The situation concerning the open source projects previously maintained by Sun Microsystems has been slowly degenerating since the company’s acquisition by Oracle [ORCL], and it would be nice for a better understanding about what is still “what” after this past year of consolidation… especially when it comes to the vast array of Java-related projects.

If you remember Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, you may recall his involvement with Sun and its various projects. He has a personal blog (he’s a fellow WordPresser!) and he has assembled a list of the open source projects and their current status that may be of interest to you, gentle readers.

A scant couple of days ago, Subversion (the project) formally graduated from its incubation phase, becoming a full-fledged Apache project at subversion.apache.org. It seemed like almost yesterday that it had been accepted as a candidate by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)… In fact, it was in late 2009 that the proposal to join the ASF had been filed, and just a few months later, it made its way toward acceptance.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what Subversion is, it is an open source file-associated content versioning system. Many developers who are familiar with RCS, SCCS, and CVS have probably heard about Subversion (SVN) as the “next step” toward versioning “modernity” or “modernness”, especially for those who are transitioning from traditional code branching and merging toward changeset management techniques. For people participating in agile configuration management (CM) and coding initiatives, Subversion may have even been selected as the primary (or even, sole) versioning system.

For those of you approaching CM for the first time during this latest iteration of Web development (circa 2006 and onward), while you may be more familiar (and even using) distributed/disconnected/decentralized versioning systems like Mercurial (hg) or Git or even monotone, you also may have heard of Subversion as one of the last vestiges of centralized versioning systems that organizations that have moved onto the current system have used in the past.

For others, the folks who have been using commercial versioning products like StarTeam or ClearCase, you may be scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss is about.

And for those you who’ve been deep in the CM trenches for awhile, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, it’s about time.”

There are benefits and disadvantages to the features that Subversion provides, and depending on your development requirements, it may be 100% the tool to use, or it may cover enough of the features that you need that it’ll do the trick, or it may be insufficient to match your needs. But it always seems to be on everybody’s short list for consideration, replacing the position that the venerable CVS once held.

For public repository access, Subversion is very popular because a couple of its access methods involve leveraging HTTP rather than a proprietary protocol. For that matter, you may find site hosting services offering Subversion as a way to manage versioned content for Web sites due to its support for WebDAV (however incomplete) as well as to support development codebases, big and small.

So, we’re tickled pink that Subversion has made its way to ASF as a full-fledged graduated project at this time. Kudos!

Apparently, several people have had issues with WordPress 2.9 since its FCS release just a few days ago.

In fact, this has caught on such attention that there has been mention by Jeff (at Weblog Tools Collection), Keith (also at Weblog Tools Collection), and at the WordPress development blog about a beta version of WordPress 2.9.1 making its way out for people to try.

If you read the comments on Jeff’s post, you’ll notice that there is a sort of near-religious (for lack of a better term) indignation over the 2.9 version and presence of bugs in the product despite its beta and release candidate cycles. While certainly not to the same extent as the “religious wars” over GPL and other open source efforts, it does touch upon the conversations and arguments over whether GPL’ed products are worth the trouble for many businesses and individuals.

While it would be difficult to argue that hobbyist bloggers have the same issues about code ownership and production-worthiness that major corporations do, it is easier to understand the concern that individual bloggers (and even SMB’s that use blogs to help drive or support their work) have over some (or, in some cases, much or even all) of the open source software that they rely upon.

And it does not make it any better when the fervent GPL’ers and open source fanatics turn the frustration around upon the users and accuse them of not “helping out”. As if every user of open source software is somehow financially and technically equipped to deal with the intricacies of agile and automated testing…?

Perhaps the lesson here is: You get what you get, and that’s all.

“Well, what does that mean?!?”

Another way of stating it (and a bit less obtusely) is that when you get software like WordPress, despite being GPL’ed, it is still nothing more than software. And like most software released into the wild today, its code complexity makes it prone to having bugs introduced with every successive increment, and coupled with its existing bugs, some of the combinations and permutations of the population of defects would be truly wicked and pervasive. So if you choose to use it, or any other software, you have to be cognizant of this reality and decide how you are going to deal with it.

