One of the things I love about my beat is the relative rarity of personal scandals. I cringe whenever I see a politician's personal peccadillos paraded before the public, and I'd hate it if I ever had to lead the procession. But Silicon Valley is not without its dramas, and this week we had a whopper. I'm referring, of course, to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark V. Hurd's resignation.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20100 comments
When I heard that Novel was set to unveil version 2.0 of its Mono Tools for Visual Studio, I was looking forward to chatting about the release with the manic Miguel de Icaza, original leader of the open-source Mono project, vice of Novell's Developer Platform group and super-fun interviewee. But Miguel was welcoming his first daughter into the world (¡felicitaciones!), so Mono product manager Joseph Hill pitched in for the briefing.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 9, 20100 comments
IBM grabbed headlines last week when it unveiled its new System zEnterprise 196 mainframe. Something of a hybrid, the new mainframe combines the POWER7 and System x servers into one box, and the servers share resources through a common, virtualized platform.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 27, 20109 comments
Today, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) announced the availability of the first major release of its new O2 Platform.
The O2 Platform is, as the project's Web site describes it, "a collection of open source modules that help Web application security professionals maximize their efforts and quickly obtain high visibility into an application's security profile." The OWASP is a not-for-profit organization focused on finding and fighting the causes of insecure software.
The idea is to provide a high level of visibility into an application's security profile by automating "application security knowledge and workflows." An overview of the available modules is available via PDF download.
The guy leading the O2 Platform project is Dinis Cruz, whom I last interviewed about two years ago. More
Posted by John K. Waters on July 12, 20100 comments
So, I'm talking recently with Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation, about this year's ginormous Eclipse Release Train -- 39 projects, 33 million lines of code -- when he mentions that, of the 490 committers, 108 were individuals. That seemed like a lot of unaffiliated code contributors to me, but he said that this was a growing trend.
"The bulk of these individuals are focused on a couple of areas in Eclipse, particularly modeling," he told me. "Lots of individuals are contributing to the Eclipse modeling project, I think in part because they can make a bit of a reputation for themselves within the Eclipse modeling community and make a living through consulting by leveraging what they've built at Eclipse. That sort of small-scale individual ecosystem is starting to become very prevalent in parts of the broader Eclipse community."
He then pointed me to Dr. Ed Merks, who has been the technical lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) project from its inception. EMF is a subproject of the top-level Eclipse Modeling project, which Merks also leads.
Merks worked for IBM about 18 years, and he was there when Big Blue bought Object Technology International (OTI) and began developing Eclipse. At the time, he was working on some modeling-related technology that would eventually become the EMF. More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 30, 20100 comments
Simon Phipps is a man with a mission… Well, a new mission. The former open source evangelist for Sun Microsystems has always been kind of missiony. His new cause: proving that "open source continuity" is a reality. His vehicle for that mission: ForgeRock, a company formed by erstwhile Sun execs to provide "reliable stewardship" for OpenSSO, an open-source access management and federation server platform.
OpenSSO was a Sun-sponsored open-source project, the stewardship of which went to Oracle when it was acquired. But Big O has shown little interest in the technology. Earlier this year, the company declared that OpenSSO was "not strategic," and later removed OpenSSO Express as a download.
Enter ForgeRock, which was founded in February by Lasse Andresen, former CTO of Sun's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Herman Svoren, former Sun Sales exec (EMEA). Phipps joined the company in May.
The goal of the company, which is headquartered in the U.K. and Norway, with subsidiaries in the U.S., is to be what Phipps calls "a pure-play, open-source ISV." More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 30, 20100 comments
Please join us in welcoming back the WatersWorks blog -- a return of an old favorite here on ADTmag.com. In this blog John K. Waters will regularly cover a variety of topics of interest to application developers working with a variety of languages, IDEs and frameworks. Check out the first few posts (above).
If there's a topic you'd like to see John cover, be sure to let him know by posting in the comments or drop him an e-mail at john(at)watersworks.com.
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Posted on June 29, 20100 comments