You know it’s bad when the Three Stooges analogies start to emerge. In the proprietary software world, folks love to point fingers at Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates. And if the analogy is supposed to mean that these three men have done some incredibly bone-headed things (amidst all the great things they’ve accomplished) , then the analogy may have merit.

But now the open source community has its own set of humorous “bunblers.” In a recent article, the Register points to Larry, Mungo and Tridge. In this case, we are talking about Larry McVoy (BitKeeper proprietor – and not an open source luminary), Linus Torvalds (Linux uber-geek) and Andrew Tridgell (Samba leader and Bitmover reverse engineer) . Added to this august trio is Bruce Perens (open source maven and former HP exec) who threw a few barbs in Linus’ direction over his recent “Tridge-trashing” comments.

So what’s up with these folks. Well, I won’t spend a lot of time, but here are the highlights:

• Linus was having trouble coordinating all the changes that were going into the Linux kernel. So he worked a deal with Larry McVoy to move the kernel development from a cvs-based system to BitKeeper (a proprietary system). This decision was not met with unanimous consent. Indeed, it resulted in quite a furor within the community. But Larry worked a deal so that the Linux developers could have a limited license through the use of gateway technologies.
• Tridge decided to start a pet project to reverse-engineer the Bitmover / BitKeeper “on the wire” protocols. BTW, this is exactly how Samba started – and exactly what Samba accomplished regarding Microsoft’s SMB implementation.
• Larry took offense at the reverse engineering and decide to pull the license under which kernel development was proceeding.
• Linus began to raise the issue of how best to conduct kernel development given the BitKeeper license changes prompted by these problems. That question is not yet resolved. But in the meantime, Linus has made some highly inappropriate comments concerning Tridge and his character.

Once Linus began his very public commentary, things got quite heated. Tridge is being conspicuously quiet (probably because of legal concerns over Bitmover). Since Tridge won’t speak, others are stepping up to his defense. As noted earlier, luminaries like Bruce Perens are even starting to speak up.

I will not comment upon the people (or their conduct and comments) in this unfortunate mess. But I will note that this proves that all people can make mistakes – regardless of how luminary these people are.

All of this reminds me of a few scenes from Star Trek: First Contact. In that movie, the Enterprise is thrown back in time. While in the past, they meet the “inventor” of the warp engine. As the crew from Enterprise are working to prepare the very first human warp craft (that will be flown by Zefram Cochrane), many crewmembers start to talk about Cochrane and his accomplishments. There is even the off-hand discussion about “first-year Academny” warp mechanics classes that were inspired by the events that were about to occur. During all of this reminiscence (and downright idol worship), we hear Cochrane utter the following: “You think I want to go to the stars? I don’t even like to fly–I take trains.” And at one point, Cochrane is trying to hide from all the intense adulation. But he is found by Geordi while he is taking a “leak.”

Sometimes, I think we treat the open source leadership like the Enterprise crew treated Zefram Cochrane. We forget that these folks are normal people who sometimes do human things (like take a “leak”). Hopefully, this will all turn out well. But I have always found that the best way to overcome such human frailties is to offer something extraordianry and altogether super-human: forgiveness. A number of community leaders probably need to step back and humbly ask for (as well as offer) forgiveness. Not to the community, but to each other. Too bad that the open source community does everything in public view. This “openness” may make such displays of contition quite difficult. So let’s give these men the time and ability to be real leaders.

-CyclingRoo-

You know it’s bad when the Three Stooges analogies start to emerge. In the proprietary software world, folks love to point fingers at Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates. And if the analogy is supposed to mean that these three men have done some incredibly bone-headed things (amidst all the great things they’ve accomplished) , then the analogy may have merit.
But now the open source community has its own set of humorous “bunblers.” In a recent article, the Register points to Larry, Mungo and Tridge. In this case, we are talking about Larry McVoy (BitKeeper proprietor – and not an open source luminary), Linus Torvalds (Linux uber-geek) and Andrew Tridgell (Samba leader and Bitmover reverse engineer) . Added to this august trio is Bruce Perens (open source maven and former HP exec) who threw a few barbs in Linus’ direction over his recent “Tridge-trashing” comments.
So what’s up with these folks. Well, I won’t spend a lot of time, but here are the highlights:

• Linus was having trouble coordinating all the changes that were going into the Linux kernel. So he worked a deal with Larry McVoy to move the kernel development from a cvs-based system to BitKeeper (a proprietary system). This decision was not met with unanimous consent. Indeed, it resulted in quite a furor within the community. But Larry worked a deal so that the Linux developers could have a limited license through the use of gateway technologies.
• Tridge decided to start a pet project to reverse-engineer the Bitmover / BitKeeper “on the wire” protocols. BTW, this is exactly how Samba started – and exactly what Samba accomplished regarding Microsoft’s SMB implementation.
• Larry took offense at the reverse engineering and decide to pull the license under which kernel development was proceeding.
• Linus began to raise the issue of how best to conduct kernel development given the BitKeeper license changes prompted by these problems. That question is not yet resolved. But in the meantime, Linus has made some highly inappropriate comments concerning Tridge and his character.

