Follow Us on Twitter
by anandeep on March 30, 2007 09:32pm
Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology.
Samir and I share more than our interest in Open Source (or Free Software as Samir prefers to call it!). Our fathers trained as Air Force pilots in the Indian Air Force in their teens and knew each other very well. In fact Samir (being the renaissance man that he is) has co-authored one of the most successful books on Indian Air Force history “The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965”. We contribute to an “open source” site on Indian armed forces history – you can read one of my articles (shameless plug!) on air war history here.
Samir is a Free Software proponent and recently he was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit to exchange ideas with a wide audience from both within Microsoft and from all around the globe. I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about his forthcoming book “Decoding Liberation” and to debate with him our views of how software would evolve.
Samir’s site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/ (his co-author, Scott Dexter's site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sdexter) and he writes a blog on Free Software which has the same title as his book.
An introduction to the book is here. Routledge has also given us permission to post the first chapter of this book which is available now for pre-order.
by MichaelF on March 29, 2007 07:26pm
by billhilf on March 28, 2007 12:45am
I recently spent time in South East Asia. As always these trips are enlightening, but as I wrote before one of the most important missions of these visits is to understand the health, growth and diversity of the local software economy. And it’s not just the Microsoft related software economies, but how all software is growing in a country. Indonesia is a particularly interesting example, with thousands of islands, over 250M people, and broadband and PC penetration in very low single digits, the potential for a powerful and unique software ecosystem is very real. While I was there I had a chance to talk with computer science students at BINUS International in Jakarta which was personally very motivating. The Philippines has extraordinary characteristics related to SMS or ‘texting’ (in 2005, over 250M text messages a day) and the use of mobile devices and technologies. With 6% GDP growth and the rapid growth and utilization of technology such as mobile devices (and also some very exciting online gaming businesses such as LevelUp!), I expect the Philippines to boom in the software world.
In Thailand I visited Software Park and discussed local software growth with one of the premier software incubation agencies in Bangkok. Take a look at their Software Gallery (photo on right), creatively showing off all the published software from the companies incubated at the park. Software Park was a very cool place to visit, certainly a vibrant and passionate development environment but they also have amazing elevators, no buttons inside the elevator car, you tell the security guard what floor you need to go to, and they key it in. At first I thought it was just for security, but it is also a much more efficient system as the sequence is always point-to-point, no randomization or mistakes.
I also spent time with members of the Thai software community, where we originally planned about an hour, but ended up going on for about two and a half once we got into questions. The discussion was great and I want to thank everyone who attended for spending the time and all the questions.
One fascinating trend in each of these emerging markets is technology generation skipping. With the fast growth and size of population, it’s not uncommon for the market to jump over an entire generation of technology. Indonesia is a good example, with such low broadband usage (and infrastructure) many users are simply going direct to 3G wireless versus moving from dial-up to broadband. I’ve seen this in other countries as well – it’s exciting because this type of exponential growth is fertile ground for big and surprising innovation. It’s an awesome time to be a software developer in environments like this.
Next trip couldn’t be more different, Las Vegas for Mix 07 – where Sam and I will be attendees only (first time actually ‘attending’ a conference for me in years, which I’m excited about). There will be some very cool stuff at Mix07 – such as WPF/E, opening up Windows Live data, Open Source applications using the .NET platform (with my friend Andi Gutmans from Zend on the panel), and a panel discussion called “Can’t ASP.NET and PHP Get Along?” (all session info here). I think it will really be a great event, in addition keynoting will be Ray Ozzie and Robbie Bach and Scott Guthrie (if you want to see a rock star demo don’t miss Scott’s talk). Here are a few preview ‘buzzcasts’ to give you an idea of what’s in store. Vegas baby!
I’m looking forward to being back in Redmond this week, Monday I talked with folks at the Microsoft Technology Summit. I enjoyed the conversation; hope the attendees did as well (some blog coverage here).
-Bill
by Bryan Kirschner on March 23, 2007 06:02pm
I’ve been running silent for awhile—ironically, because I had too much to blog about. Sam Ramji and I attended (and sponsored) Olliance Group & DLA Piper’s 2007 Open Source Think Tank earlier this month. Participants were encouraged to “live blog” (under an honor code)—but I found I was booked 7 AM – Midnight and was fully engaged in what was going on. Since then I’ve been mulling over the things I took away from this really rewarding event.
