I’ve remembered what it feels like to laugh loudly at a joke without having to disrupt the flow of conversation for two minutes while I “overhear” it. I’ve become closer to my real friends, and more distant from total strangers. Which seems like the right direction for things to be moving in.

I think what people fear the most is to face what’s left after years of unconscious abuse; that the emptiness of quitting is all that remains and focus and awareness are nowhere to be found.

Well, that’s precisely the best part: the refreshing taste of freedom you get rediscovering what’s really important is still there.

From Googlecode’s blog:

So we’re sad to announce that we won’t be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally.

Not surprising that Google won’t be coming. Now, I didn’t hear of anyone suing Open Source. Oh, wait: Google IS the Open Souce.

From Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge (if you haven’t done it already, go get the full series and read them!):

“With this I am,” Pelorat said and held up a square wafer about twenty centimeters to the side and encased in a jacket of silvery plastic. Trevize was suddenly aware that Pelorat had been holding it since they had left his home, shifting it from hand to hand and never putting it down, even when they had stopped for a quick breakfast.

“What’s that, Professor?”

“My library. It’s indexed by subject matter and origin and I’ve gotten it all into one wafer. If you think this ship is a marvel, how about this wafer? A whole library! Everything I have collected! Wonderful! Wonderful!”

We’re almost there: we can now have a whole library in less than that and even have a display embedded to access it. Now, regarding the means to build it, fully index it and cross-reference it, we’d need first to modify crazy copyright durations, wipe off DRM from the face of Earth and get some real eBook standards on board to allow content intercommunication.

Having gravitic engines powered, pocket cruiser class spaceships would be nice too.

Broadstuff’s take on the The Guardian coverage on Facebook being valued at more than $33bn (£21.3bn) as investors try to secure a stake in the social networking site in anticipation of its flotation on the US stock market:

But in The Old Days you got pre-flotation shares at pre-flotation prices, not at a secondary market price driven by scarcity and speculation. Another notch on the post for flat earth news it would seem perhaps? Those who cannot remember the past…

I’m not sure if this is really a Internet-wide dot.com-like bubble symptom, although such a strong confidence in advertisement as the universal source of revenue doesn’t smell good. Completely agree that this kind of reporting does not help.

Before I start, I’d like to disclose that I’m currently working for one of the companies named in this post and that I also am a former employee of another one referred here too (sorry guys, enough clues for today). Also, for the shake of clarity, I’d like to repeat that what’s written here is not linked in any way to my employer, and that it’s my pure personal, independent view on the matters I’m going to discuss.

I want to talk about my view of why Sun went out of business and as a consequence was finally acquired. I’d also like to comment on some of the things I’ve been reading in the Internet about what happened after it that I consider wildly misinformed. I won’t be talking about Sun’s hardware business because I think it was at their Software strategy that Sun failed miserably. Of course, hardware never wouldn’t have never made it alone without the right sofware approach, but that’s another story I may talk about another time.

After a sound failure to get maket share with its software strategy and not managing to become a truly “systems” company, Sun decided to go the Opensource way with almost all of their software products. Their enterprise products then became a long list of Open Source products: OpenSSO, OpenDirectory Server, Liferay, OpenESB, Glassfish, OpenSolaris, DTrace, ZFS and a long etcetera. Their development and end user platform became open (Java, Netbeans, OpenOffice) and even their acquisition strategy went the MySQL way (remember Sun spent one billion dollars in it, one fifth of the price Oracle had to pay for the whole company). I’ve never seen a company so strongly commited to Open Source, and I think I never will. But you know, times are a-changing.

Despite of all this the community¹ never quit ranting about Sun. I still remember long threads in Slashdot kicking Sun in the nuts for not being open enough. Like, they said, IBM or Google. Only after Sun hired community starlettes, gave them the evangelist status and was quite clear it was bleeding to death quarter after quarter the community came to support it. Meanwhile, Sun Software sales guys were working their asses off trying to make the most (a.k.a. selling) of such a model. Also, companies like Google bypassed Sun, the JCP, and the JME licensing that should’ve got Sun some much needed cash because they knew Sun wasn’t in a position to fight (yes, I’m talking about Android and the Java affair). Not that the community support would’ve saved Sun at all but, you know, some recognition eases the pain.

The truth is some members of the community (and I’m not talking about the engineers part of it that are employed by a vendor to work on a given project) don’t give a shit about understanding business requirements. They just care about code, technologies and features; the cooler, the better. And let’s face it: the enterprise world may not the coolest one, but it’s the one customers live in.

What about the revenue model based on getting the money from supporting OSS/free/Sun’s-dual-mode software then? Allow me to give you a real example of why this didn’t work as expected.

