Open @ Krishworld

City Of Vancouver Adopts Open Government Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:34:00 +0000

Last month, City of Vancouver in Canada passed a motion mandating Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source in their government. Vancouver is the first city to adopt this strategy in Canada. This is a pretty good move and a morally right one too. A democratic government that runs on taxpayers money cannot use proprietary software or standards. It is ethically wrong. Slowly, but steadily, people are realizing the importance of having an Open Government with Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source as the foundation.

The motion passed by the City of Vancouver clearly identifies this in their motion

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
• Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with
citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data
possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
• Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
• Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing
software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles;

and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
• Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
• Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
• Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large;
• Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
• Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
• License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

The city council has done a commendable job and I am sure they will be a good example for other cities to follow. Being one of the first few cities in the world to do this, we (open government evangelists) should do our best to offer wide exposure to this news. I urge fellow evangelists to talk about this news.

(Hat Tip: IT World Canada)

RIM May Go Open Source

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:57:00 +0000

Speaking to ZDNet Asia, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM says

Symbian has made the leap to open source--would you follow?
There may be parts it makes sense to open source - BlackBerry has a rich and strong environment and it delivers on a set of promises. There may be some open source stuff that makes sense. Different parts of the app set makes sense to open source [but] it hasn't been a big pressure point [for RIM].

Well, I am pretty sure markets will force RIM to eventually take the Open Source route. Let us wait and see.

Much Ado About Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, tech blogosphere was buzzing about the Belgian Open Source developer Bruno Lowagie of Ghent's plans to restrict certain users from using the software he developed. The gist of the story is as follows. The developer of iText, an open source Java library which helps manipulate PDF, RDF, HTML, etc. on the fly. The developer has some personal problem with the Belgian Government and he now wants to restrict the Belgian government agencies from using the software by adding a term in the license. The software is released under Mozilla Public License and LGPL right now.

Pundits are worried about the impact of such a move by the developer because this library is also embedded into other popular Open Source projects like Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, etc.. They are worried that the additional restriction will prohibit Belgian authorities from using any of the Open Source software that uses this library. There are also worries about what if this becomes a trend and the potential havoc such a trend will cause in the software community.

In my opinion, these fears are overrated. The biggest advantage of Open Source licenses over proprietary licenses is that the developer or the company behind an Open Source product lose some of the control once the software is released in the wild. This offers an easy solution to the above problem. Fork, Fork, Fork. If this library is so important and if it is used by many big Open Source projects, there will be many developers who are willing to offer their time to develop the code further. If the original author runs wild, anybody can just take the code in its current form and just fork the project. They can then keep the software under an Open Source license without any draconian restrictions. This is the beauty of Open Source. No single developer or company can restrict anyone from using a particular piece of software. It is important that Open Source users (and developers) understand this unique feature of Open Source and go ahead with the life without worrying about issues that doesn't matter the community.

Using Trademark To Protect Openness?

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:57:00 +0000

When I read the "open letter" by Sam Johnston, I was shocked to see his attempts to trademark a very generic term like "Open Cloud". In my opinion, there is nothing open about using a suppressive tool like trademark, on a generic term like "Open Cloud". This is definitely not in the spirit of openness and there is absolutely no need to use a tool like trademark to protect openness. In my opinion, it is just meaningless.

Before people pounce on me with terms like traitor and what not, let me give some background about myself. I have been an evangelist for Open Source at various forums. It is my unequivocal belief that Richard Stallman is singularly responsible for bringing the idea of Openness to the consciousness of the people. However, my own beliefs in how the idea of openness should be implemented lies somewhere between RMS and Eric Raymond. I breathe openness whenever I am awake. With this justification out of the way, I want to go ahead and explain why I think Sam is wrong in his approach.

