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by hjanssen on May 03, 2007 07:01pm
Here we are, day two of the Apache Conference in Amsterdam.
I have been attending less tracks today, I seem to be ending up talking to a lot of people.
It is very enjoyable to see the reaction when I tell people that I am from Microsoft, and I work at the open source software lab at Microsoft.
So far nothing but positive reactions to me being there.
I had the pleasure of talking with, among others, Lars Eilebrecht, Roy Fielding and William Rowe. They are of course very active in the core foundation. Very enjoyable, and there seems to be synergy for future collaborations.
Okay, before I go into what all took place today, I wanted to finish up yesterday’s events. And I am going to severely reduce my long winded writing (yeah right).
Two tracks I went to that were of interest yesterday were ‘ mod_rewrite’, which finally had some more technical content in it. I would love to see more of these talks. How and when to use which mod_*.
The second one was given by Rebecca Hansen of Sun Microsystems. She talked about ‘Best practices for incorporating open source code in Commercial Production’. I did not think she spent that much time on what the subject seems to imply. Much more time was spent talking about how Open Source is now viable and you can and should switch to it because large companies are now going to provide you support and services for it; so you will be safe using it.
She also said that companies are much more willing to pay for support to get what they want instead of paying for a license and being stuck with a product.
I have to say that these comments where met with some skepticism from the audience. And the questions that followed clearly showed this.
General audience response was that they are very well aware that OSS exists because of a community, not because of a company. So without the community there is no product/service. Which made the statement that you now can switch to open source because large companies will provide you service on the community software is kind of odd. Several people I spoke with afterwards seemed to share my views of it.
I think there is a place for service orientated opportunities for companies. But they better realize that without a healthy community for the projects they are trying to provide service to there is no business opportunity. Community comes first.
Okay I will write some more about what happened today. But I ended up talking to a lot of people and did not attend all the tracks I set out to. And since it is late here on the other side of the planet, I am stopping here for today.
Till tomorrow.
Well, at least it is a little shorter this time :)
by anandeep on October 27, 2006 12:27pm
I loved doing development in a research and university environment. You got to write cool code, prove new ideas, break new ground and generally ended up with bragging rights to say “I did an image recognition algorithm on a multi-layer architecture implementing reactive and planning parallelism on an autonomous robot!” The code had to work on your workstation or maybe on a demo machine once. Once you wrote the code, the only people who touched the system were hapless graduate students implementing the next big idea. They had to come to you and you could then dazzle them with your insight! This was “sexy development”!
When I moved to industry and wrote software for day to day use – things changed. Now you had all those people with “manager” titles telling you what to do, and those people called “testers” who told you why your code sucked (you couldn’t logically argue your way out of that because the weasels usually had proof)!. Of course being consummate professionals you adapted. You got the religion of “bullet proof code” and worked on making sure the testers only had “fit and finish” bugs filed against you. Which the intern could work on. That was still fun - a different challenge maybe not as “pure” as designing a neat new algorithm but pretty good nevertheless!
You got past the testers but when they integrated the components that you had bullet-proofed to run end-to-end or user acceptance tests, unexpected stuff happened. Who would have thought that they would configure the machine that way or that another non-surface component could pass you null strings. Now you had to plan not only for the testers – but also for other developers and those pesky sys admin guys. How did they become sys admins? They couldn’t tell a polynomial solution from a log n solution anyway! But being nothing if not adaptable you adapted. You now built bullet proof AND idiot proof code. (My father, a military pilot and flight instructor, when teaching flight safety used to say “Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious!”). It got a little boring at times but you still had the satisfaction of building something that was “engineered”.
I thought I had shipped the product but I found couldn’t sit back and relax. The support guys were making insinuations against my code. It didn’t work they said – and you hadn’t put in the right level of granularity in the logs for them to do a diagnosis. This had nothing to do with Computer Science – any bozo could write stuff to the log. Why didn’t the intern do it? What do you mean he can’t make sense of my code? Yeah, I do know my code best. I guess it’s the right thing to do. Certainly not as fun as designing, bullet proofing and idiot proofing new code but good supportability is “sine qua non” for a well done project!
Is that the end of it? No, further design and coding needs to be done for making software more manageable, to make the logs more systematic, to make sure that the product works when its deployed to multiple configurations, that it performs well and fails gracefully.
