************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * July 2003 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Beta testing of DB/C DX 13.0 for all platforms continues. If you are interested in participating, let me know. I recently attended the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. My impressions of this event are the topic for this month's article. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** O'Reilly Open Source Convention Report by Don Wills The 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was held July 9-11 in Portland, Oregon. Some 1600 attendees heard six keynote addresses and attended as many of the 125 technical sessions as they could fit into their schedules. 25 exhibitors showed their wares in the exhibit hall. And for those willing to invest more time (and money), two days of tutorials were available prior to the convention. OSCON is the largest O'Reilly conference. It has evolved from earlier conferences that were devoted to Pearl, PHP and other open source projects. OSCON's focus is now on the 'LAMP' group of open source projects - L LINUX A Apache web server M MySQL P Perl, PHP, Python Other open source projects were discussed in keynotes and in various sessions, including Eclipse, PostgreSQL, XML, Java, Ruby, and others. The conference had a definite geek orientation with a somewhat anti-Microsoft bias. To Microsoft's credit, they sponsored two days of sack lunches and provided speakers for a couple of the discussion panels. It is apparent that the term 'open source', while generally understood to mean 'free', doesn't necessarily mean 'free to do whatever you want'. There are several ways to categorize 'open source' software. Here is one grouping of open source initiatives: 1. GNU Public License (GPL) projects The Free Software Foundation is a pioneer of the open source software movement. They created the GPL to reflect their philosophy about the importance of public ownership of software. The GPL requires that all GPL'd software and modifications to GPL'd software must be made publicly available for free. The GPL is sometimes referred to as the 'CopyLeft' license because of its similarity to certain political philosophies that eschew private ownership of property. One of the OSCON keynote speeches was presented by Stormy Peters of HP. She oversees all open source projects in HP. She said that HP's biggest concern with open source software is that none of HP's software products become tainted by GPL'd software. Microsoft and others are strongly opposed to GPL'd software. LINUX is the primary example software licensed under the GPL. 2. BSD and similar license open source projects The BSD license, the Netscape license, the IBM Common Public License (used by Eclipse), the Apache Software License and various others essentially allow any use of the software without requiring that modifications be made available for free. For example, Apple Computer uses the Mach kernel (which originated at Carnegie Mellon) and BSD UNIX (which originated at UC Berkley) as its basis for Mac OS X which is not free. HP uses software from various open source projects in printer drivers and other products. Apache web server is the most well known software covered by this type of license. 3. Software that is free for some users but not free for others MySQL AB is a Swedish company that has a unique financial model for sustaining their MySQL database product. The source code is freely available at the MySQL web site. If you want to use or modify MySQL for your own company, then it is free. If you bundle it with your free software and give it away, then it is free. Otherwise, it is not free. In other words, if you make money by selling MySQL bundled with your product, then you pay royalties to MySQL AB. 4. Software that is free but you can't modify in any way Java and its class libraries from Sun are an example of software licensed in this manner. This license is like a really nasty GPL. 5. Commercial software for which you can obtain the source These aren't really open source projects, but the owners of such software like to pretend. The Microsoft 'Shared Source' initiative is an example. As Ms. Peters noted, if you are embarking on using open source software in any way, you need to understand the details of the licenses governing the software. Failure to do so could be very expensive. Tim O'Reilly's keynote address discussed the state of open source software and open software architecture. He outlined these three themes that will be pervasive in the future: 1. Commoditization of software 2. User customizable systems 3. Network enabled collaboration The term 'software as a commodity' was mentioned many times at OSCON. Although free software is not actually a commodity, several similar concepts apply. A commodity becomes standardized so that it can be interchangeable in its use. The low cost producer generally succeeds in a commodity market. And as profits erode, businesses adapt by changing their pricing structure to charge for specialized services that they provide with the commodity. Each of these concepts applies to open source (free) software. Mitch Kapor (the original author of Lotus 1-2-3) presented a keynote speech titled "Open Source on the Mainstream Desktop". His main point was that LINUX will be arriving soon on the corporate desktop, at the expense of Windows and UNIX. He made the bold prediction that 10% of corporate desktops would be running LINUX as their primary operating system in the near future, and that LINUX would become predominant at some unspecified time farther off. He spoke about the many current limitations and pitfalls that are hindering LINUX on the desktop, but was sure of his predictions. I personally don't buy his predictions. LINUX is just too cumbersome today for most desktop users, and I don't see any changes coming that will get around these issues. Paul Buck, head of the Eclipse project within IBM, presented a keynote speech titled "An Open Source Tool Framework for the Enterprise". He gave an overview of Eclipse and spoke of how it had become more successful than anyone at IBM had predicted or even hoped. The audience, while skeptical of anything initiated by IBM, was favorably impressed. Several other up-and-coming technologies and projects were discussed. These include instant messaging (Jabber is one protocol stack), open source word processing (OpenOffice.org), Mono (the open source .Net initiative), and Ruby (a fully object-oriented scripting language). All in all, OSCON 2003 was well organized, quite informative and useful. I will strongly consider attending again next year. Here are some useful links: http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2003/ various articles about the convention http://www.fsf.org the Free Software Foundation http://www.apache.org the Apache Software Foundation http://www.mysql.com the MySQL AB web site http://www.jabber.org the Jabber web site http://www.openoffice.org word processing and more project http://www.go-mono.com home of the Mono .Net project http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ English language home of Ruby project ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: September, 2003 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. 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