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<< Monday, December 08, 2003 >> |
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Giving back to open source
Jonathan Bollers, vice president and chief engineer at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), says that SAIC forks open source projects for in-house development "almost without exception." The problem is that although there is often a desire to give back, it's "a tedious process fraught with more heartache than benefits." The bureaucratic hurdles include security considerations, export controls, and a host of other issues that Bollers sums up as "releasability remediation." [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Jonathan Bollers proposes that defense contracts might be structured to make such remediation economical for contractors, and suggests that benefits would flow to private-sector entrepeneurs. I think it's a great idea.
Of the many readers who reacted to the earlier column on the open-source give-back dilemma, Bollers was the only one willing to go on record. A similar thing happens when I write about Microsoft recently: a lot of folks agree with what I'm saying, but most prefer to remain anonymous. It's funny how both OSS and MS, each in their own ways, raise political issues that people want to talk about but are scared to talk about.
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Point/Counterpoint: Web services for collaboration
P.J.: Despite what some may think, I'm about as platform-neutral as they come. But here's the problem: There's still no agreement on how presence shall be presented as a Web service. On one side are the proponents of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an XML-based outgrowth of the Jabber project, which doesn't seem to be supported by anyone bigger than Novell. On the other, I see IBM and Microsoft agreeing on something for the first time since OS/2 1.0 was released: that SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)/SIMPLE (SIP Implementation for Messaging and Presence Leverage Enhancements) is the way to go. So, I'm curious, Jon: What side are you on?
Jon: Both, for different reasons, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. I know several developers who are using Jabber as a SOAP transport, and I'm told that the new breed of SIP-oriented IP PBXs offers SOAP interfaces. It's not a question of whether Web services will turbocharge the next generation of collaboration, but how. And there are two big answers. First, Web services will provide a general means of access to the messaging substrates. Second, Web services will help us unify metadata (message headers, aka context) and content (message bodies, aka documents) under a common data-management discipline: XML. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This was my first appearance in the InfoWorld Point/Counterpoint series. I was looking for an opening to deliver Dan Akroyd's immortal line: PJ, you ignorant slut. But the opportunity never arose. Until now :-)
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