Unless you specialize in a certain aspect of manageability, reliability or diagnosis – this is not “sexy” development. I probably wouldn’t get as much satisfaction from designing event logs as I would from designing a new search algorithm.
I was getting paid to do all this (ok, so it was my own startup but I was getting paid in VC money!) and it was still very hard. We did do it but it took lots of coaxing of our developers to pay attention to this. They all preferred to work on the next release that had all the sexy features. Even though they knew that to make the startup successful and still have a job, the unsexy stuff needed to be done and done RIGHT!
When you are working for the “love of the game” and not money, like in Open Source – who coaxes you? Who does the unsexy stuff? Are there enough people who specialize in the esoteric aspects of event logs, that this is not a problem? Or do users who need the feature “just do it” and add the code to the community version? Or are things slipping through the cracks?
I did a sweep of the usual suspect Linux developer mailing lists and found that there is concern about whether unsexy stuff gets done. Here is a typical comment that I saw
“I think that the only issue with Open Source boils down to this:
The things that nobody wants to do, but somebody has to.
Nobody wants to think about documentation. Or user interfaces. These things are hard, tedious, and a hell of a lot more boring than actually coming up with stuff to "make things work".” (from here)
Documentation is famously one of those things that is considered “unsexy” (well, ok in commercial software too). There are efforts like Grokdoc to make documentation of Open Source projects sexy by making it a priority. But the “who does unsexy?” issue is a real concern in Open Source.
We ran into a similar issue with event logs. You know the text stuff you write so that you can find out later what happened. At the lab we just did an investigation of whether we could tell if one of our boxes had crashed from the syslog and from console messages. We were a little taken aback by how many times we couldn’t tell what states the machine had gone through.
On doing some investigation we found that the most influential project that was addressing this issue, the Evlog project (most supported by IBM) has been quiet since 2004. This code is used internally within IBM but was not mainstreamed into the Linux kernel.
How does one get unsexy stuff like this into the Linux kernel so that is comparable to UNIX/VMS/Windows?
I contend that it is critical to Open Source that attention be paid to the event logs. They are critical in making any operating systems reliable. VMS/UNIX/Windows all went through the process of making their event logs more meaningful – and this has helped make them much more reliable.
We will be addressing this further in the next couple of weeks – keep tuned!
by anandeep on August 17, 2007 01:35pm
My overall impression was that OSCON was lower key than last year. There seemed to be fewer booths in the Exhibition floor and less palpable excitement in the venue. A lot of people were complaining about the quality of the tutorials and the talks. Or it may just be that this was my second time around attending OSCON and it didn’t have the same quality of excitement for me compared to the very first time!
Microsoft’s name was on the bag that they gave us. That was good to see. Also Microsoft’s name was on the marquee as a diamond sponsor. The other sponsors were all big names. Intel was a diamond sponsor as was Zimki. Zimki? Wait a minute, Zimki isn’t a big name! How did an open source web development platform company spend so much money? According to their web site “Zimki is Fotango's flagship product, a JavaScript web application development platform that enables developers and businesses to build and deploy web apps quickly without the need for tools, equipment or hosting. With no set-up fees and subscription charges,users simply pay for the computing resources that they consume on a utility basis.” Their blog also states that they were holding back their plans to roll out Zimki at OSCON . So a small company spent all this money and had no presence at OSCON. Shades of the dot com boom. Hopefully open source web development platforms are not today’s dot coms!
I attended two keynotes (that I remembered an hour after I attended them) – one involved Eben Moglen, the lawyer dude for the FSF, tearing into Tim O’Reilly. Tim O’Reilly was asking Eben questions about whether GPL V3 gave Google a free ride. Eben went into how he wanted to protect freedom and how the Open Source people had “wasted ten years” not making “freedom” the issue. But as persuasive and articulate as Eben is, I think he left the feeling with the audience that the FSF had given in to Google to get GPL V3 passed. Eben even used the words “diplomacy” to describe the process of building GPL V3.
Some dramatic moments such as Eben pointing to Tim and then to the sign behind him and saying,” Take down that sign with YOUR name on it and put “Freedom” there instead”. Tim even went to say to him – “I will ignore the personal attacks”. To which Eben said – “This is not a personal attack, it’s an invitation to diplomacy”. Wow! I could have watched a musical and not had so much drama.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire the FSF’s devotion to its cause. They have been consistently practicing what they preach. I am glad that there are people like them to keep even big companies like Microsoft honest. But I feel let down with their inconsistency with respect to Google.
