Planet Profoss

Interesting news today from the Eclipse Mylyn project, which it has been proposed should deliberately fragment into six sub-projects for which Mylyn would become an umbrella.

I had the chance to chat last week with Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies, who originally invented the task-focused interface and created Mylyn as part of his PhD.

He explained that the creation of six sub-projects was designed to encourage greater involvement from other vendors in the task-focused interface. Mylyn already has 45 public third-party extensions and the thinking is that other commercial vendors will be more encouraged to participate in their areas of expertise.

The six proposed sub-projects are Tasks, which remains the core project; Context for Java and C++ workspaces; SCM for source code management; Build; Review and Docs. Other commercial vendors that have already agreed to take part in the new sub-projects include Perforce, which is taking a leadership role for SCM; and Cloudsmith, which will be involved in Build.

Each sub-project will be run independently and each will have its own reference implementations, which are:

Tasks – Bugzilla, Trac and Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) implementations
Context – Java, C++
SCM – CVS, Subversion and Git
Build – Hudson and OSLC
Review – Cross-repository support via Tasks and SCM
Docs – WikiText, RichText

In the long-term, however, the thinking is that the independent projects will be able to draw in more support and contributions from the vast ecosystem of software development and lifecycle management vendors ans projects.

Mylyn will remain as an umbrella organization, with Mik Kersten continuing to lead the implementation effort and coordinate the sub-projects. While Mik said he is unaware of a precedent for this kind of fragmentation within Eclipse, there are good examples of coordinated independent sub-projects, such as WTP and EMF, and he will be taking clues from them, as well as the overall Eclipse governance process, on governance.

The change to the Mylyn project is currently a proposal, and there is a 30-day period for feedback before it is due to be implemented.

Jeremy Allison of the Samba fame wrote an interesting blog post about Sun’s approach to open source participatory development, followed by Bradley Kuhn’s bad opinion of Oracle’s attitude towards open source.

Oracle’s plans for open source are probably not detailed enough to score, but looking at history is always instructive.

Mike Olson’s experience with Oracle sounds positive in regards of BerkleyDB future.

Many open source projects “made in Sun”  are not competing with Oracle’s products and Oracle will evaluate if they worth the money. The ones competing with Oracle’s products (e.g. Sun Open SSO) are not even mentioned in Oracle’s list of open source projects.

Listening to Michael Bemmer - formerly Director of Engineering for OpenOffice/StarOffice and Communication team and now GM at the Oracle Office Global Business Unit - reiterating that Oracle will remain OpenOffice.org’s main contributor, doesn’t say much.

Oracle to succeed where Sun Microsystems failed - i.e. engaging with the community and turning open source investments into profits - needs to define and implement viable open source strategies for those projects. I believe they can, let’s see how Oracle will move forward in the future.

A couple of weeks a go Brian Profitt pinged me for a chat about Devops , the result of that chat , his article can now be found on the Zenoss blog, it's titled Datacenter Barometer: Better days arrive when dev meets ops

It's a very nice read with some pointers to places regular readers of my blog should already know ;)
So with lots of leading Open Source infrastructure companies on different levels, such as config management (OpsCode and Reductive Labs) , monitoring (Zenoss) , deployment (openQRM, RPath, and obviously Consultancy companies , the upcoming Devops conferences around the planet promise to be a lot of fun ! ;)

Oh, and apparently there is some more on the story on /.

Technorati Tags: devops ha krisbuytaert monitoring opensource zenoss

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Topics for this podcast:

*Novell gets unsolicited bid
*More deals and drive for devops
*Dual licensing debated
*Patent and IP deals, fights involve open source

iTunes or direct download (32:56, 9 MB)

Elliot offers $2bn for Novell. OSI refutes IIPA’s view on open source. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell confirmed a $2bn purchase offer from Elliot Associates. Interesting perspectives on Elliot’s offer for Novell from Linuxquestions, Andy Updegrove, and Matt Asay.

# The OSI categorically rejected the IIPA’s special pleadings against open source.

# Canonical’s new CEO, Jane Silber shared her top priorities for Canonical and Ubuntu with the VAR Guy.

# Zenoss Core version 2.5.2 now includes monitoring capabilities for the Xen Hypervisor.

# The H reported that the Samba project has released version 3.5 of its open source SMB protocol implementation.

# Stephen Walli presented: a graphical explanation of open source software economics.

# Microsoft inked another “Linux software patent agreement”, with I-O Data Device Inc.

# eWeek published an interview with Paula Hunter, head of the Codeplex Foundation, on its role and progress.

# Vermont became the latest government to enact an open source software policy.

# Jahia enhanced its caching and clustering capabilities with Jahia Enterprise Edition v6.

# rPath added interoperability with Puppet, Cfengine, and Chef as part of its move to configuration management.

# Gorilla Logic released FlexMonkey, an open source testing tool for Adobe Flex applications.

# Deutsche Börse Systems is implementing Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the AMQP standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

# Alfresco announced an early-access beta program for Alfresco SMB Edition on Amazon’s EC2.

# Dries Buytaert discussed the role of open source in the cloud.

# CodeWeavers released version 9 of CrossOver for Mac and Linux.

# REvolution Computing added Zack Urlocker to its board of directors.

# The Zarafa open source groupware software is now included in Fedora.

# Zenoss added a new data center visualization capability to the latest version of Zenoss Enterprise.

# OStatic reported that Best Buy is releasing its idea-gathering software, BBYIDX, under the GNU GPL.

# Orange signed on to support the MeeGo platform.

We continue to see and hear signs of a new movement in enterprise IT: devops. The term has for some time been a reference to the blending roles and benefits of an integrated approach when it comes to the ‘development’ of an application through testing and QA to production and ‘operations.’ We cited this as the focus of SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic and then VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource last year. Still, we see the trend today on a few different levels, all of which are drawing in vendors eager to meet the opportunity.

