It’s amazing how some people get their jollies — such as by hacking into and damaging an open-source project’s Web site. As my colleague Edward Correia wrote about in EclipseSource this week, someone jumped onto the redesigned Eclipse Plugin Central site a few weeks ago, causing a service disruption and attempting to infect the site […]
It’s new! It’s improved! It’s the new SDTimes.com home page, the first visible result of a top-to-bottom overhaul of our Web site. Right now, we have just a few pages redone, but our Web team is working feverishly to change not only the look-and-feel, but also add new features, create room for more content, and […]
This week’s news – that a judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned the copyrights to Unix and UnixWare – was good news for anyone who believes in open source software, and who also believes in giving customers choice. It was certainly bad news, very bad news, for SCO, and for other companies who shall […]
Novell — not SCO — owns Unix. According to a report on Groklaw, a pro-Linux, anti-SCO Web site, there’s been a major breakthrough in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. To summarize: Dale Kimball, the judge on the case, has concluded that Novell is the actual owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The case is […]
As hoped, Barry Bonds smacked his 757th career home run last night, as the San Francisco Giants beat the Washington Nationals 5-0. Barry’s mighty swing also created the 45th home team “splash,” as the ball flew out of the ballpark and landed in San Francisco Bay’s McCovey Cove. Signs mounted at the park detail both […]
Bruce Schneier has written an excellent blog post talking about “backwards thinking” on software security. Using the recent California security review of voting machines as an example (all the machines tested failed — but were conditionally recertified for use by a state official, as long as the easily found flaws were patched), he said that […]
Last year, I wrote a pair of “Zeichick’s Take” columns for SD Times News on Monday. Unfortunately, they weren’t archived onto the Web. However, I’m posting them here now, in response to an MSDN blog entry, “The real cost of compatibility is not in the hacks; the hacks are small potatoes,” by Raymond Chen. So, […]
Want to see the latest in quad-core servers? Go to the LinuxWorld Conference, going on this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Want to check out Motorola’s latest cell phones? Want to see racks full of blade servers? Want to see the Palm Foleo mobile computer, “the perfect companion for your smartphone”? Go to LinuxWorld. […]
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to see the San Francisco Giants take on the Washington Nationals tonight. It would have been truly memorable to be there in the stands when Barry Bonds hit home run #756. The bad news is that Barry did the deed last night. The good news is that my wife […]
Is this any way to build a community? Not only does Sun refuse to talk about the license for the Java Compatibility Kit for Java SE 5 and Java EE 6, but it won’t comment on what companies like IBM and Intel wrote in their votes on the Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316). Sun […]
Today, Apple released its next-generation iMac computers – moving away from the white polycarbonate slab introduced with the iMac G5 in 2004 toward a new, slimmer aluminum slab look. The new Macs are pretty, though I fear that the MacBook-style keyboards will be a turnoff. They feel fine, but they look too much like the […]
As the parent of a teenage boy, the thought of his using illegal drugs – or abusing legal ones – is a constant worry. Of course, I know that he’s a good boy, and that he understands the dangers. On the other hand, having once been a teenage boy myself, I am aware of the […]
If you’re not reading about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan behaving badly, then you’re reading about sports scandals. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I read about baseball great Barry Bonds in the news nearly every day. In part, it’s because of his race to beat Hank Aaron’s home-run record. But it’s […]
Why is Sun Microsystems so afraid to let the Java community look at the license agreement for the Java SE 5 Java Compatibility Kit? The JCK is the test suite that third parties, such as the Apache Software Foundation, must use to demonstrate that their implementations of the Java SE virtual machine meet the specs. […]
I have been asked to be more explicit about the ‘field of use restriction’ cited in my earlier posting. To be honest, I can’t be — yet. The field of use restriction that Apache is talking about is part of the TCK for JSR 176. That is, the technology compatibility kit that anyone who claims […]