The other keynote that I enjoyed was Bill Hilf. Bill is our GM, and we know all the stuff he said in speech. We try not to say one thing and practice another (surprise, surprise!). But he said it all so clearly, and so well in front of a largely skeptical audience. It was a masterful and engaging performance. Even when ambushed by Nat Torkington with questions that were not on the agenda, he didn’t lose his verve and kept on emphasizing what we do instead of what we say. It feels great to have a official place in the Microsoft firmament @ www.microsoft.com/opensource . Wait! Or was it nice to be the exclusive open source guys in such a big company? (From a purely selfish point of view)
I attended a few talks. One was Sam Ramji’s talk about our Interop efforts in virtualization, identity and management. To tell you the truth, I went because Sam is my boss. But I stayed because he did a great job of simplifying and presenting the information. I learnt and reinforced a ton about virtualization and the Interop challenges around it. I now have a firm grasp on the subject – not isolated chunks of information unconnected to each other. Ok Sam, when are you doing a talk on High Performance Computing? J
The other significant talk I attended was about Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Or basically it implements Google’s MapReduce. According to Google’s original paper on MapReduce - “Programs written in the MapReduce style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system”.
Hadoop has been created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Lucene and Nutch. In order for him to do MapReduce effectively he had to do a “Google File System (GFS)” like system called “Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)”. HDFS was originally built as infrastructure for the Apache Nutch web search engine project.
Now, Yahoo is using Hadoop and HDFS for its back end. There is now an open source implementation of Google’s Open Source based proprietary stuff. If the community get’s behind it, it may be that the truly open source stuff may outshine the open source but proprietary stuff. Makes your head spin.
Oh, and why the name Hadoop? Doug Cutting’s son’s favorite elephant was named Hadoop. A name that came from the son’s imagination. I love Open Source!
by jcannon on October 31, 2007 03:22pm
It's been awhile since we've featured any books or authors on Port 25 - you may remember Jeremy Moskowitz on Windows/Linux Integration, and then Linux in a Windows World with Rod Smith. That doesn't mean our library shelves have gone empty though ~ so today we're going to run a small giveaway of some extra copies of .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit we came across. It's a great book on how to open .NET to work with Java and comes with some useful tools on CD - including the The Mind Electric GLUE web services. GLUE provides developers that want to build Java Web services with an easy-to-use, compact implementation of all of the core Web services standards, including XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. It allows any Java object to be instantly published as a Web service and third-party Web services to be consumed as if they are local Java objects. To Win: All we ask is that you submit the best example of open source interoperability on Windows. It can be a project running on Windows (like Apache), a language (like PHP or Java), or a commerical application - like MySQL. Send them directly to port25@microsoft.com and we'll pick the best 6 stories. We'll close the competition next Friday, November 9th at 12 noon EST. Good luck!
About the book: Discover how to build applications that run on both the Microsoft .NET Framework and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)—and extend your customer reach and system shelf life. Whether your background is in .NET or J2EE, you’ll learn to implement many of the interoperability technologies available today, including Microsoft, Sun, and third-party compatibility tools. Interoperability expert Simon Guest takes a balanced look at the pros and cons of each cross-platform technology presented, including best practices, workarounds, and examples of interoperability solutions in action. You also get interoperability software on CD—plus a wealth of code you can use in your own solutions.
Discover how to:
by jcannon on August 24, 2006 06:41pm
If you've subscribed to our RSS feed in the past couple of months, and there are many of you, please update to our new home at Feedburner.
Our new RSS feed is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Port25/
by jonrosenberg on January 08, 2008 02:22pm
Those of you who’ve read my little bio at the bottom of this blog may have guessed that I have a life-long passion for helping kids learn and a strong belief that technology can be a great educational tool. Next month I will be moving to a new position at Microsoft that will allow me to indulge this passion full-time as Director of Education Solutions, helping Microsoft to innovate around technology, delivery models and partnerships to reach the majority of the world’s student population that don’t have access to technology and its benefits today.
Many families today take technology for granted. I know mine does. We all assume that a computer will always be on, connected to the Internet, available to help with studying, problem solving, productivity, and finding the answer to just about any question that we can think of, including how well Junior is doing in Spanish class :) While I appreciate what technology has done to enrich my children’s education, I am also aware that the majority of people in the world do not have access to a computer. My new job is, quite simply, to get to work on this problem and I can’t wait to get started.