In the realm of COTS, it was fairly simple: you abide by the terms of the EULA or basic software licensing contract. If there was a support clause, you could exercise it. If you decide the headaches of using the software are not worth it, you have the option to just stop using it. A common example that is being played out in the marketing arena, and in mass media, is of course, the Exodus Away From Windows of the 2000′s: whether it’s OS X, Linux, Solaris, or something else, the choice to stop using Windows has become not just viable but extremely attractive. And while some have chosen to stop using Windows, others have decided to stay with the versions that they are already using, and still others have taken the plunge to Windows 7.

The FOSS arena has generally been fairly simple as well: if you choose to use the software, you need to understand the terms of acceptance and make arrangements for support. Since several of the open source licenses do not place restrictions on customizations or modifications, it is a laissez-faire market for hiring developers to manage the code. This frees the users who are less technically adept to focus on their business needs and be what the software expects them to be: users.

The WordPress-GPL realm has been a bit murkier when it comes to the separation between user and developer in some respects; some of the comments being bandied around about how WordPress users should somehow transform themselves into volunteer developers or QA testers for unstable versions of the blog package indicate how misinformed those writer are. Other comments about how the WordPress users with problems should consider hiring some developers to correct the bugs for them are a bit more reasonable since, after all, it’s just software. But judging from the types of comments being written by the user types, a lot of them are looking for constructive advice on how to get back on track and just being productive users of the software, but not heckling or the typical “you-should-have-backed-everything-up-every-second-of-every-day” lecture.

Recommendations

Well, by now, you probably figured that this section would be here, right?

Here are some recommendations for WordPress users, especially the ones who are discouraged and frustrated by all of the people who are giving you grief for being, frankly, users of WordPress:

• Use the software for all it’s worth, but don’t expect more from it than it really is… skip the hype about how it’s the end-all-be-all of software… It’s Only Software.
• Whether you’re a casual user or a power user, use the features you like or need to use. Blog as much as you want and how you’d like to, based upon what the software provides for you.
• Sometimes you’ll have to check the WordPress.org support forum for information or help. Don’t be afraid; just ignore the hecklers– the rest of us do.
• If you are motivated and spot a bug, there is documentation on WordPress.org, including in the Codex, about how to report a bug. It’s a lot of didactic to wade through, but it discusses the formalities behind researching the bug to see if it already exists, and then posting it (if it’s not anywhere) into the Trac issue tracker.
• If you want to focus on being a user, use the support forum to discuss the bug… take your best guess at the most appropriate topic for now (you’ll see what I mean when you get there).

And not to leave Matt and the other WordPress folks out of the recommendations, here’s a feature request of sorts:

• If I couldn’t persuade a few hundred project managers at a large Fortune 500 company to submit and track bugs in something like JIRA or Trac, I seriously doubt I would be able to offer Trac as the easy-to-use, convenient bug reporting tool for end users.
• Instead, a lot of customer-facing software tend to use quick pop-up style or pre-shutdown hooked dialogs to capture the user’s note about the problem and some internal stack trace or other technical info before the software bombs.
• A good approach would be a “Report a Bug” feature in WordPress that would be accessible at multiple locations through the admin console. What information you’d like to capture would be up to you, of course, but knowing where the bug occurs and what happens when it occurs… well, y’know.
• You’d probably want to pump all of the bug report data through to a secure Web service and store the raw incoming data separate from Trac initially; then you could filter against it, or scrub the data down to unique sets for import into Trac. Or you could have the Web service import the data into Trac after a bit of transform or scrub, so you would have everything captured… just keep in mind that the data could get large and you will see a lot of duplicated reports.
• For more advanced fun, you could also provide the users with a ticket ID associated with their report, for both the raw incoming data and the eventual associated Trac ticket.

Parting Words

Users are users. Many developers are also users. But not many users are also developers. Good users are great sources for feature requests, but they should not be expected to be well-versed or experienced in reporting and investigating defects.

So, happy holidays, folks! Be kind and considerate to your friends, neighbors, and even strangers. Be of good cheer and well-wishing. And be good users of software.

Microsoft [MSFT] and Nokia are finalizing an agreement to augment Nokia (particularly Symbian/S60-based) phones and smart devices into becoming viable business-grade devices, or even components in functional corporate meshes.

