliver this simple scalability is that we plug in to the JVM instead of to your application's source code. Ours is the only technology on the market that allows applications to trust their local memory view of the world at all times instead of having to work through APIs. This means that we are the lowest latency provider of scaling because your application memory operations happen directly to local memory, always. Simultaneously, we are the highest availability solution because we write all changes to memory to disk in our Terracotta server process. This means an application running on top of Terracotta is completely re-startable from a data center power failure without losing any information. For the community of community owners, operators, moderators, and members: we need better options, and I believe we need them to exist on open platforms. We all have different tastes and we all use different tools, but I think we all can accept that community software should help us grow and flourish. One potential platform for us is found in Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) that can be molded into a powerful, integrated suite of community experiences - something that can help us make sense of all these social networks we belong to.
For the geeks: Drupal has so much power in its core, and enough fantastic community-contributed modules, that I think it’s time to assemble an Install Profile, complete with beautiful (accessible, microformat’ed, high quality) themes, pre-set Views for any Web community to either install on their own or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations. The benefits to you should be more than obvious. And I don’t mean just the framework for the community platform, I mean… like, it’s ready to go. “It’s not the features, it’s the implementation.” This all started when we began to migrate the existing Lockergnome community to Drupal (5.x, as 6.x had not yet been released and many favorite modules have not yet been brought up to speed). OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth… just there. I’m posting this because it’s my hope that I can find partnerships, angels, brain-power, etc. - either from other communities or businesses willing to take part in an open source project that could benefit everybody and themselves at the same time. Debian Lenny: new kernel, new problem, plus the best distros for the Alps touchpad, FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD, and laptop surgery The Linux kernel is a funny thing. A new kernel should mean increased functionality, but for me and my old-and-getting-older machines, the newer the kernels, the more functionality I lose.
I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in a while on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450). When I did it today, I noticed a new kernel being added to the system: 2.6.24-1. Now I have three kernels in Debian: 2.6.18 (a holdover from Etch), 2.6.22 (my first Lenny kernel) and now 2.6.24. I didn't think about the new kernel when I next booted into Lenny, but when I did, I soon discovered that my sound card didn't work anymore. I looked at all the settings, tweaked a bit here and there, but still nothing. Then I had an idea. I rebooted and loaded 2.6.22, and sound returned. That's a curious thing. The Gateway uses the ESS 1988 Allegro PCI sound chip, so I imagine that anybody who also uses this chip and is running Lenny will run into problems. Here's a bug report on the problem via Google Groups. It's Bug No. 464191. Here's the same thing on the Debian site. If some of the commenters are correct, it appears that sound quit working due to removal of a binary blob: I am also left with a mute laptop, a HP 6100 with ESS Technology ES1988 Allegro-1 (rev 12) sound chip. Matj Laitl seems to be spot in his post since in I found this in Debian kernel changelog : linux-2.6 (2.6.23-1) unstable; urgency=low * Remove binary only firmwares for: - ESS Allegro/Maestro3 While I understand and support the whole "up yours, binary only firmwares" view, I also do like having sound. Is there any chance of getting the needed firmware in kernel or as a module in Debian. Package alsa-firmware-loaders doesn't seem to handle a module for these chips. Cheerio, Mikko Nurminen And here's a subsequent message: In a few days the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML will be known - whether it will be accepted as a second ISO standard for documents. Two years ago, the Open Document Format was ratified as a standard.
Plenty of politicking has gone on over the past month or so and it makes for some interesting reading. Some countries have started making their stance known - the US has indicated a yes vote, while India has indicated a no. Both countries voted the same way in the first vote in September 2007. India's "no" vote is not surprising, given that the country is now looking to its technically educated population to help keep the country's foreign exchange coffers full. The country's academic institutions - the institutes of technology, management and science - other government bodies and Microsoft rivals such as IBM, Sun and Red Hat had enough votes to outnumber the Microsoft acolytes - Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Nasscom plus Microsoft of course. There are 22 members on the committee which voted. The comments of one member indicate that Microsoft has already started whingeing ; Venkatesh Hariharan, Red Hat's man on the panel, writes that Microsoft lodged a complaint with the government about the constitution of the committee and tried to cast aspersions on the head of the panel. Wipro, Infosys and TCS are the three big companies that accept business process outsourcing from the American and other markets, hence their vote for Microsoft is not a surprise at all. These are companies that maintain the status quo, conservative to the core and willing to do the bidding of the piper. Nasscom represents the interests of the bigger IT companies and it probably had no choice but to fall in line. We've seen the reasons given by the Free Software Law Center as to why Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, or OSP, provides no assurance for FOSS developers. But what about everyone else?