After all the OSCONs, OSBCs and other interactions with the Open Source community, I’m quite sure that the list of things I’ve learned and people I have to thank for it is longer than your reading endurance. So I’ll just say that it’s been great, I will never forget the cooperative spirit in which many of you engaged with me as Microsoft made its first forays into the world of Open Source, and I’m sure that many of our paths will cross again as we endeavor to improve education in the developing world.
by admin on June 19, 2006 02:28pm
I’ve been traveling in Brazil recently, one of my favorite countries, and meeting with various customers, developers, IT professionals, government officials and topping it off with a talk at Linux World Brazil in Sao Paulo. On my flight over I was reading a translated version of TEMA magazine which discusses the Brazilian federal government’s IT spending. An interesting statistic from a 2003 study by the Department of Logistics and Information Technology is that Microsoft is just barely on the ‘top spend’ list of commercial software providers to the Brazilian Federal Government. In terms of money spent by the government on software, Microsoft comes in at number eight. Many would believe or would guess that Microsoft is the ‘big gorilla’ in the Brazilian market, which is why the Linux/OSS versus Microsoft debate in Brazil always seems so dramatic in the press. But, alas, we are number eight, in terms of money spent by the state.
According to this study, the biggest software suppliers to the Brazilian federal government (in Brazilian Reals):
Of course, this is just software costs you can imagine what that IBM number looks like if you add in services and hardware.
The reason, I believe, for the misperception that Microsoft is the single ‘foreign’ vendor is because most people ‘see’ Microsoft everyday on their desktops. So Microsoft becomes a singular metaphor (or poster child) for commercial software. The misperception even carries to the academic world, such as Benkler’s Wealth of Networks from Yale Univ. Press, where he discusses the role of free software, giving governments, “freedom from reliance on a single foreign source (read, Microsoft)” – page 333. But if this is true, shouldn’t free software also reduce reliance from the other sources of commercial software in Brazil (players 1-7 above)? Of course it should, but that’s not the general perception because some of these others, such as IBM, have put on the cloak of ‘open systems’ to market themselves as free software loving champions. But if that were really true, I wonder where all that money is coming from and then going to? So the bigger question is: how much do these commercial companies generate for the Brazilian software economy relative to what they are profiting?
This is very important for Brazil, particularly as it relates to exporting to developing nations; for example, from 2002-2005 Brazil has increased total value of exports to Africa, Middle East, and Asian from US$13.4 billion to $28.8 billion (Ricardo Neiva Tavares, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Economist, 27/5/2006). Generating revenue to Brazilian companies through software exports will be an important part of future growth in this area.
From a Microsoft perspective, we are seeing real value for Brazil using our software to build their software ecosystem, a few statistics about Brazil and Microsoft:
In my time here in Brazil I will have an ear out for how people are using OSS and how they are interoperating with commercial software – the best lessons are always found ‘in the field’ – and it will be interesting to test how much ‘what you see everyday’ effects the perceptions and how this holds up to reality in the cold light of day (or maybe a little warmer light of day here in Brazil).
-Bill
P.S. – adding to this on my return home, after I wrote the above. Indeed the veneer of ‘free’ has faded in Brazil like it has in most countries as businesses enter into their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th ‘wave’ of Linux/OSS usage and realize that there are certainly still costs with ‘free’ software, such as in management, integration, security, people, etc.