Management Perspective

Despite the consumer penetration by Apple [AAPL] in the smart mobile device market, neither it nor Palm [PALM] with its new Pre device or even Microsoft itself, with its Windows Mobile platform, have made the significant inroads that RIM [RIMM] with its various BlackBerry platforms have made in the business community. And while adoption of Nokia/S60, iPhone/iPod touch, Windows Mobile, and Android smart mobiles in the SMB segment has been tremendous, none of them have been able to make that tremendous security investment and network ubiquity that larger corporate entities demand.

Research in Motion: Problems

Not to say that RIM has completely protected its devices from espionage or other nefarious hacking attempts. But given their early adoption into businesses, BlackBerry devices have had the benefit of early market entry and dominance to keep its competitors at bay. But for the past few years, with the encroachment of the iPhone and its powerful distribution channel known as the iTunes App Store, RIM has had an increasingly difficult time justifying its add-on costs to tech-savvy companies that have very specialized needs that should not be restricted to the RIM network services.

Even worse, the BlackBerry devices actively marketed for business use carry hefty price tags that are beyond the hardware and assembly costs and yet are not as subsidized or discounted by the wireless carriers. This has become so extreme that many long-time BlackBerry owners have eked out a living by sticking with their old models.

Palm: Problems

Despite the recent rollout of the Pre, and the expected launch of the Eos, Palm has been limited to Sprint [S] for its wireless service on the Pre, while the more ubiquitous Centro and Treo smart devices continue to appeal to both businesses and consumers because of the stable Garnet OS platform and the wide plethora of applications available. In fact, despite the development onslaught of iPod/iPhone apps being released, the total software base of Palm OS/Garnet OS applications far exceeds every other mobile phones’.

But since Palm has essentially abandoned Garnet OS in favor of its newer webOS platform, the death knell for the Treo and Centro devices– while delayed– has been pealing for quite some time.

Android Consortium: Problems

While conceptually a good idea, Google’s [GOOG] open source Android platform seems to be suffering from too much expectation and not enough implementation realization. Instead of a tremendous groundswell of product releases and massive application software offerings, the problems associated with multi-vendor “cooperation” have curtailed widespread Android OS product adoption. This may be another case of early market advantage by Apple, or it may be merely due to developer community splintering and over-division.

Windows and Symbian OS: Opportunities

Combining the technologies found in Windows (and other Microsoft technologies) and Symbian OS platforms definitely provides quite an opportunity. Focusing on Nokia devices, traditionally non-Windows Mobile based throughout its history, allows for better standardization for application development, and it brings a huge developer community from the standard Windows OS, the portable Windows Mobile and CE platforms, and even interest from the XNA-Xbox networking groups. Additionally, the Maemo and S60 communities can be brought to bear to help flesh out both the Windows Mobile Marketplace and the Ovi Store.

Even more intriguing is Sun’s [JAVA] and Oracle’s Java Store (known on the distributor side as Java Warehouse) availability, given the strong presence of Java ME on Nokia smart devices. While Java Store has not been formally launched yet, finalizing the available revenue models for software developers who want to leverage that channel would benefit all of these potential collaborators. Combining Java technology (and JavaFX Mobile, too, ‘natch) with the distributed computing opportunities by the usual Sun-Java partnerships, like with Amazon [AMZN] Web Services and Elastic Cloud, as well as plenty of other hosting services (like Joyent) would further intensify and magnify the reach and coverage for businesses and corporate users.

And, of course, there would be plenty of consumer bleed-through opportunities as a result… Could you imagine purchasing Xbox LIVE games from your smartphone and having the option of either playing them on the ‘phone or having them ready to play at home via the download queue?

There are a lot of people passionate, even “religious”, about the open source licensing that they tend to prefer. There are even some people who allegedly insist on certain license types. Steadfastness? Maybe. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. Controversial? Absolutely.

Matt’s recent post definitely re-opened that proverbial can o’ worms, with plenty of folks, both the heavily-published, and individual developers, and even the casual tech readers, voicing their opinions and concerns. Unfortunately, the typical responses range from the unhelpful (“I like/hate this because I do!”) to the tangential (“Buy my GPL themes!”) to the confused (“What is GPL and why is it so different from open source?”), all the way to the apathetic yet noise-inducing (“I don’t know why people are arguing about this.”).

An interesting, valid counterpoint was provided by Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater Software) entitled “Getting Pretty Lonely“. And this led to Matt’s reply-post, entitled “Not Lonely at All“. If you are a developer and trying to stay within the letter and intent of licensing terms while struggling with architectural and design issues and customer requirements, you’ve probably encountered licensing issues already. 