Let me start off from manifestogate. When Ruv planned the Open Cloud Manifesto with some vendors, I was very upset by the secrecy surrounding the process but I was not all that upset with the contents of the document per se. I felt that it should be done in an open manner with complete community participation in it. In my opinion, any such initiative should be open, democratic and vendor neutral. When CCIF withdrew from signing the document, I was relieved and I was looking forward to a community driven approach to define the Open Cloud. I have been following the politics surrounding the "attempts" to unleash an Open future for Cloud Computing without really jumping into the "fight".

When I saw the post by Sam, I was startled and being an ardent evangelist of open source and open federated clouds, I feared that I will forever be condemned if I don't speak up now. In fact, I am pretty impressed with Sam's devotion towards Open Clouds. I am very proud of him for displaying such a passion to keep Openness to be part of the Cloud Computing ecosystem. However, his attempt to trademark the term "Open Cloud" is just naive in my opinion. It is as silly as Microsoft using such suppressive tools on the terms like "Windows" and "Office". Anyone who has so much passion for Openness will not think of trademark as a solution to protect Openness. Trademark is the tool for proprietary software vendors. People who believe in Openness should not resort to such tools.

Rhetoric aside, we should learn from what happened in Open Source (and/or Free Software) communities in the past. Similar to what we are witnessing now in the Cloud community, after the ego clash between RMS and Eric Raymond, attempts were made by some people to trademark the term "Open Source". Almost everyone in Free Software community and many in the Open Source community didn't like the idea of trademarking a term as generic as "Open Source". They felt that it is possible to stop any abuse of the term by not resorting to the use of a trademark. Finally, the efforts to trademark the term failed and we were saved from major wars in the courtrooms using the trademark. Even the attempts to trademark the term Linux was met with severe resistance from, guess who, the regulator of Intellectual Property in Australia. Well, history should teach us about how we should go about implementing Openness in Cloud Computing.

History aside, let us just take a commonsense look at the issue. Openness doesn't imply empowering just the end users. Openness should empower both the end users and the vendors. A definition of "Openness" that benefits only one segment of the society (end users) will not go anywhere. Under such a restrictive definition and with a trademark on the term "Open Cloud", there is absolutely no incentive for the vendors to be Open at all. Again, we need to learn from what happened in the Free Software and/or Open Source world. It is imperative that our definition of Openness empowers the end users while also embracing the vendors. If we have to do this, a route through trademark is not the correct approach. Using trademark to keep a term like "Open Cloud" to ransom by an organization is not Open at all and it is plain wrong.

When I tried to tell this to Sam on twitter, he tried to argue that the trademark is a necessary evil to keep the vendors from poaching the term "Open Cloud". I don't buy that. If Open Source can survive all kinds of onslaught from the vendors, including the most "powerful" Microsoft, Open Cloud will survive too. Thanks to people like RMS and others, users are now very aware about the dangers of being locked-in and the Cloud Community will not have a dinosaur like Microsoft. Let us learn from how Open Source community stopped all attempts to abuse the term Open Source and do the same in the case of Open Cloud. Let us educate the masses and make them understand that maintaining Openness is the only way they can stay empowered. Once we do that, we can stop any abuse using the power of the masses. Well, it is easier said than done but if Open Source is any example, it can be done. There is absolutely no need to resort to suppressive tools like trademark to achieve this. An Open society doesn't need such tools of force to defend themselves. Instead of using restrictive tools to keep people on leash, let us just leave the term aside and let the mass power of the users counter any attempt by any vendor to marginalize them.

Seriously, why do some people think that they need the powers of the dark proprietary society to enforce Openness. Also, let us not get dragged into a binary fight like either you are with Ruv or you are with Sam. Let us think deeply about the consequences of a trademark on a generic term like "Open Cloud". We all know Sam's intentions are in good spirit. However, a single group, however democratic and independent they are, owning the trademark for a generic term like "Open Cloud" is just dangerous. Imagine such a group having a bias against the vendors. Can we really expect the vendors to keep to the spirit of Openness. Isn't this just the reverse of what Sam accuses Ruv and his vendor friends to be doing? How can we correct one wrong with another wrong on the other side of the spectrum? A truly Open ecosystem is one where vendors play by the rules of Openness and empower the end users. With Sam's approach, we cannot achieve this. We will, then, have disconnected vendors doing what they think as right, leaving the users in a lurch. If at all we establish Openness with participation from both vendors and users, it should be based on trust and faith on each others' intentions and not due to the fear of draconian tools. I don't see any difference between what Music industry is doing to users using DMCA and what Sam wants the community to do to vendors using Trademark. Let us just do it as a matter of trust and use the mass power to stop the abusers.

