The Politics of OSGi and JSR 277

Things seem to be heating up around the compatibility between OSGi and JSR 277, in particular the different version numbering schemes. Peter Kriens, Alex Blewitt provide some good commentary for the OSGi scheme and Stanley Ho defends the proposed JSR 277 scheme.

However, Hal Hildebrand, the Oracle OSGi guru, provides the best insight into what is wrong with JSR 277: politics. For all Sun’s executive-speak about being a hip open company, they continue to behave like an old fashion hardware vendor. The non-existent JSR 277 expert group is a mockery of the JCP process and by anyone’s definition of openness. Instead of trying to create a community and build bridges between JSR277 and OSGi, Sun is using backroom tactics to find some type of ‘compromise’ between OSGi and JSR277.

Sun stop the bilateral discussions, re-boot the JSR 277 expert group with a real spec leader and start participating in the OSGi organization. In short stop the politics and start a real open discussion to ensuring OSGi and JSR 277 are compatible.  Anything else is just going to be bad news for Java.

Ganymede Packages RC2 Now Availabe

The Ganymede RC2 Packages are now available for testing.  Ganymede is a short 3 weeks away, so the clock is ticking on testing out these packages.   Also, thank you for all the feedback we have received on the new packaging site.  There is still time for more comments but that clock is ticking too.  Send any comments to Bug 224729

OSGi Community Event and Marketing Stammtisch

Next week I will be traveling to Germany for two events: 1) the OSGi community event in Berlin and 2) a Marketing Stammtisch in Bensheim/Auerbach.   The OSGi event has a great technical program and I am looking forward to meeting a lot of the people in the OSGi community.   OSGi has a lot of buzz this year, so it should be a great event.

The Marketing Stammtisch is something Ralph Mueller and Stefanie Peitzker from Innovations GmbH created.  My understanding is that a Stammtisch is German for ‘drinking lots of beer and having good conversation’ or something like that.   Of course since everyone is a marketer I hope to see a lot of people show up for this event.  The details are;

Where: Restaurant Poststuben, Bensheim/Auerbach
When: Thursday, June 12, 17:00

Looking forward to meeting lots of people at both these events.

Hockey and Eclipse: A perfect match

Hockey season is just about to finish, which mean Canadians are about to begin our second season: summer.   Sys-con just published a pretty good interview with Mike Milinkovich to mark his 4th anniversary at the Foundation.  Among discussions on Mike’s view of  ‘Strategy as Ecology’ and ‘The Stackless Stack’, Mike was able to relate hockey to software development.  For those Detroit fans, you can probably relate.

CIO.com’s Open Source Virtual Panel

In the past couple of weeks, I have noticed CIO.com is doing a great job highlighting and educating their readers on open source software.

They just published the results of a reader survey about open source adoption in the enterprise which showed 53% are using open source today in their organizations and not surprisingly the primary uses are:

Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary uses are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent), and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent).

This week CIO.com is also running a live blogging panel on enteprise open source that includes participation of open source experts like our very own Mike Milinkovich. The concept is that moderator, Esther Schindler, asks a question and the panel of experts respond in the comments. It should make for some interesting commentary.

Finally, CIO.com also published an article written by myself called ‘Using Open Source Innovation Networks to Drive Collaborative Software Development‘. In the article I try to explain how and why enterprise IT shops should consider to participate in open source projects to drive forward industry specific projects.

Overall, I think it is great CIO.com is adding this focus.  It can only help to educate IT management on possibilities of using open source software.