Oracle starts to show his disrespect for the java ecosphere.  Oracle published a press release on 12th august 2010 that they are suing Google about patents presumably used in android. This results in a lot of fear in the industry that they may be next. This hurts Suns former goal to make java a language that is widely used. There are millions of people out there who use java to earn a living. Is this on stake now? Would I as a company try to find alternatives now to mitigate the risk of Oracle go even more haywire? Of course I would. And if I’m getting familiar with the new alternative, then I’d switch over completely, when the new solution fits my needs. Why should I keep up the risky java business?

I think that Oracle did a great mistake by suing Google. But after all, java is kind of open source, it’s mainly protected by trademarks and obviously some patents, which sun should have donated to a separate organisaion long ago… So what can we do? Maybe we should use the open source spirit and show oracle that a blade can have two sides and start a java fork.

After all, there are plenty of JVMs out there, the specification if freely available. The language itself is standardized. Why not create a fork and get rid of code and features that is blocked by patents and invalidate as many oracle java/jvm patents by prior art as possible. Put the new ecosphere in the hands of a foundation that is lead by the interested companies and highly rated individuals from the java community to ensure that the cancer doesn’t come back. I am sure that google would be delighted to help in this process and I guess that IBM wouldn’t mind either to get rid of Oracle as gatekeeper.

We all play in a publicly available playground that has been build by a (presumably) nice guy and then a bully comes, takes over the nice guys business and starts kicking out some people whose face he don’t likes. What do you think? Should we keep playing or show the bully that he may have bought the playground, but without us, it will be pretty boring?

news

Hi!

I am preparing a talk, that I will give at an open source conference in august (http://www.Froscon.org). The topic is “agile open source development” and I’m looking for projects that like to participate and help me to gather some data about agile techniques in these projects.
Often projects don’t realize that they use agile techniques, so it would be nice if you and/or the team could answer the questions and send me an email to cornelis@pcornelissen.de and place your project name and “[TALK]” in the subject, so my mail filters can mark the mails accordingly.

There are no wrong answers and it’s completely ok, if your project does not use any of the mentioned techniques!

To be able to use the data for the talk it would be nice if you could send me the reply before the 20th of july. If you can’t make it for that date, I can use it nevertheless, because I’m going to write a blog entry after I gave the talk about the topic.

I’d like to thank you in advance for your time and effort! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

If you are involved in multiple projects, feel free to send me multiple replies to this mail. You may also send this to other people/projects you know, if you think they might want to participate.

BTW: I am also interested in negative experiences with certain techniques or agile development as a whole (in the context of open source projects).

The survey won’t take long and I’ll give credit to each project in the talk and the blog post, that I’ll write afterwards!

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agile · froscon · talk

The wordpress installation was broken and the article links didn’t work. Now they should work again…

news

In august I’m giving a talk on agile open source development. I have prepared an email with questions for open source projects that use or have tried agile techniques. If you know a project that may be interested to participate and get some coverage in the talk, please contact me at cornelis@pcornelissen.de

The talk will be in german, but after the conference, I’ll write a blog post here in english.

news · talk

I am watching the video of Alexandra Leisses talk at the Froscon 2009 with the title “Managing the Unmanageable”.

You can download it at:

ftp://ftp.stw-bonn.de/pub/froscon/2009/prerelease_please_do_not_redistribute/sa/hs12/…

It is a nice talk and worth watching! (Language is english!)

froscon · talk · video

The projects have been chosen, now it’s up to the students to apply for certain tasks. So if you are a student and you have spare time left, need a little bit of money and you want to help the open source community, then go to:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/03/students-apply-now-for-google-summer-of.html

And check the available projects and tasks :-)

news

I held a talk about things to consider, when you’re starting an open source project and what you can do to keep it alive. The talk is in german (sorry, no subtitles, but the talk is the insparation for this blog, so you can more or less read what I have talked about here). I have fixed the sound, because the microphone had some minor problems. There are a few minutes where the sound is a little bit crappy.

See the video here: Froscon “Open Source Projekte starten und am Leben halten” auf Vimeo

froscon · news · talk · video

It’s time again. If you want google to pay someone, so he helps in your project, apply now!

http://code.google.com/soc

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external-help · news

For us developers, it’s easy to write the code, but that is not all a good project needs to do. You have to provide information on your project, the releases, the schedules and how to use your software. That’s a bunch of work, how can you fulfill the user expectations?
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early-phase · hosting · introduction · talk

Choosing the right scheme for the version numbers is not as easy as it sounds. There are many implications that you may not think of in the first place. Selecting a version scheme without thinking is like selecting a name without thinking and you don’t wouldn’t do that, would you?

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communication · early-phase · introduction · naming · release-planning · talk

early-phase · introduction · release-planning · talk

Oracle decided to shut down the public services of Kenai  (the sun hosting site, that was announced on java-One last year). First I thought that the idea of combined standard services with a shared frontend for project hosting is dead. But today I received an email from the kenai admins and they clarified the oracle strategy. The Kenai infrastructure will be merged into java.net, so kenai is not dead, it has switched bodies ;-)

I am really glad that oracle has decided in this way!

hosting · news

Sometimes people start to behave weird when they are in control or able to influence others. They act rude, or for example are mean to their users or project members… So, take a second and reflect if you are doing similar things and hurting your project and reputation.

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communication · early-phase · introduction · social-skills · talk

Your project published a few releases and a small developer team is forming. You’re still doing the communication and web site maintenance. Time for real development is becoming smaller and smaller. Are you doing it right? (more…)

early-phase · external-help · introduction · social-skills · talk

This blog post deals with the mistakes and opportunities you might encounter when you’re trying to integrate new people in the project. The problems range from a too high entrance barrier to overly caring project leads that suffocate new members…

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communication · early-phase · introduction · social-skills · talk