In short, Sam's attempts to trademark doesn't make any sense to me and it is not in the spirit of Openness. I have no problem lining behind Sam in his quest to achieve Openness in Cloud Computing but I cannot stand behind him if he is using tactics that are not in the true spirit of Openness.

If there is a meaningful discussion on this topic, I am more than willing to participate. If it is going to be plain name calling or bullying, I will just ignore such tactics and continue in my quest to educate users about Open Clouds and ensure Openness through a bottoms-up approach. Good Night and Good Luck.

Open Federated Clouds And Why I like Sun's Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:38:00 +0000

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Last week, Sun Microsystems announced their Cloud Computing plans. I spent some time thinking about their offerings and its impact on Cloud Computing. If we remove the chatter around the rumored IBM’s acquisition of Sun and proceed with the assumption that Sun remains an independent entity, I get some good vibes about this announcement. Let me try to channel my thoughts in a coherent way in this post.

As Cloud Computing gets more popular and as more and more enterprises move towards clouds, doubts are being raised about the scalability and reliability of single provider clouds. In spite of the “low costs” involved in building datacenters, a single provider may not be able to offer infinite scalability. Add to it, the reliability issue associated with putting all eggs in one basket. We are now faced with a dilemma of whether Cloud Computing can stand up to the demands of the future. The solution to this problem lies in the idea of Open Federated Clouds.

The idea is to create an ecosystem where the technological capabilities are federated to different vendors. Such a federation requires interoperability to be the key factor. For example, an organization should be able to tap into Amazon EC2, Go Grid, etc. for computing power, S3, Rackspace's Cloudfiles, etc. for storage, SimpleDB or some future relational database on the Clouds for database requirements, etc.. In fact, this ecosystem can consist of public as well as private clouds (cloud like architecture inside of company's firewall).

The advantages of Open Federated Clouds, an ecosystem of disparate cloud vendors interoperating with one another, are many. I will list some of them below.

Infinite Scalability
High Reliability with uptime running much closer to 100% than those offered by single providers
No vendor lock-in
Democratization of Clouds with no monopoly. Even a small business can become a Cloud provider
High level of customization for enterprises

The idea of Federated Clouds is not new. Many people have promoted this idea including Tim O' Reilly in his post last year.

Take note: All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon's S3 and EC2 and Google's AppEngine to Salesforce's force.com -- not to mention Facebook's social networking platform -- have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we've known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches? The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve. (Neil McAllister provides a look at just how one-sided most platform as a service contracts are.)
So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

More specifically, we believe that to truly fulfill the promise of cloud computing, there
should be technological capabilities to federate disparate data centers, including those owned by
separate organizations. Only through federation and interoperability can infrastructure providers
take advantage of their aggregated capabilities to provide a seemingly infinite service computing
utility. Informally, we refer to the infrastructure that supports this paradigm as a federated cloud.

Status Of Open Source In India

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:55:00 +0000

Alolita Sharma has written an article on FossBazaar on the status of Open Source in India. After talking about various government initiatives and how companies are leveraging into open source for their internal needs, she offers an optimistic outlook for the growth of Open Source in India.

One of my peeves about India is the lack of active participation in the Open Source projects by geeks in India. It is in fact a disturbing trend that India is not in the forefront of Open Source movement in spite of being the leading supplier of world's IT needs. Ms. Sharma explains how it can change in the future and offers an optimistic prediction on it.