Despite what some may tell you, deciding to use GPL software in the real world, is not as easy and straightforward as some think. Being accosted by a team of IP attorneys from a company that sells “GPL’ed” software, demanding to have full access to all of your source code (and a lot of money) because your company “bought” their software and made some modifications to it and used it within the enterprise… not pleasant. Sure, it’s a fishing expedition (like the insertion point of a tech/industrial espionage mission), and annoying, and most likely without merit, but it throws a nasty wrench into conducting business, and brings into question for many management teams whether GPL, and open source in general, is really worth the headaches of encountering creative lawyers. Depending on the size of your company and corporate coffers, the constant threat of time-consuming lawsuits may embolden your risk management team to strongly advise against GPL or even all open source. Nothing between public domain or well-understood commercial proprietary licenses is acceptable…?

Is it surprising that some developers and lawyers interpret “distribution” or “redistribution” as merely viewing a Web page that was generated by software? Not really. Is it surprising that developers and lawyers who are for or against GPL terms will leverage the ambiguity in the text of the licensing to their own advantage? Nope.

Is there room for all of these different licenses– public domain, open source, closed source, etc.– in the real world? Definitely a strong maybe. Like the world’s religions, it seems that it filters down to interpretation and what you are accustomed to.

N.B.

The “quotes” I included parenthetically in the main text aren’t actual quotes, just humorous paraphrasing of actual responses.

And for those of you who think that there’s no place for public domain licensing today: consider SQLite, which is one of the most widely distributed packages worldwide. And read about the concerns about public domain…

A lot of developers and interested parties in the FOSS community have raged back and forth over the propriety and legalities about charging money for the supposedly open source software itself, and/or distribution of said software, and/or services and/or maintenance and/or bug-fixing for the software.

Mark had gotten tipped off about an upcoming book that mentions WordPress being not merely open source, but a variant of shareware. Mark proceeds to set the record straight in his post; and rightfully so, given that we use WordPress here, too.

Back in 2008, just before Javamancy was launched, I had agonized over whether WordPress was acceptable for use as a weblog. I had reviewed its source code in the past, and as a result, had postponed switching to it while reviewing other competing products. Eventually, the customization aspect and mindshare won me over, and we formally launched on April 10, 2008 with the “Hello, World!” type of greeting.

(Those of you who are familiar with my test case content have seen the “Greetings and Salutations” titles plenty of times, maybe even thousands of times, before… )

One sore spot has been its authentication system, both for users and for remote agents. Yesterday, a post from Will Norris came out that described his experiences with trying to integrate OpenID and OpenAuthentication (OpenAuth for those of you familiar with AOL and its dealings with the its flavor of this mechanism type, OAuth for those of you who may have seen or read about it in some Web 2.0+ venues) for the upcoming WordPress 2.8. The post is a great read, as well as the comments associated with it.

N.B.

I used to work on, and with, OpenAuth and OpenID APIs back in my AOL days for a plethora of the internal systems, so it’s nice to hear about how other people use (or plan to use) them. The AOL Developer Network site now offers a nicely fleshed-out resource center for OpenAuth, so check it out, as well as the other topics included on the portal, like the resource center for OpenID.  

If you missed my previous mention about a non-AOL person’s experiences with OpenID, you may find it interesting as well.

Earlier, I had posted about Snipt.org and a WordPress plugin that “embeds” code from it.
 

The Action, Part 2: Gaming the Service for the Fun of I.T.

Of course, if somebody is allowing you to embed code from a remote location in a faithful manner, the natural next step would be to strip out the display code and then include the code directly into your enclosing Web app, to run whatever you wish. Obviously, source code that requires compilation (as opposed to server-based dynamic language runtime engines/cores that are already installed on your Web server’s host) will not work if you try to embedding it directly into mere Web scripts. On the other hand, you can always force dynamic reloads across various server-side platforms, like JSP and ASP types. Or, if you’ve got a sourceloader available (say, something you’ve been using for C, C++, Java, or a .NET language), so you can fetch the snippets and extract the code and compile them and either force a rebuild or just use reflection in your parent code to fold the snippets into place.