Once Linus began his very public commentary, things got quite heated. Tridge is being conspicuously quiet (probably because of legal concerns over Bitmover). Since Tridge won’t speak, others are stepping up to his defense. As noted earlier, luminaries like Bruce Perens are even starting to speak up.
I will not comment upon the people (or their conduct and comments) in this unfortunate mess. But I will note that this proves that all people can make mistakes – regardless of how luminary these people are.
All of this reminds me of a few scenes from Star Trek: First Contact. In that movie, the Enterprise is thrown back in time. While in the past, they meet the “inventor” of the warp engine. As the crew from Enterprise are working to prepare the very first human warp craft (that will be flown by Zefram Cochrane), many crewmembers start to talk about Cochrane and his accomplishments. There is even the off-hand discussion about “first-year Academny” warp mechanics classes that were inspired by the events that were about to occur. During all of this reminiscence (and downright idol worship), we hear Cochrane utter the following: “You think I want to go to the stars? I don’t even like to fly–I take trains.” And at one point, Cochrane is trying to hide from all the intense adulation. But he is found by Geordi while he is taking a “leak.”
Sometimes, I think we treat the open source leadership like the Enterprise crew treated Zefram Cochrane. We forget that these folks are normal people who sometimes do human things (like take a “leak”). Hopefully, this will all turn out well. But I have always found that the best way to overcome such human frailties is to offer something extraordianry and altogether super-human: forgiveness. A number of community leaders probably need to step back and humbly ask for (as well as offer) forgiveness. Not to the community, but to each other. Too bad that the open source community does everything in public view. This “openness” may make such displays of contition quite difficult. So let’s give these men the time and ability to be real leaders.
-CyclingRoo-

As reported yesterday afternoon:

The Mozilla Foundation today released updates to two of its main products, the Mozilla Suite and Firefox. This marks the third round of security fixes for Firefox, along with the seventh minor update to the 1.7 version of the Mozilla Suite. Security issues fixed in these new versions are listed on the Known Vulnerabilities page with detailed descriptions of each issue.

So I’ve updated – and added another few downloads to the counters. Man, I wonder what the real stats are for unique downloads. Oh well. We’ll see more details as web sites report unique visits by Firefox users. In the meantime, you can get you copy here.
The security fixes are as follows:
MFSA 2005-33 Javascript “lambda” replace exposes memory contents
MFSA 2005-34 javascript: PLUGINSPAGE code execution
MFSA 2005-35 Showing blocked javascript: popup uses wrong privilege context
MFSA 2005-36 Cross-site scripting through global scope pollution
MFSA 2005-37 Code execution through javascript: favicons
MFSA 2005-38 Search plugin cross-site scripting
MFSA 2005-39 Arbitrary code execution from Firefox sidebar panel II
MFSA 2005-40 Missing Install object instance checks
MFSA 2005-41 Privilege escalation via DOM property overrides
I don’t yet have the scoop on whether these bits include Asa’s “Popups Must Die” ad block improvements. I’ll double check and report later.
-CyclingRoo-
===Update===
The relevant string did not exist in about:config after install. So I added the following: privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins with a string value of 2 (it accepts 0,1,2, or 3). Things are blocked quite nicely now.

Apple dropped its sales bomb – and it’s a big noisemaker. According to published results, Apple sold 5.3 million iPods during 1Q05 (second quarter of the Apple fiscal year). But the thud came in the form of the revenue drops associated with the increased sales. Overall, iPod revenue per unit dropped by 16%.
Why the difference? Well, Apple didn’t provide enough information to make the reasons clear. Indeed, Apple made it a point _not_ to report where the revenue came from. So increased iPod sales and decreased revenue probably was a result of a major (and possibly unexpected) shift in iPod purchasing habits. By that, I suspect that iPod Shuffle sales were far higher than expected. That is good. But the sales were not (exclusively) incremental unit sales. Rather, iPod Shuffle purchases may very well have displaced iPod mini, iPod, and iPod Photo sales – thus damaging revenue projections. And the fact that Apple did not report the results per product in the iPod family lends credibility to that assertion.
If my speculation is correct, then Apple may be faced with the good news before the bad news. The good news is the unit sales increases. But if the sales were for the Shuffle, then the bad news is that they shifted their market towards the more commoditized end. This is good and bad. If true, expect the other flash player manufacturers to step up the competition. In this end of the market, Apple does not have a feature or price advantage – only a brand advantage.
So I expect other suppliers to ramp up competition. And I expect Apple to shoot back with something new. I expect the knee-jerk response to be some form of firmware update to provide more distinctiveness (and brand allegiance) to the Apple iTunes family. But I am having difficulty guessing what that might be. Given the current design, there is very little that can be done on the player side. But I wonder if there might be something to be done with iTunes or at the ITMS channel. Again, this is just speculation. But expect to see something (e.g., a new rev?) soon and expect folks like Samsung to ramp up the price pressure on flash-based players.
For more information on the subject, check out Jupiter Research’s entry on their Microsoft Monitor site. Jupiter expects a very serious push by the PlayforSure crowd. I just love it when competition makes things faster, better and cheaper!
-CyclingRoo-
-Update-
Apple stock took a pounding despite the amazing sales results. Maybe other folks are curious about the 16% revenue decline as well.