What got me writing again was reading about the death of John Backus, the “Father of Fortran.” I started circulating a call for Fortran experiences internally , thinking we should put brief note of tribute up on Port25—then I realized, that this was ‘Web 1.0” thinking (h/t to Hank). I should put my thoughts out there and let folks share any adds. My little blurb was:
Fortran shares a hazy set of memories of very random experiences of computing (with PASCAL and COBOL) from when I was a kid - until only a few years ago when I was using Dataplot, a public domain statistical analysis app available from NIST written in Fortran-77. Dataplot does not claim to be ‘open source’ in so many words, but its authors do promote user enhancement of the source code. I never actually accomplished anything useful in that at all regard—but I did go so far as to pull down the source and find a Fortran compiler.
I asked myself: given my little story about Fortran, am I inspired by “open?” On the one hand, I went out of my way to take advantage of the deliberate availability of code. On the other--in contrast to when I was much younger and noodle around with all kinds of bits—I didn’t actually do anything with it. What’s important to me?
This led to conclude what struck me most at the Think Tank is the passion of the many start-ups who were there. They had intense energy inspired by the fact that they see an open source –based business model as offering new opportunity. These are folks “inspired by open” – as an economic opportunity. Conversely (as we found during the Think Tank) this community is largely uninterested in (or actively hostile to) the “what really deserves to be called open source” debate (useful round up from Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk) for understandable reasons: flexibility to do what they need to do to help their businesses succeed is important to them.
I came up with a few personal scenarios:
Curiosity & Creativity Historically this was a huge factor in my life-- what was certainly my technical peak was all about getting games to work better on my Commodore64 (6502 Assembly, baby). Today, Civilization IV—totally moddable using Python and XML and supported with an SDK—is tugging at me. So is XNA. The opportunity to do new cool stuff and participate in an organic community is definitely inspirational. (I used to be able to spend much more time chasing these motivations before I had a house, job, or spouse. I think the time trade-off explains the brevity of my modern flirtation with Fortran.)
Economic Opportunity & Problem Solving My first significant indulgence in Microsoft technology actually happened around Visual Basic 5 (--go ahead, insert joke about technical trough here). I’ve blogged before about being a big fan of Eric Von Hipple’s theories about toolkits and democratizing innovation: Office97 wasn’t a product or set of products—to me, thanks to the “openness” of the object model it was one big “toolkit” you could make do almost anything a user needed it to do—and I did, for between $35 and $60 an hour.
Status and Recognition What I enjoy most is making music. By design (necessity, really –I’m not that good) it is not my source of income. So it has always been about sharing and recognition: all of my music has always been available at no cost, one way or another—the highest praise is someone else performing my songs or positive feedback. I am a big fan of the creative commons efforts and (unsurprisingly) the concept of attribution licenses. This is an area where—like the open source start-ups at the Think Tank, I actually “get inspired” about distribution models and license mechanisms enabling new business models. (Example: Today, few artists make any money from record sales—most artist income comes from live performance. Combine a mechanism for distributing freely available music that phoned home as it was (re)distributed so geographic location and demographics register back with the artist; now you have freely peer-to-peer distributed music while independent artists can pitch (paid) performance venues with a rich, valid database of fans by geography.)
As it turns out this list of top motivations is similar to what Lakhani and Wolf found Why Hackers Do What They Do? Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects—even though exactly none of these examples fits a textbook definition of a FOSS project. But that further brings clarity to my experience at the Think Tank: if we look at the question of “inspired by open” as an empirical and human question, not a semantic or theoretical one, the diversity of perspectives and motivations among people suggests diverse communities (or sub-communities) will form along different dimensions of “inspired by open.” My brief modern flirtation with Fortran helped me think about where I might fit in. My experience at the Think Tank helped me learn a lot about the “commercial OSS” community and how they’re “inspired by open.” And that will be the next blog….
by kishi on March 21, 2007 06:09pm
Impetus: This is the 19th year I have spent in the Information Technology business, out of which more than 15 were spent designing and implementing IT environments of various scopes, platforms and sizes. Among several similarities and differences between each implementation, a few constants always emerged, and my favorite of all:
Systems Manageability. This question always got asked during every high-profile design review meeting. You know the meeting I’m talking about, the one with the CIO and the IT Director are sitting across the table and asking how we’re planning on managing the environment. The main concern you could see in everyone’s expression was “what sort of manageability needs to be built around for operations and support ?”. So why does manageability matter ? Let’s start with what people imagine, when they think of Systems Manageability. It means different things to people in different roles: the Infrastructure folks imagine uptime and redundancy, the Developers imagine reliability, the Business Managers imagine efficiency. But the answer is so overwhelmingly obvious. Had it not been for systems management toolsets, apps and frameworks, ITPro’s and Admins would be worried sick about everything from uptime to reliability to scalability. So yes, manageability matters, a lot, because it’s the knowledge that “all’s well and running smoothly” that matters to everyone from a CIO to a Developer to a IT Admin.