Let be a customer using a supported version of an enterprise software product that had, as was usual back then at Sun times, both the OpenSource and the supported flavors. The customer finds a bug; they report it. Turns out engineering tells the customer the bug is already fixed in the OpenSource version (by the same engineers working in both flavors) but that the supported version will have to wait until next release. This, of course, is because there is different dynamics in both worlds. There isn’t any commitment from the vendor as to the quality or stabilty of a community-driven nightly build so the bug can be quickly fixed without further checkin. But a supported, contract-bounded product is a different kind of animal. You’ve got to include the fix in a product cycle, run tests in different platforms and in general, follow a product cycle that any engineer in any other production sector knows quite well. But the image you’re projecting to your customer is this: “You are fixing a bug that I discovered for the people that’s not paying although I, your customer, am getting nothing back for the money I’m paying you”.

This is why I cannot disagree with releasing the Open Source version after, and not before, the supported one (and hence paid) is out. Because your customers should get something back for their loyalty, don’t you think? If you don’t want to be out of business and remain a innovation top dog (and that’s another interesting discussion), better do it this way too. Just ask youself this question: which one of the top software companies today is disclosing its core business code before they get any advantage from it?

Lately I’ve been hearing (well, mostly reading) a lot of moaning about Oracle being the new evil because of what is happening to some Sun former products under Oracle’s management, some of it from people that make a living with software, from people that were using the Open versions and never paid a single dollar in support nor contributed a single line of code or from people that never set a foot in a big company. And I’m fed up of it².

I think is fair and necessary to call a company evil for abusing the rules of the market, trying to bend the law to its interests, or because it claims something while it does just the opposite. But Oracle’s statement regarding Sun was cristal clear for anyone willing to hear it: they were going to get Sun business back to profitability, and that means making money. You may not like it for your own personal reasons, but if you’re in this world you should know better. So, now that even Microsoft seems not to have that role assigned anymore, stop moaning and looking for the Generic Corporate Evil To Hate that gives sense to your life. Black and white isn’t even in Disney movies anymore.

1. The community: people surrounding the Open Source that call themselves this way. I’m not referring here to any organization in particular or the Open Source by itself but more to a movement that seems to communicate and behave following a certain pattern. [↩]
2. Don’t get me wrong: I’m fed up with blind fanboyism not getting the hard facts, but not with the Open Source Software in any way. I think OSS has become very important today, is key to a lot of business and customers and end users get real benefits from it. But not just for the shake of it. There’s also a business model and even the most open, cool and technology-oriented company needs it. Ignore this and you’ll be quickly out of business. Fail to acknowledge it and in the long run you’ll be hurting the very core of the model you’re trying to defend. [↩]

Manuel Guerreiro explains why he finds geottaging services as Foursquare useful and why he doesn’t think it’s something to worry about when it comes to privacy:

Para nada lo veo como una intromisión en mi intimidad, al fin y al cabo todo lo que comparto en redes sociales es una parte de mi tiempo que hago público y lo hago de manera consciente y directa por lo que no veo mayor intromisión en usar esto y no tener que escribir donde estoy a la vez que lo hago de manera más atractiva con su mapa y su ubicación.

What I don’t still get is why should I disclose my own location to comment on places or read other people’s opinions. Now, managing to be the Major of certain bar or getting the Purple Heart for being toasted in the act of drinking beers, that I can grasp.

This is, to my own delight, and auto discovered tip. If you want to quickly accent vocals in the iPad spanish virtual keyboard, just do what your intuition tells you.

Push the vocal key, do a quick slide up from the key with your finger and voilá, you just got served! Compared to the old, standard method, it’s fast as hell.

Now, your friends call tell the world where you are without your permission. And yes, it is activated by default. Even if you are a Foursquare whore, you may want to disable this.

Very funny. Watch it even if you’re not a Mac user (you’ll miss some jokes though).

Techcrunch just published their browsing traffic: they don’t miss the point and they just use their data to illustrate how the iPad usage has skyrocketed. But I can’t quite resist to twist it a bit and use the numbers to try to illustrate how the companies involved could *cough* hypothetically read them.

Bear with me while I do a little corporate marketing role playing here:

• Microsoft: We still have 55.2% of the total share.
• Apple: We’re the first mobile company in the world and number two OS manufacturer closing in on Microsoft. We did that in only two years. This is magical and it’s only the beginning.
• Google: Driven by our open, free, and advanced technology Android share is growing at a 200% rate every month, and more Android-based handsets were sold in the latest month than Apple has sold iPhones.
• RIM: Blackberry share has been experiencing an steady growth that we’ll be pushing further with the launch of our new Blackberry Torch.
• Nokia: Symbian wasn’t designed with Internet browsing in mind in the fist place. Stay tuned to what our new Symbian^3 Maemo Meego platform is capable of in the near future.