by Bryan Kirschner on December 14, 2007 10:11am
My participation in technology was transformed by the Commodore 64. That's why I--like others here at Port25 and over at Slashdot--still love it after 25 years. Natales posts: "I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502..." Neither can I. I was 10, and needed to learn assembly to make a game I was writing run faster. I still remember there was a free 4k block of memory up at register C000 (49152) you could use to stick your assembly code in. "Participation" is a theme you've probably picked up on here at Port25. That's not just because most of us here share some sort of experience that enabled us to participate in technology in new and rewarding ways. It's also because it's an important element in enabling Microsoft and open source to "grow together." I am confident about Microsoft and open source growing together. With that said, it's a fair point to make that the best of open source is not-- yet! --established as a universal part of "Microsoft DNA." But a tradition of growing opportunities to participate in the opportunities offered by technology is. It's easy to forget today that providing free SDK's for developers was at one time a significant departure from common industry practice -- a business model innovation. Business and technical approaches that enabled third parties to develop on top of a "platform" are a part of Microsoft's heritage. The importance of growing the number of people able to participate in that ecosystem as creators or entrepreneurs is widely understood as simply smart business. Following Tim O'Reilly's insight, we think broadly about the "architecture of participation" as "systems that are designed for user contribution." One thing we do is work day by day to learn how open source concepts and approaches offer new or enhanced ways to grow participation. And then we work to understand what's already being done across Microsoft--and what could be done that's new or different. After a talking with folks here (Bill Hilf is an-ex C64 hacker and Sam Ramji got started on a PET) I realized that understanding the people and projects and perspectives of our open source community inside Microsoft isn't possible without more transparency about this idea of "participation." So this blog is an introduction for further blogs--and some new bloggers--on the ways in which we're working on and thinking about growing participation now and in the future, whether by effecting change at Microsoft, sharing information more broadly about opportunities that already exist, or working with leaders in the technical and academic communities on new ideas. (And if the Commodore 64 changed your life too, by all means chime in--or share what other technology made a big difference for you!)
by MichaelF on November 13, 2006 10:39am
While we were in San Jose for Zendcon we had the opportunity to spend some time with Jacob Taylor, CTO of Sugar CRM. As you may remember, Microsoft and Sugar announced a technical collaboration in February focused on improving the experience of deploying and running Sugar on Windows. Sugar also decided to release the a new Sugar Suite distribution under the Ms-CL (Microsoft Community License) as part of the Shared Source Program.
In this interview Sam and Jacob discuss the path that led Jacob to being co-founder and CTO of Sugar CRM as well as what has been happening at Sugar since February. We also get Jacob's thoughts on the commercial open-source model that Sugar pioneered and the collaboration announced by Microsoft and Zend which has an impact on Sugar and its customers.
by MichaelF on October 23, 2006 12:34pm
Taking a brief detour from the thread about OSS and its similarities (or not) to law to take note of a couple recent publications, both of which discuss the interaction between traditional IT vendors and OSS:
In MIS Quarterly (September) (link) Brian Fitzgerald (University of Limerick—one of the must-read researchers on OSS, IMO) provides a comprehensive survey of what he calls “The Transformation of Open Source” with expectations for “Open Source 2.0.” He expects IT vendors—including Microsoft—to play significant roles in “OSS 2.0.”
In Communications of the ACM (October) (link) Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley) discusses “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source.” (The title pretty much speaks for itself as a summary.)
I highlight these because they reflect what seems to me (qualitatively) to reflect a trend in the literature. We’ll work on getting a better sense of what the trend is and researchers’ perspectives on it to bring back to Port25…because (to bring things back to analogy and metaphor), they introduce the question: Is a vendor in my OSS more a fly in the ointment or chocolate in my peanut butter?
by admin on June 23, 2006 06:12pm
Due to popular demand we are going to start posting our interview content with a transcribed text version. Each week, until we catch up, we'll be releasing three transcripts from interviews that are already available on Port 25 in video format starting with the oldest and working our way forward. Comments and feedback on these transcripts are appreciated! Interview: Faces from the Collective: Shared memory anyone? Date: 3/31/06 Description: Sam Ramji sits down with resident UNIX guru and Microsoft Architect Jason Zions to discuss the history of Windows and UNIX interoperability. Download Transcript
Interview: Stuff we think is cool: Improving the Windows experience, it's elementary! Date: 3/31/06 Description: Ben Canning, Group Product Manager from the Office team talks Watson and how this unique solution is helping improve the Windows experience. Download Transcript
Interview: Partner Spotlight: Do your directories play nicely? Date: 3/29/06 Description: Directory specialist Jackson Shaw from Quest Software joins Sam Ramji from the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, to talk Active Directory and interoperability. Download Transcript
by admin on April 24, 2006 05:18pm
We are launching the MPEG-4 versions of our interviews today (now linked on the interview pages themselves), and future interviews will be posted in MPEG-4 and WMV simultaneously. This was overwhelmingly the top request for formats from the community. MPEG-4 files are fairly large (our typical interview of 30 minutes is about 70 MB) and will need to be downloaded to view.
I’m interested in getting your feedback on the formats. No doubt you will have feedback on the interviews as well – but those responses are best posted back to their respective posts.
