Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

"Get those motherf**king steaks on that motherf**king plane right now! There are people starving on there. Give them your motherf**king steaks!"

Sorry. Sometimes I over share what goes on inside my head

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer. You can read some of it here at IT Pro .

Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps has announced the next stage of the open sourcing of Java in London this week, adding Java ME to the road map. Open source versions of both Java ME and Java SE should be available by the end of the year.

While there were no actual dates confirmed, Phipps went into more detail on the open source roadmap for Sun's various software platforms. Describing it as a gradual process, he detailed Sun's commitment to providing an open source software stack, from OS to Java, and in the future, its middleware.

We also talked about the missing element in many Open Source projects: governance.

While one of the keys to Open Source is the license, another is just how the project is run. And Simon sees one big problem facing many open source projects.

It's all very well being open source, but with only one person with commit rights (the ability to make changes to the code) to the code base, if the project becomes successful, they're going to become overwhelmed very quickly. Things get worse when commit rights are concentrated in a single project. A project run that like that (and there are many many of them, including some very high profile ones indeed) is more like Microsoft's shared source programme than anything else. There have even been cases when experts on a piece of code have left the company that sponsors the project, and have immediately lost any rights to working with the codebase...

The really successful projects, like Linux and Apache, have distributed commit rights, and a range of people from many different organisations adding code. That's what Phipps wants to do with Sun's open source projects. Open Solaris is certainly successful, and has spawned several different distributions (including one that mixes Debian with a Solaris kernel), and he hopes to the same with Java.
Cross Posted to A New IT World

It's looking more and more likely that we'll soon have to change those mnemonics for the planets. No more Matilda Visits Every Monday And Just Stays Until Noon Period. We'll have to add in Ceres, Charon and 2003 UB313...

Professor Owen Gingerich, who chairs the IAU planet definition committee, said: "In a sense we're demoting Pluto by taking it off the list of classical planets. But we're promoting it by making it the prototype of this new category of plutons."

[...]

The basis for this re-evaluation is a new scientific definition of a planet which uses gravity as the determining factor.

According to this definition, two conditions must be satisfied for an object to qualify as a planet:

* The object must be in orbit around a star, but must not itself be a star
* It must have enough mass for the body's own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape

On whether he was confident the resolution would be passed, Professor Gingerich told the BBC News website: "It will be a very awkward situation if they don't.

"On Sunday afternoon, we proposed it out of the blue for the division chairmen and they voted unanimously that they would be prepared to back it. That's a good cross-section of astronomers.

"I'm sure it will be controversial to those with a stake in some other solution, but I hope we will get an overwhelming endorsement."

Ah, the politics of the IAU. Long may they debate.