Importance: Now that we have established the impetus behind why Systems Manageability matters, we should now address the importance tied to it, such as:
In the next seven blogs or so to follow, you will get a detailed breakdown on the Systems Manageability project that we have completed in the lab. We will be covering the Project Methodology and Project Ontology in my next blog. As always, send us your comments and feedback and THANK YOU for tuning into Port25.
by MichaelF on March 20, 2007 08:40pm
1/Podcast_3A00_-Accessing-VS-Team-Foundation-Server-from-Mac_2C00_-UNIX-or-Linux-through-Eclipse.aspx" target=_blank mce_href="http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/07/21/Podcast_3A00_-Accessing-VS-Team-Foundation-Server-from-Mac_2C00_-UNIX-or-Linux-through-Eclipse.aspx">Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.
To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.
To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.
Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.
by jcannon on March 16, 2007 05:02pm
This week, the lab looks at configuring and installing MySQL - an open source relational database management system which is typically used for web applications.
This paper will provide an overview of configuring & installing this software on Windows. MySQL does not have as many features as PostgreSQL, however, and one would expect it to perform substantially better than PostgreSQL on Windows because of its thread-based architecture (PostgreSQL uses a process-based architecture instead).
Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.
Attachment: MySQL_Windows.pdf
by jcannon on March 14, 2007 03:38pm
Today, a lighter post and link to Sara Ford's blog which talks about her recent presentation to Microsoft employees entitled, "Embracing Open Source on Codeplex." Sara, a developer/evangelist with Microsoft on the Visual Studio Powertoys team, has been a tireless supporter and advocate of change internally on identifying when & where it makes sense to embrace open source collaboration and licensing styles through offerings like Codeplex and Shared Source.
Sara's post (and some great pictures of grassroots marketing here on campus can be found here.
by jcannon on March 09, 2007 04:08pm
In our continuing series of papers describing both the research undertaken by the Open Source Software Lab, and technical tips, here is the latest networking configuration technical analysis.
Abstract: This document provides the reader with an analysis of VPN functionality within the Linux operating system. Specifically, it provides a breakdown of VPN components and a description of what is available to Linux Administrators, in terms of manageability and functionality. It also provides a set of HOW-TO’s in the area’s of VPN and IPsec.
Attachment: Linux-VPN-Analysis-Howto_final.pdf
by jcannon on March 08, 2007 03:38am
Folks may be aware of our technical collaborations with open source companies like Zend, JBoss and SugarCRM, but to-date, our work with MySQL hasn't gained as much attention. Some background. Over the summer of 2006, MySQL joined the Visual Studio Industry Program, a program that grants institutions, researchers, companies,etc. access to the extensibility components of Visual Studio. This, in turn, allows Visual Studio to become a platform for developers to build new functionality on-top of what we release. There's even a catalog for these extensions.
MySQL's extension is hosted here and allows for full DDEX capability and database object manipulation from within Visual Studio Server Explorer. It's a great example of the technical collaboration and engineering work needed to create the code behind interoperability.
The good news is we'll be talking more about this in the coming months. And as part of our continuing relationship with MySQL, we're also a sponsor of their upcoming user conference. While we work out the details, please drop a line if you're planning on attending.
Additional MySQL on Windows Resources:
by anandeep on March 07, 2007 01:06am
I just got back from Cambridge (in the United Kingdom, not the one by the Charles river) from the Microsoft Research / Technische Universitat Darmstadt “Reliability Analysis of System Failure Data” conference.
Microsoft Research has a very nice lab near Cambridge University. This was my first visit to Cambridge and I was able to drink in (literally!) some of the local color. I went to the pub (called the “Eagle”) where Watson & Crick had their “aha!” moment about the double helix structure of DNA. I also visited the pub next to Queen’s College called the “Anchor” which Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett used to frequent.
But it was not all pub-crawling, we had some serious stuff to deal with at the conference. The objective of the conference was to bring academia and industry together to deal with a problem in the field of reliability analysis. The problem is that industry (there were representatives from Sun, Cisco, IBM and of course Microsoft) had the failure data but NOT the models and techniques for solving the problem overall. Academia had the models and techniques but NOT the kind of failure data that it needs to solve the overall problem. This conference was an attempt to get the two sides together and find a solution to this conundrum.
After we had presented our position papers (our lab’s paper is here), we split into workshops on Data Collection, Data Repositories and Data Analysis. The idea was to come up with the “next step” in taking reliability analysis of system failure data forward.
In the Data Collection section, we were stuck for a bit. We were trying to look for compelling reasons for data collection by end-users (rather than by the software makers like Microsoft, Sun or IBM). What reason would an IT department have for implementing mechanisms to collect failure data?
