Mongoose is a Mildly Opinionated Networked Group Of Open Source Experts. Initially launched last year in Austin at ApacheCon, I’m now re-launching Mongoose and opening up the forum to a wider community.

The intent of Mongoose is to serve as an informal forum for free and open source software developers who support FOSS in some sort of professional or commerical capacity. As FOSS developers we enjoy the membership of some wonderful communities, but the discussion of business questions is generally off-topic on these mailing lists and channels and that’s understandable. Mongoose was created to serve as a forum for these sorts of questions, a place for developers to share advice, resources and network.

Mongoose is open to developers and contributors from any open source project or community. If you currently do not run an open source business, but are interested in doing so, please join us! All we ask is that the forum be reserved for developers and contributors and that the focus of the group be respected. Due to the nature of the questions and information shared on the mailing list, Mongoose is a private forum for members (no publically available archives). Please include details about your open source project or company when you sign up as this will help us keep the possibility of spammers lower.

I look forward to seeing you on the new mailing list!

Last year I put together a screencast on the Eclipse PDE build process. PDE is the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment. It’s a set of tools for developing Eclipse plugins and OSGi bundles. It may surprise some to learn that you can use these tools “outside” of the Eclipse IDE as part of an Ant build (for example). This allows for headless builds and continuous integration. However, using the PDE in this context is not always straightforward. In this screencast, I share the layout and approach we used. We didn’t follow the documented PDE build process exactly, and in there are certainly areas for improvement in the tutorial code, but it should be a decent starting point for anyone deailing with Eclipse build issues. These instructions are specific to Eclipse 3.2 and some changes may be necessary to apply the code to other versions of PDE.

• Screencast on Google Video
• Source code on SourceForge

I know the quality of the Google Video version isn’t very good. There’s a full quality version included in the SourceForge download. The download also includes additional documentation and notes as well as the full source code and necessary dependencies. Enjoy!

According to Charles Babcock of Information Week the answer is the Apache webserver. Not a bad choice, in my humble opinion.

As was mentioned at ApacheCon, the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation will be producing a joint open source conference in Hong Kong November 26-30. Yes, this year, this November, in Hong Kong! Further details and a call for papers will be announced soon. In the meantime, you can listen to the latest Apache Feathercast Podcast in which I discuss the new conference with Rich Bowen.

See you in Hong Kong!

Today ApacheCon EU finished up. It was a great conference—so great, that I haven’t had time to blog or even take many photos. I have put up my slides though:

• Open Source in China
• Incubating Open Source Communities

The slides I used for my Scala: Hope for Java Weenies short talk were largely taken from material in the Scala Beginner’s Guide and I recommend reading that document. I was surprised to find a few others at Apache using Scala so hopefully we’ll see some Scala based projects soon.

Now that ApacheCon is over, it’s time for me to focus on coding. William and I have an exciting product in progress, so expect updates here on the blog.

A talk fell through here at ApacheCon so I had the opportunity to give my Open Source in China presentation. Given that it was only announced that morning, I had decent attendence (around 20 people) and good feedback. The slides are now online.

Tonight I leave for ApacheCon EU where I’ll be giving my Incubating Open Source Communities Talk next Thursday at 10:30 am. This talk is based on one I gave last year at OSCON and this year at the Taipei OSDC. I’ll be sharing lessons learned in Apache about open source communities as well as reviewing the structure and procedures of the Apache Incubator. I’ve enjoyed preparing this presentation and I’m looking forward to sharing it.

Adobe has announced it will release Flex under the MPL. This includes the compiler and ActionScript libraries.

The Flash runtime is still closed, but this is a great step. I wonder how OpenLazlo will respond.

I spent this last weekend in Taipei, Taiwan attending the Open Source Developers Conference there. By rough count I estimate there were 200 some people attending. The conference included two tracks of sessions for two days. Perl talks took the majority of slots with presentations by Audrey Tang” (developer of pugs ), Ingy döt Net (developer of kwiki ), and clkao (author of svk ) to name a few. Seth Spitzer from Mozilla talked about Firefox 3.0, and I spoke about open source communities and the Apache Incubator.

Taiwan has an impressive open source community. Perl is strongly represented. The OSDC Taiwan event intentionally followed the YAPC::Asia in Tokoyo. The Mozilla Taiwan community is also very active. And I found out from Ping Yeh (co-founder of the Taipei Open Source Users Group ) that there’s a strong FreeBSD community in Hsinchu.

All in all, I had a great time and met some great people. It’s just too bad I could only stay for the weekend. It’s always nice to go back to Taiwan.

Gianugo Rabellino has a great post on the use of the GPL versus more permissive licenses in commerical settings. I find this interesting because lately I’ve been considering the open source strategy we plan to take with JadeTower. The advantage of the GPL is that companies can dual license. However, to be able to dual license the company has to have the rights to all contributions. IMHO this limits the attractiveness of the project to outside contributors. It puts contributors and the original copyright owner on unequal ground, which is against the idea of the GPL and open source in general. Personally, I perfer the approach the Eclipse Foundation has taken: a permissive license that encourages a community, both commerical and non-commerical. Now, if only Adobe would do something similar with Flex and Apollo.