Statistics, thou heartless bitch.

Vivek Wadhwa on Techcrunch:

But I do know one thing for sure: it isn’t the big companies that create the jobs or the revolutionary technology innovations: it is startups. So if we need to pick sides, I vote for the startups.

And I do agree. But in the rest of the world (developing countries, Europe, and specially low R&D investors like Spain) the big companies, most of them US-based, are the ones supporting jobs in the IT sector. Not that I like it but as of today, it is a fact of life.

James Gosling on the negotiations between Sun and Google for Java licensing before the Ads Giant decided to go Dalvik for their Android platform:

Money was, of course, also an issue between Sun and Google. We wanted some compensation for the large amount we would be spending on engineering. Google did have a financial model that benefited themselves (that they weren’t about to share). They were partly planning on revenue from advertising, but mostly they wanted to disrupt Apple’s trajectory, and Apple’s expected entry into advertising. If mobile devices take over as the computing platform for consumers, then Google’s advertising channel, and the heart of its revenue, gets gutted. It doesn’t take much of a crystal ball to see where Apple is going, and it’s not a pretty picture for Google or anyone else.

From day one, nor Google nor Apple were exactly white hats here. It sucks that the Internet killer app is advertisement, but it sucks even more that it’s going to be the same for the wireless spectrum. This also helps me understanding the new Google-Verizon view on Net Neutrality.

James also covers why the Android platform is so fragmented. Turns out considering making the platform free to handset providers as a core principle while having very weak notions of interoperability plays directly against freedom for developers. Surprised, anyone?

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

So, instead of protecting citizen’s right to privacy in the first place we’re supposed to change our names, homes and families? I think I’ll start to invest in plastic surgery startups.

Fortunately, Schmidt elaborates a bit more about why we don’t need regulations:

Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

As the WSJ says, I don’t believe it’s that easy to just “walk away”. I think I’ve got enough creepiness already from the full interview.

Accenture asked 300 large companies about their Open Source adoption; here’s some of the results they got back:

When it comes to the benefits of open source, the cost was no longer viewed as the key benefit, with respondents focusing instead on other aspects:

• 76 percent of respondents in the UK and US cited quality as a key benefit of open source
• Two-thirds overall (71 percent) cited improved reliability
• Better security/bug fixing was cited by nearly as many (70 percent) across both countries.

[...]

One notable finding, however, is that less than a third (29 percent) are willing to contribute their own solutions back to the community.

Sadly, as Matt points out in his article, although not necessarily a bad sign, this calls into question the benefits these companies hope to get from Open Source. In my personal experience, I’m seeing companies taking heavily from the community (not only code but online presence and buzz) but giving almost nothing in return.

Also very interesting that in Enterprise Software, Quality has surpassed cost as the primary adoption driver for OSS. I’m curious though about what Quality aspect (overall, code, product…) are the respondents referring to here, but I guess the survey didn’t lay out the concept clear enough for them to be that specific.

But that tradition was somehow lost in the Korean War and buried conclusively in Vietnam. Nowadays, dynamic young leaders can’t emerge as quickly, because almost no one is fired. In a much-discussed 2007 article in Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.

No puedo evitar establecer una comparación entre esto y lo que le ocurre a una empresa de tecnología cuando se hace grande, en lo tocante a sus managers y la pérdida de competitividad.

Uh, oh, aquí llegan los iAds. De una primera lectura, no parece algo tan salvaje como lo que hace Google, pero cuando una compañía de tecnología se mete en el negocio de la publicidad, mal asunto para la privacidad.

I really think despite the nice features (3D display, 3D camera) Nintendo has lost the war of portable casual gaming. Phones won it. There’s still opportunity in the kid market though.

This is hurting Apple image a lot. A guess that’s what happens when you link yourself to companies that are not up to the quality standard you follow.

The problem with an Android phone running a phone manufacturer’s homebrew software, like HTC’s Sense or Sony’s TimeScape, is well known: You’re going to wait a lot longer to get the freshest version of Android

This is assuming normal users are aware there’s a freshest Android version, which is highly improbable.

I’d really like to believe this is the only fragmentation problem Android is getting. Fragmented hardware is doing Android a lot of damage, and it’s a real shame because this is what’s preventing me from considering it as an option right now.

I’ve gotta admit though that Froyo looks very tempting compared to the iOS4. In my opinion Apple mobile OS is OK today, but it’s gonna be a huge weakness in the next few months if Android keeps its improvement rate and Apple does nothing about it.

At last, a unified input device for Macs and iPads (my bet is the iPad will support it) that’s been long coming.

If it’s also true it’ll be supporting handwriting recognition, my Pogo Stylus is going to rock the world.

Update: seems a crafty mac user did a cardboard mockup using the leaked pictures. Dimensions look quite accurate.