We’ve considered other approaches - for example, we’ve explored posting these as Flash, which is x-platform and streaming by default – but wanted to focus on doing what the Port 25 community has specifically asked for.
Hopefully this solution will work well. If not – what do you think would be better?
Cheers, Sam
by jcannon on January 23, 2007 02:47pm
This February 14-15, 2007, Port 25 will be a sponsor at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit - one of the largest Linux and open source gatherings on the East Coast. A number of folks from the lab will be attending - myself (Jamie), Michael Francisco, Bryan Kirschner and Anandeep Pannu, among others.
We're excited to be at OpenSolutions Summit - we're certainly available to meet up, discuss & engage with you if you're attending. Please feel free to shoot us a quick mail if you're going to be there. Also worth mentioning, if you're attending, we will be sponsoring a Valentine's Day Evening Reception the night of February 14th. No marketing, no sales - just a great chance to relax, talk with friends and colleagues and enjoy some free food and drink! Plus, some pretty amazing views of Manhattan. If you would like to attend, it's free, but you do have to register for the reception (and be a paid attendee of LWOSS).
As an offer to our community, if you would like to attend the event, feel free to use our discount code (N0126) when registering for 20% off the advertised price tag. The LinuxWorld folks also tell us you'll get some pretty decent seating at the keynote presentations, some registration benefits & special welcome gift. Good deal!
Stay tuned for more updates as the event approaches & coverage throughout. Looking forward to seeing you in New York City!
-Jamie
by Mark Stone on March 30, 2009 04:15pm
We should never forget that a key motivator for open source developers is fun. For student developers -- where open source really starts -- this is especially true.
We’ve been looking at several potential student projects in Croatia, and for the past several months have been lending some support to the PlugBlog project.
In many ways this is a classic open source story. Croatia is not a large country (population 4.5 million), nor does it have as highly developed a technology sector as, say, Scandanavian countries of comparable size. Combine that with a distinctive language of Slavic origin, and you have an environment in which there is very little motivation for commercial software providers to offer Croatian localization. Thousands of languages and dialects world-wide struggle with this same problem: they simply lack the critical mass and market opportunity to warrant commercial software localization.
Into this breach steps open source. Several local blogging sites in Croatia do, of course, post blogs in Croatian. But bloggers would like to have the client tools to compose in Croatian as well. Given the popularity of Windows Live Messenger as an instant messaging client, there was a natural opportunity for open source development to create a localization pack enabling Live Writer composition in Croatian. This is precisely what PlugBlog aims to do.
One of the interesting twists on life in the era of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is how enabling SOA is of open source. Plugins for Live Writer can easily be open source independent of the source code status of Live Writer itself, because these plugins need only make web services calls to the Live Writer API. Indeed, a quick search of Codeplex shows more than 60 open source projects dealing with Live Writer. This is the kind of thriving little sub-community that SOA makes possible.
The developers working PlugBlog are students, and they are doing this work as a student project. As such, it has a clearly defined project plan and specific milestones for the project. The work they are doing will provide a valuable localized tool to Croatian bloggers, but it will also serve as an example of how other languages could integrate localization with Live Writer. This is all great, but you can’t stop developers from doing something just because its fun.
So I was surprised to see a check-in on this project that creates a connector for passing data from Skype to Live Writer. This wasn’t on the project plan. Talking to project coordinator Boris, he mentioned this was an extra they threw in in their spare time. Given the huge popularity of Skype in Eastern Europe this shouldn’t have been surprising, and indeed if anyone had mentioned it during project planning it almost certainly would have been part of the original design.
But this too is part of the beauty of open source: user-driven innovation fills the gaps overlooked originally. I look forward to more Skype integration and more pleasant surprises from the Croatian team.
by admin on May 25, 2006 12:56pm
The Future of IdMU, help us help you...
I would like to thank everyone who posted comments in my Identity Management for UNIX intro web session. While I am keen on getting your feedback on Windows 2003 R2 and Longhorn Beta releases, I am also interested in getting your views on the direction you feel that this product should take for future releases. I have received good feedback so far on topics such as: expanding IdMU feature-set to support authentication over LDAP, and providing a Kerberos based solution that knits well with AD.
I would like to hear more ideas and request your opinion on what direction you feel IdMU should take next.
Please take a moment to comment below or submit mail to port25@microsoft.com with the subject: IdMU Ideas. I will be responding to comments and email and look forward to a productive discussion.
-Shamit