Here's an issue that affects everyone, not just FOSS developers, as explained by the Free Software Foundation South America in a long discussion of OOXML and why NBs should not approve it: It carries a number of dependencies on earlier Microsoft decisions, not all of which are part of the already-huge specification, and Microsoft's promise covers only fully-compliant implementations. But Microsoft Office isn't fully compliant with the OOXML (Office Open XML) specification, therefore those who seek interoperability with Microsoft's software won't be covered by its promise. Eek. I understand that to be saying that there are gaps in OSP coverage. You'll get documents you can't legally open unless you are using Microsoft's software, because the extensions found in Office but not in OOXML proper, so to speak, are not covered. Let me explain what I think they are saying this means. We knew we'd get documents we couldn't open effectively from a technical standpoint, without at least losing something in the translation. But if extensions to the OOXML format, as exemplified in Microsoft Office 2007, are not covered by the OSP, and evidently they are not, when you get a document with, say, spreadsheet macros, or DRM, what legally protects you if open the document? All Microsoft has to do, then, is extend the format, as it already has, and you then can only interoperate with them if you use Microsoft software too. So. OSP gaps. Nice work if you can get it. Why would anyone in their right mind approve such a thing as this as a *standard*? A standard that you can't use without risk of legal consequences? Oh, you can implement the standard, but if Microsoft doesn't do so without extensions that are not protected by the OSP, there will be no true interoperability, because the OSP doesn't cover the extensions. OSP gaps. You'll be implementing the standard while Microsoft is ignoring it in their products. How do you like them apples? Is interoperability not the point of a document standard? The format will be on paper, and you can implement all you like, but to interoperate with Microsoft's implementations of it, you'll need to use Microsoft software. Great. Locked in again. Think of enterprise open source, and you probably think of GNU/Linux, Apache and MySQL – the core infrastructural programs. You probably don't think of specialist areas like Business Process Management (BPM), since the received wisdom is that the free software development process only works for general applications. And yet it was as the open source company Intalio that the people who invented the idea of a Business Process Management System (BPMS) chose to implement their ideas.
One of those, Ismael Ghalimi, talks about the origins of his company, its open source products, what exactly all those acronyms beginning with “B” mean, and explains Intalio's innovative Demand Driven Development programme – which he describes as “Digg for Product Management.” GM: What's the background to Intalio's foundation - when and why was it set up? Where does the name come from? How has it evolved since those early days? IG: Founded in 1999 by myself, Pascal Belloncle and Assaf Arkin. The name comes from Intaglio in Italian (the -g- is not pronounced), which is the name of stones where text is engraved. It's also the name of the process to engrave inscriptions onto stones. It's the same process that is used today to make US bills. Intalio started as an open source company to build a BPMS. The team invented the concept of a BPMS and released the first white paper on this concept in 1999. At the time tools for developing applications with connectors to other systems (SAP, Oracle, etc.) that included workflow and had an intuitive user interface were non-existent. In researching the existing tools I realised that a lot of low-level tools were needed. "Now that we are (presumably) approaching the next merge window, can I ask what use (if any) will you be making of the linux-next tree? Alternatively, is there any information you want from it?" Stephen Rothwell asked regarding the tree he started maintaining last month for tracking upcoming stable merges. Andrew Morton replied, "afacit it's already working. The level of merge and build errors in the subsystem trees this time around is a tiny fraction of what it was at the same stage in 2.6.24-rcX." He went on to note, "there are 60 or 80 "susbsytem" trees hosted in -mm at present," adding:
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