It’s easy to get confused what one means by “open” these days. Ted Leung has stirred an excellent conversation ( follow ups ) about the openness (or lack thereof) of Adobe’s Flex and Apollo technologies. Ted argues for an open environment with at least three characteristics:

• the ability for interested parties to directly determine the future of the technology
• mechanisms for compatibility
• availability of source code

Brendan at Mozilla discusses another aspect of openness. He calls it open standards, and that’s certainly part of it, but the technologies he describes aren’t just open, they’re transparent. One can easily inspect them without any special tools and from the outside. Opaque software (or as Yegge put it, hardware ), like Flash or Java bytecode, may still have intrinsic introspection, but to everything on the outside it’s a closed system. Brendan looks for REST-friendly technologies that are “hyper-linkable or indexable by search-engines.” This sort of openness (or transparency) is different from the openness for which Ted contends.

I completely agree with Ted’s concerns about the openness of Adobe’s RIA platform. I’m worried that we’ll have to go through the whole Java song and dance once again. In fact, I can’t express it much better than Ted already has, so I won’t try.

At the same time, I don’t share Brendon’s concern about Flex’s transparency. If Adobe provided an open environment for Flex and Apollo, that would be good enough for me. Why? Because rich internet applications are different beasts from websites. Period.

Let me elaborate. As far as I’m concerned, GMail is no more transparent than a Flash client. Where’s the hyper-linkability or the search-engine friendliness? Any openness is due to features of the application, not the underlying technology (have you looked at that Javascript?!) Better yet, where’s the linkability in say, Adobe Photoshop? Or Emacs or Eclipse or Skype? These are all applications, one of them just happens to be delivered over the web and uses the browser as its platform instead of some virtual machine or operating system. And let me go on record as saying the browser is a horrible operating system. Mozilla is great and getting better but when you target the web as your platform, then you have to work with IE and a host other browsers and the incompatibilities between them. The web just can’t easily support some applications to the same degree that an operating system or virtual machine can.

Ryan Stewart brings this up in Stop Thinking of Flex As a Browser Technology. Seriously. Stop It. I couldn’t agree more. The web was designed for hyperlinked documents. The core specifications are about resources and data, not applications (despite supporting code-on-demand). Just because we can turn a series of HTML documents into an application doesn’t mean we always should. Or that all applications can be turned into a series of forms and documents.

What web applications can do, however, is provide a web friendly view in addition to a rich client. Applications can provide open RESTful APIs that serve data in transparent formats like Atom or RDF. I would much rather work with a web application that actually behaved like an application but then also provided internet-friendly interfaces on the server. That’s a transparent and open approach.

I truly believe that, as Brendon suggests, the web can evolve to deliver rich applications using open, transparent technologies. I believe that Mozilla will be key to that realization. In the mean time, if you need a solution today, then you’re going to consider Flex. Since it isn’t a transparent technology, it’s all the more critical that it be an open one.

For the last two weeks I’ve been in Beijing researching the state of open source efforts here in China. With the help of some of my fellow members at the Apache Software Foundation I was introduced to the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union ( COPU ). I met with Mr. Lu Shouqun and discussed internals of ASF and how we build open source communities there. We also discussed the state of open source here in China, what success and challenges they’ve faced. Thanks to Wu Jinnan, I had the chance to visit CSIP and talk to those working on Linux and open source there. Other meetings I’ve attended here included a short visit with Intel and the Beijing LUG that I already mentioned.

The case for open source in developing countries is strong; however, the US, Japan and Europe are still home to most open source developers, projects and companies. Within the ASF, we have no Chinese members and only a few Chinese committers. While I’m here in China I’m hoping to change that and help bridge the gap between oss communities in the East and West.

As to what challenges exist, well, I’m still learning. :-) One of my first impressions is that there’s still a lot of misunderstanding about how open source communities work and what motivations drive oss development. I heard a lot of talk about looking for business models. And the Chinese software market certainly does have it’s own peculiarities. For example, in the past there was strong government support for open source projects but the actual local demand was very small. In fact, the entire Chinese IT and software market, while growing, is still pretty immature. I’ve also seen a lot of focus on desktop projects and heard talk about trying to get Windows APIs into Linux (but not with wine ).

Later this week I’ll be in Shanghai and then after that I’ll be visiting several cities in the Pearl River Delta—Guangzhou, Macao, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. While there I’ll be meeting with Scott McNeil who’s been working on the Global Desktop project. I think his approach of working with universities to introduce students to open source may have the most success of any OSS program here in China.

I’ll be sharing what I discover here on Cubicle Muses. I’m also hoping to collect up some of what I learn and present it this year at ApacheCon or OSCON.