While most open source software is still used internally in Indian organizations, the potential for significant contributions back to global open source projects is increasing. Growth in contributions may accelerate when the need to scratch an itch (or many itches) to support local needs grows. As scalable and affordable automation using open technologies becomes embedded in the processes of managing and supporting the needs of more than a billion people, useful and significant contributions from India will begin to pour into the global commons of open source software.

Well, we will wait and see how it turns out. Good luck and kudos to the evangelists in India.

Technorati Tags: open source, free software, opensource, India

News Highlight: GlassFish As A LAMP Alternative For Enterprises

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:30:00 +0000

Sun Microsystems today announced GlassFish Portfolio as an enterprise level web application platform. Sun calls it most complete, cost-efficient open web application platform. It is a stack comprising of its highly scalable, high availability, GlassFish server, Apache Tomcat, Ruby, PHP and Liferay Portal. Similar to many other commercial open source stack, it is a pre-integrated, fully tested stack ready for deployment in production systems.

The GlassFish Portfolio includes the GlassFish Application Server, along with the following new components:

Sun GlassFish Web Stack - A complete and fully integrated LAMP stack designed for developers wanting a light-weight Web solution. The GlassFish Web Stack includes Tomcat, Memcached, Squid and Lighttpd with support for PHP, Ruby and the Java Platform.
Sun GlassFish Web Space Server - Based on Liferay Portal, the leading open source portal technology, helps companies simplify Web site development and build collaborative work spaces, including portals and social networking sites.
Sun GlassFish ESB - A lightweight, open source ESB platform for department-scale and enterprise SOA deployments that connects existing and new applications to deliver content and services to the Web.
Sun Enterprise Manager - For enterprise scale management and monitoring of the GlassFish Portfolio including SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support.

With the release of this stack, Sun could complement its Mysql Enterprise Database, offering enterprises a complete portfolio of applications needed for their web deployment. It is available in a range of subscription based pricing starting with $999 per server per year to $8999 per server per year. More information on their subscriptions plans is available here.

News Highlight is a section where I will highlight the latest news related to Open Source, Open Standards, Open Web, etc., without much analysis on my part.

Technorati Tags: opensource, open source, glassfish, lamp, enterprise, sun microsystems, sun

Welcome to Open @ Krishworld

noreply@blogger.com (Krish) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:19:00 +0000

Welcome to this new blog at Krishworld. In this blog, I will be writing about my thoughts on topics related to open source, open standards, open web, open society, open government, etc.. My thoughts on these topics are evolutionary in nature and I plan to use this platform to fine tune my thoughts. Feel free to join the discussion here. Initially, I may not maintain a regular schedule but eventually, I plan to move into a routine. Feel free to visit my homepage at www.krishworld.com for more information about me.

I used to blog about open source and related topic in my old blog, which is now archived at blog.krishworld.com. I was somewhat regular on that blog till a sudden boredom and eventual obligations at other blogs pushed it to near death. Then I moved it to wordpress.com, breaking many of my links. I have decided to retire that blog and start fresh, exclusively, on topics related to open source, open standards, open web, etc.. In short, this blog will serve as a platform to evolve my ideas for an open world. However, I might recycle some of the posts from the old blog if it is relevant to the theme here.

If anyone has a question about hosting my blog on an open world in a proprietary environment like blogger, here is my response. I want to host this blog on the clouds. I am clear about it and I don't believe in using traditional hosting methods while preaching the advantages of clouds elsewhere. The only option for an open source based blog hosting on the clouds is wordpress.com. But I find its features restrictive and themes terrible. Plus, as we move from the traditional software world to cloud computing world, open source becomes one of the many considerations. Others being open standards and data portability. Since I could export the blogs into an xml file and the availability of open source blog converters, blogger.com meets some of the standards I have set forth for myself. I do agree that it is not a solid reason but I find the limitations of wordpress.com equally restrictive. In future, I might move the blog to a cloud based hosting that also offers their software in an opensource format. Till then, this is going to serve as a platform to develop my ideas.

Once again, welcome to Open@Krishworld and I hope you find my musings worthwhile.