Mark Twain was right. History does rhyme. And my variant on Samuel Clemens quote is that history not only rhymes – it now riffs (or maybe it’s a cover song)! This time, I’m hearing the notes of the smart tag song once again.
For those with short memories, I’ll play a few notes. In early 2001, Microsoft announced its Hailstorm initiative as well as its Smart Tags features for Windows XP (and Office XP). I won’t go into too many details – especially since I’m not an expert on the subject. But the heart of these technologies was a coupling of web services (via XML and SOAP) and smart-tagging. The industry (i.e., the open source community and many web developers) screamed “foul.” Specifically, folks felt that it was absolutely criminal for Microsoft to “edit” content by adding tags that weren’t provided by the content author. BTW, I was one of those screaming about the “arrogance” of Microsoft acting as a content editor.
Today, we are now talking about tags once again. All of us are thrilled by Flickr, Del.icio.us and other tag-centric content modification approaches. And lots of us are thrilled by the Greasemonkey extension for Mozilla Firefox – even the staid Jon Udell.
So what’s my point? Everything old is new again. Greasemonkey is doing exactly what we screamed at Microsoft for doing. Well, sort of. Greasemonkey is different because it places content control in the customers’ hands – not a corporation’s hands. The customer must implement the scripts that would modify the content. In this regard, the ethics are quite different than the Microsoft Smart Tags proposition. But the technologies are quite similar.
And if the big content providers release their own versions of Firefox (as both Yahoo and Google are rumored to be doing), then we must watch these folks quite carefully. It would take very little work to include Greasemonkey and a bunch of scripts into a browser. And such amplified browsers would be capable of doing exactly what we screamed at Microsoft for talking about.
So the issue of content modification and ethics needs to remain a concern for the open source community – lest we engage in the same things that we scorned others for. Simon Willison has the makings of a good start on the subject. Let’s keep the discussion going!
-CyclingRoo-

Just when you thought the materials industry was starting to slow down, you run across another really cool innovation. Ecology Coatings (Akron, Ohio) has announced that DuPont will be licensing its nanotechnology coating system. I love the way Ecology Coatings refers to its products. They produce curable liquids that are 100% solids! Sounds like a marketing term, right? Right. But here are the features: fast-drying (3 seconds vs. twenty minutes), no evaporation and/or fumes, no need for solvents and/or carriers. In addition, UV curing consumes about 75% less energy than heat-based drying schemes. In short, this stuff is far more environmentally friendly than traditional industrial coatings.
The potential applications are numerous. DuPont is envisioning the product for use in automobile finishes. Other companies are considering licensing the coating as a screen to apply to other materials. For example, Nano-Tex (a competitor) uses their coatings to prevent socks from absorbing foot odor. Other applications include rain-repellant (or bullet resistant) cloth.
This stuff is pretty cool. And it’s important to note that DuPont is the company that brought us Teflon coating. They know about how to market coatings for an incredible diversity of applications. Indeed, DuPont has been a pioneer for nanotechnology on the future battlefield. I wonder just how much it will cost!
-CyclingRoo-

It is amazing to experience technology changes as they are occuring. Over the past six months, podcasting has started to take off. According to Pew Research, there are over six million podcast listeners on the Net. And there are a bunch of folks that are jazzed about the kinds of social and commercial changes that this medium will spawn.

And these millions of listeners are using lots of different pieces of software. On the Windows platforms, you have iPodder and Doppler as the principal podcatching clients. On the Mac, there are plenty of other tools including iPodderX. And these tools are very good.

But Adam Curry wasn’t happy with just good podcatching software. So he and his development team have been working on podcasting production software. On yesterday’s Daily Source Code, Adam demoed his new production software which he is dubbing “CastBlaster.” From the sounds (and sights) of the software, it looks really good. I am getting excited to try the software – whenever the beta is released.

Of course, I have no idea whether the “studio” software will be proprietary or open source. I would guess that it would be open source. After all, I am sure that he will be using existing open source software as a basis. But I do think that Adam wants to monetize this – but through the “services” angle. In December, he registered the domains for the PodShow. And recent DSC podcasts have hinted at the launch. There is a functioning web site (with little to no content) and lots of hints. I don’t know where this is going, but I suspect that Adam wants to start a “network” of podcasters. On that network, he can charge “rent” (storage space) and collect his “cut” of advertising revenue. In a way, he is building an “MTV” network all over again. But this time, the talent will be far more decentralized – and geeky.

Rick Turoczy talked about this on his “hypocritical” blog. At the same time, Christopher Carti talked about this on his Social Customer Manifesto blog. Both seem to predict big things for the venture. If buzz could kill, this would be homicidal!

-CyclingRoo-