SD Expo Best Practices Round table

Posted on by John

Earlier this week, I participated in a round table at the Software Development Best Practices Expo.
Surprisingly (to me anyway) it was the only section specifically talking about Open Source. In addition to Andy Oram from O’Reilly, who was the organizer/moderator, the other participants were:

It was an interesting discussion ranging over a wide variety of topics around open source and software development.

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Alfresco 1.4, Podcast, Commoditization of ECM

Posted on by John

A number of interesting things in the Open Source ECM arena over the last week or so.John Newton, the Co-Founder and CTO of Alfresco, posted this excellent blog entry on the commoditization of ECM and the thinking behind Alfresco’s strategic direction. In the post, he argues that “the scene is set for real standardization in content management and commoditization to the point of real replacement and swap out of existing systems.” The strength in Alfresco’s corner is its basis in open source: “Facing an aging, commoditizing Enterprise Content Management market, Alfresco has used open source to provide a new approach to ECM. This open source platform accelerates the development of an ECM solution and can ultimately outdistance the ECM laggards. I have no fear for our future.”

He goes on to describe the various open source frameworks they leverage (including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, EHCache, jBPM , Chiba, Open Office and ImageMagic) and the functionality they’ve used those frameworks to deliver. It’s really an outstanding read as an example of the compression of development time and flexible customization possible through an open source approach.

Additionally, Alfresco last week released the community preview of version 1.4 of their ECM suite. The focus in this version is on Business Process and Lifecycle Management, though functionality increases show up in a number of areas.

Finally, there’s also a podcast in which Newton discusses the release.

Open Source and the Long Tail

Posted on by John

I’ve been thinking recently about open source software and the notion of the long tail. (See Chris Anderson’s blog, book, and Wired article for the canonical description of the whole “Long Tail” meme).

One way to approach open source and the long tail is to focus on the sheer volume of available open source projects: the notion that there are a few highly visible projects (the equivalent of the best sellers, or the “head” against which the long tail is opposed) and that there are many many more smaller projects with less visibility (the long tail).

(See, for example, The Silent Penguin, Robert Kaye reporting on Kim Polese’s OSCON 05 keynote, Kim’s keynote, and Matt Asay)

A deeper, more interesting relationship between open source and the long tail is the way that open source development methodologies, distribution techniques, and licenses enable the development of custom solutions for niche problems.

In other words, open source enables the development of the long tail of software applications.

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Over 70% of statistics are made up on the spot

Posted on by John

If you’ve ever read an article about project management, software lifecycle management, or any “new methodology” for developing software, you’ve undoubtedly come across the infamous Standish Group CHAOS Report. (The original 1994 version is available in HTML or PDF directly from the Standish Group).
A column in the August Communications of the ACM (“The Standish Report: Does it Really Describe a Software Crisis?” – ACM membership or subscription required) got me wondering: what did this often-cited report really demonstrate, and on the basis of what data?

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Rockbox: Open Data for your iPod

Posted on by John

For the last year or so, I’ve been trying out various different methods for working with my iPod nano without relying on iTunes. (iTunes is slow and bloated, at least running under Windows, doesn’t run on Linux, and relies on proprietary DRM so it makes it very difficult for me to move music files between my laptop at work and my desktop at home or play them on other devices).

I recently went back to a project called Rockbox, which I used to run on an Archos Jukebox.

But now Rockbox runs on many iPod models, including my Nano.

It’s well worth checking out if you have lots of mp3 files and you move between machines. It can be installed from a Windows, Mac OS, or Linux host computer, and it relies on just treating the ipod as a drive when connected to PCs – you can move files on and off, with no need to rebuild any iTunesDB on the device, or having iTunes obfuscate all the file names and bury them in random directories.