The obvious advantages of this are, heh-heh-heh, obvious. If you need malicious code to bypass protections layered somewhere due to sandboxing of remote compiled code, or remote invoked dynamic code, you can allow your otherwise innocuous code to fetch your wicked-cool-nasties, then reformat them for usage, and then have at it! Or, on the flipside, if you have code that needs to change rapidly and not be present with the rest of the (parent) code, you can do that by taking advantage of the publicly available service, using basic HTTP calls instead of having to support something a bit heavier (and proprietary, or requiring additional libraries).

The Challenge: The Art and Life of Hacking

But let’s also look at the more fun aspects of this… A couple of decades ago, I had a bit of fun with those “small” Core Wars games that popped up every so often. And later, several years ago, when I was building groups of developers to work cohesively as teams, I used the RoboWar/Robocode simulators to have the guys and gals put up their bots into the ‘arena. Now, with something like Snipt.org combining Twitter and the code embedding feature (with the execution of the scrubbed code, of course), we can have social networked code gaming, with CI servers happily crunching away on frequently (and probably erratically) updated source code on the Snipt.org servers and uploading the resultant bots into multiple arena servers around the world. And now, many other non-traditional client formats can participate: smartphones, networked PDAs, hacked game consoles with Web browsers, et al. Good times, folks!

So, I’m proposing to enterprising developers (and yes, architects) out there to try this Robocode-type scenario:

• Create an open specification that describes the warfare allowed in a shared arena system, and set up the game objectives and constraints;
• Create the APIs that use the embedding feature to extract snippets stored on Snipt.org (and any other snippet repository, presumably) and allow R/W to the snippets as needed… offering multiple language implementations to maximize developer coverage;
• Set up some servers to handle the continuous workflow of your choice;
• Assemble your teams for some friendly competition;
• Launch your games and set up a public site displaying the real-time results of the warfare.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have some folks hacking away on their smartphones battling it out with some Linux-PS2 hackers and PC gamers half a world away? Or some military developers coding on their decomissioned workstations against grade school children practicing their CS skills on school computers?

The Setup: Which “Snipt” Are We Talking About?

Remember when Snipt was discussed here a few days ago?

To add more confusion to the snippet remote storage controversy, there’s another site (which some of you have already mentioned) called Snipt.org, which does not appear to be the same as Snipt.net.

Although the two sites are not the same, they offer code/content fragment (snippet) storage. But Snipt.org posits that Twitter distribution is the way to go, with your snippets… and they offer a code embedding feature to pass your code around to other sites. There’s even a tumblelog (cutely named org.snipt.SniptBlog, like a Java package) that offers advice on styling your embedded code display to your audience, and other news about Snipt.org…

The Premise: What About That Plugin?

Yesterday, a guy named Dan Wasyluk submitted Version 1.0 of a new WordPress plugin that allows Snipt.org snippets to be included/embedded into WordPress blogs. Sure, you can roll your own integration with the code embedding feature, but now that there’s a plugin available, why bother, right?

Now, the term “embed” may be a bit misleading: it is presumably not intended to be a code include. Instead, it is a way to display the code stored on the Snipt.org service elsewhere. In the case of the plugin, the target location would be a blog running the plugin.

The Action: What’s Next?

Having more ways to get access to code snippets, and to provide different ways of apportioning code as “snippets”, is certainly an entertaining endeavor. It opens up quite a few interesting possibilities.

More on this a bit later…

Several people have asked about what had happened to the Brian’s Revolution 2 themes…

Apparently, a few weeks after we reported on the open sourcing and public availability of the unveiled Revolution 2 themes for WordPress, there was a change of heart, apparently. All of the links that we described in detail were yanked, with no explanation on the site itself. This led to the inevitable searching by interested webbies looking for the open source themes.

With a little uncovering, on the Revolution 2 themes forum, as well as other WordPress-related discussion sites, you may spot the reasons tossed around concerning why the download links were removed. The biggest reason appears to be that the free downloads were a marketing ploy which may not have worked out as well as Brian & Co. wished, so they just stopped offering the themes for free.

Now, the Revolution 2 themes were announced to be GPL’ed under the same WordPress GPL license. Which means that you, as a responsible GPL-adhering programmer, have the ability to make changes to your Revolution 2 themes that you already have, as long as you comply with the terms of that GPL license.