On its most basic level, devops is about people. Developers and admins/operations have historically been separate camps within enterprise organizations. While there has been some integration and collaboration, helped by open source software and social networking trends, there seemed to be a persistent disconnect between these two parts of typical enterprises. Similar to how open source software developers have come a long way in considering usability, user interfaces and users in general, we now see enterprise developers taking into consideration the deployment and use of the software. I’ve also actually met some of these devops, hired to strattle the software from creation to consumption, and I believe it is a growing job title for enterprise IT. Further reinforcing the devops people factor, CollabNet indicated a need to manage not only code and applications with agility, but also to similarly manage people and teams as a driver of its acquisition of Danube, a project management company.

Of course, most of the people involved in devops come from the software development and IT operations worlds. At the developer level, we see open source software tools and practices, Web and agile development all contributing to devops, whereby development and production are getting aligned.

On a more technical level, we again see open source and agile development practices, but with the addition of cloud computing as the delta of all of these trends.

Yet another level of devops is the business level, whereby not only developers and operations folks are getting involved, but the executives and people representing business and application requirements, needs and realities are also finding they have a stake in devops. This is something we’ve already seen in open source software thanks to vibrant communities of not only developers, but users too, particularly in specialized fields where their stake in the development and deployment of the software is more critical. For example, we’ve heard from many vendors how their open source software for the healthcare and government sectors is pulling in new stakeholders and experts, including doctors and nurses, who are directly reporting their needs, issues and realities to developers, operations and in the best case scenario, to devops.

One thing all of these different levels of devops have in common: they are all driving activity and strategy among a wide array of vendors and projects. After all, at yet another level, devops represents the promise of cloud computing, elasticity, doing more with less and driving synergy and efficiency through people and technology.

We will be delving much deeper into this subject for a special report from our Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) and Infrastructure Computing in the Enterprise (ICE) practices planned for this summer. We look forward to speaking with more devops players and hearing what they think of the trend.

The 451 Group has been participating at OSBC for many years and this year will have a larger presence than usual as both Jay and I will be presenting and attending both days and we are sponsoring the event itself.

My presentation – “From Support Services to Software Services – The Evolution of Open Source Business Strategies” – is scheduled for 11:40am – 12:30pm on March 17th as part of the Strategies for the CEO/CMO track.

Jay’s presentation – “Cost Conscious – Calculating and Understanding the Cost Benefits of Open Source Software” – is schedule for 2:00pm – 2:50pm on March 18th as part of the Strategies for the CIO/CTO track.

We’ll also be attending various sessions and related events and already have a number of interesting meetings set up, but if you are going to be in San Francisco and/or at OSBC and want to meet either one or both of us for a briefing or just to say hi and share a beer, drop us a line – or find us at our booth.

The full agenda for OSBC 2010 is here.

Novell’s Q1. The future of OpenSolaris. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca

“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell reported Linux platform revenue of $37.5m in Q1, up 6.4%.

# Internet.com reported that Novell’s Linux business broke even as Microsoft deal revenues fade.

# As the H reported Oracle exec Dan Roberts confirmed that OpenSolaris has a future at Oracle.

# Citrix acquired Paglo, launched GoToManage service.

# StatusNet launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a support program for corporate clients.

# Stephen O’Grady dismantled Gartner’s prediction about commercial open source revenue source.

# Researchers at the University of Oviedo estimated that the cost of replicating the Linux kernel at over €1bn.

# Dave Rosenborg reported on IBM’s use of Hadoop, Nutch and Pig to create BigSheets, a web-based analytics project.

# Dave Kellog published his thoughts on the NoSQL movement and open source. http://bit.ly/dhd7ol

# The Tech Teapot published an exploration of open core licensing in network management.

# SEP AG released the source code of its SEP sesam backup and recovery software under the GNU GPL.

# Zend announced the general availability of Zend Server 5.0.

# Computerworld reported that Twitter is migrating from MySQL to NoSQL, specifically Apache Cassandra.

# Talend signed an OEM agreement with BonitaSoft to integrate BonitaSoft’s BPM in its MDM Enterprise Edition product.

# Sourcefire and Immunet partnered to create a free, Windows-based version of ClamAV.

# Musings upon the open core functionality ceiling from Tech Teapot and Tarus Balog.

# Jeremy Allison argued that Sun’s need to control the code cost them the company.

# Nexenta Systems included ZFS-based in-line deduplication in NexentaStor 3.0.

# Alfresco is targeting Eastern Europe, Russia, and CIS via partnership with VDEL.

# Mark Callaghan compared MySQL and the various NoSQL databases.

# Sonatype reported that Intuit has moved its software development to Maven and Nexus Professional.

# CollabNet noted the promotion of Subversion from Apache Incubator to Top-Level Project (TLP) status.

# Matt Asay told Roberto Galoppini about his top priorities as COO of Canonical.

# Kolab Systems launched to provide support and services for the Kolab groupware project.

# Carlo Daffara published “How to analyse an OSS business model – part three.

# Olliance published part two of Miriam Tuerk’s interview with Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft.

Mind the Bridge - the initiative started by Italians living in Silicon Valley to help Italian entrepreneurs to go to Silicon Valley, raise capital and bring it home - invites everyone to join the Mind the Bridge gran finale on the 18th of March at Stanford.

Registrations are now open, take your chance to listen to the elevator pitches from last year competition.