There’s a debate going on in the Java community regarding the licensing terms for technology compatibility kits. It’s not a new debate—the Apache Software Foundation published an open letter on the subject back in April, complaining about the so-called field of use restrictions that Sun places on its Java Compatibility Kits. The JCKs are the […]
Well, not for dummies — for enthusiasts! You may recall my comments about Guy Kawasaki’s keynote address at the Salesforce Developer Conference, where I described him as “the funniest entrepreneur.” But whether he’s a CEO or venture capitalist, Guy is, ultimately, a software evangelist. Last month, as a follow-up, I interviewed Guy, asking for advice […]
Last week, Dave Rubinstein chatted with Forrester Research senior analyst Carey Schwaber about Microsoft’s three-pronged product announcement for 2008, IBM’s patent play and what “release management” means to different groups within an organization. Before that, the SD Times e-in-c talked to Rob Enderle, Enderle Group principal analyst, about the iPhone phenomenon and the platform it […]
Well, it’s not really “Appreciate Your Test Team Day,” but if you read Edward Correia’s latest Test & QA Report newsletter story, you’d think it should be. Eddie really hit the ball out of the park with his essay, “QA Teams — Underappreciated But Seldom Understood.” A number of readers have already commented that he […]
Sometimes something happens, and you just miss it. That’s the case when Micro Focus quietly purchased Acucorp two months ago. Micro Focus and Acucorp are among the few remaining providers of COBOL tools and runtimes. Micro Focus was by far the larger and more successful company. Its fiscal 2006 revenue was around US$170 million; Acucorp […]
With the release of the Oracle Database 11g beta yesterday, Oracle pulls ahead in the War of the Giant Enterprise Databases. With all respect to all the enterprise database companies, the four main contenders remain, in alphabetical order, IBM with DB2, Microsoft with SQL Server, newcomer MySQL, and Oracle. Yes, there are lots of other […]
Last night, we want to see the new action movie, “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth movie in the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. All of the movies in this series have been well done, but this installment was the most fun, mainly because the plot had to do with rogue hackers. I always […]
As mentioned in Part 1, my wife asked me to cancel her eFax account, and it seems that the only way to do that is to telephone the company or engage in a live chat. This is unacceptable: I was able to sign up for the account entirely online, why can’t I cancel the same […]
My wife, Carole, had been using an eFax account for a few years, but decided to it just wasn’t worth continuing. She asked me to cancel it for her, since I was the one who set it up in the first place. Sounds easy, right? Of course not. Step 1: Try to go through the […]
Last week was a big one for technology enthusiasts and software developers. The Eclipse Foundation shipped Europa, the huge simultaneous upgrade/release of 21 open-source projects. Apple shipped the iPhone, its groundbreaking multi-purpose mobile device. And the Free Software Foundation updated its General Public License for open source software to v3. What do each of these […]
The Traveling Wilburys released their two official albums in 1988 and 1990. Ever since then, my wife and I have listened to the cassettes we bought nearly two decades ago, later supplanted by a “rip” of those cassettes onto CD-R discs. But now, our lives have changed, with the newly released CD set comprising both […]
To many people, it seems that open source software movement begins and ends with Linux. Take, for example, the popular news Web site, NewsForge, which has done a good job of covering the entire open source universe. Last week, its owners, SourceForge Inc. (formerly known as VA Software), announced that it was folding NewsForge into […]
A highlight of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (which I attended on June 13) was an afternoon panel entitled “How do we get more applications on Linux?” Moderated by Dan Kohn, COO of the Linux Foundation, the panelist were Mike Milinkovich of the Eclipse Foundation, Darren Davis, from Novell, Kay Tate from IBM, Scott Nelson […]
If the Linux community has a hero other than Linus Torvalds, it’s Mark Shuttleworth, a dot-com gazillionaire who started the Ubuntu Project, and who funds it out of his own pocket. If you’re not familiar with Ubuntu, it’s a distro based on Debian Linux, which is designed to offer a one-disc install of everything you […]
If you talk to anyone about open source software these days, the topic of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License v3 is sure to come up. People – or rather, those people who think about open source licenses – generally fall into three categories: • GPL v3 is the worst thing since Rome was […]