At first the reasons seemed obvious – to monitor for failure and to correct defects of course. But then the representatives from the software makers spoke up and said that they did collect failure data and were using it exactly for the purpose of correcting defects. Vince Orgovan from Microsoft stated in his paper that almost 400 million PCs provide data to Microsoft. Not only was the data available but Windows XP supported corporate error reporting in exactly the same way that it supported error reporting to Microsoft. It just needs changing a few registry keys to do this. The Windows debugger “!analyze” can be used on the error data, much as it is used internally.
This took the wind out our collective sails. If shipping software was providing all these mechanisms what could we suggest as a next step that had compelling value? Most corporations would like to leave the job of correcting defects to the software makers (proprietary or open source) anyway! The software makers were in a much better position to look across many deployments and correct defects in the software.
The only compelling reason we could come up with to build a mechanism for data collection was to help with deployment on the user side. The data collection mechanism would collect failure data during the preliminary testing. This data would then be fed into a model that could be used to judge the maturity level of the deployment. Kind of a CMM (Capability Maturity Model) for reliability. We even suggested that we have an ITIL management practice around this. This would potentially allow the ITIL model to not only give good qualitative measures like it does today but to quantify the reliability of a deployment.
This in itself is a very useful thing to have, but I cannot believe that it is the only reason that we would collect failure data at the end user level. Let me know if you think of any others.
Open Source would have much the same issues but for the fact that there is not a central organization that collects all this failure data. The situation in Open Source may be the reverse of the situation for proprietary software makers in that the failure data is collected at the IT organization level and not centrally. How does this failure data really result in code defect corrections? I guess that it is either pre-analyzed and submitted as a bug or people patch their own instances of the source code. But my opinion is that eventually open source software systems will have to build central repositories of failure data in much the same way that commercial software vendors have built them.
by billhilf on March 05, 2007 06:48pm
Four random bits…
1. Multicore. I think we as an industry over complicate the value of multicore and programming in this environment (although I enjoy Clay’s blog about this subject). I think this presentation by Bruce Dawson and Chuck Walbourn from Microsoft Games Technologies Group explains how two popular Xbox 360 games take advantage of the three cores in the 360. Makes it a little easier to translate how developers can (and will) take advantage of the multicore servers and desktops in the future:
Now imagine the gaming on an 80-core chip ;)
And since we’re on games, I’m *very* excited about DirectX 10, now in Windows Vista. You need this nvidia card to really exploit it right now, but others will be out soon and some great games will be out soon which will make DirectX 10 really shine, such as Crysis. Read this interview to go deep with the people behind DirectX 10.
2. Our Windows Home Server guys, by using drive extender technology, claim the ‘death of the drive letter’. Yeah yeah it sounds like RAID but having seen this first hand, it will make drive swapping extremely easy. I will certainly use it.
3. I always get a kick out of reading Mark Cuban’s blog. If you don’t know Mark Cuban, he owns the Dallas Mavericks and is, in general, a very outspoken entrepreneur. I don’t always agree with him, particularly on many tech issues, but I love when he gets passionate about his own team. Read his defense of one of his star players, Dirk Nowitzki, here. What I think is great about this blog is just how absolutely honest and real Mark’s voice is when he blogs. You may not be a basketball fan, but I doubt you’ll need to be to get the point of this blog – no holds barred. Pretty rare in today’s blog-on-anything world - and certainly rare for major league sports team owners. Recently, Hank just brought a similar game to Port25. Kudos.
4. Lastly, I get asked sometimes about ‘hey Bill, so what’s new in Vista?’ I would recommend two things – first, high level key features are all here; second, is a great technical overview of the new things in the Vista kernel by Marc Russinovich, which I think is one of the best walk-throughs I’ve seen online (Part I, Part II, and Part III coming). Note, this is just the kernel, not all things in Vista of course.
On the road in March, maybe blogs of substance forthcoming.
by MichaelF on March 02, 2007 06:04pm
For those who weren't aware there is a series of blogs penned by Todd Osagawara and Matt Asay on O'Reilly's OnLAMP site called: Inside Port 25.
Todd and Matt have been writing about content on Port 25 as well as industry news regarding Microsoft and Open Source. If you're interested in reading some other perspectives on some of the topics we cover, check it out.
Here are links to some of the latest blog entries:
Todd's latest: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/03/interview_with_ian_gilman_micr.html http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/02/sms_notifier_for_pocket_pc_oth.html
Matt's latest: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/03/microsoft_hiring_its_way_into.html http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/03/microsoft_goes_after_young_blo.html