Fum images: If Google owned everything
Posted by pat 130 days ago
b3ta has an image challenge about "If Google Owned Everything". Some of them are hilarious. I love the Google Garden one, very Zen!
WS-* hilarious picture from David Heinemeier Hansson
Posted by pat 150 days ago
Don't blame me, I'm just a contractor (Loud Thinking)
RedHat buys JBoss: a fun quote from the past
Posted by pat 154 days ago
It seems like RedHat bought JBoss today, for $350 million: not bad!
When discussing that in the ossgtp (open source get together paris) mailing list, a fellow open sourcer, Philip Mark Donaghy, sent out a link to a Google cached page of an old post from Marc Fleury's blog entitled Sun vs Red Hat, who is more Open Source. It was published in september 2004. It seems the page is not on Marc's blog anymore:-). A quote from it:
RH is a PACKAGER, not a technology house. How do they DARE call SUN on technology innovation. SUN by all measures has been a star in technology. SUN created more technology over the years than RH ever will, JAVA, NFS (open source) etc. RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux.
It sounds quite fun when reading Marc's new post about the RedHat acquisition:
RedHat and JBoss share a joint culture of pure-play open source. While different, our cultures are both centered around the mission of changing the industry through the development, distribution and support of free and open source software.
Who could blame him? $350 millions is a fair price to change one's mind:-) I wonder what Hani will write about this when he knows.
Leaving Google: I'm going to evangelize Java and Open Source at Microsoft
Posted by pat 163 days ago
What a better way to celebrate my birthday (yes I'm an april fool) than this special announcement?
Evangelizing the AdWords API at Google was a blast, but I could not pass up this offer: Microsoft finally gets it and I want to be part of this adventure!
They approached me last week their Mix06 conference with their super secret shocking project and that was too good to be true: they're shedding .NET and their proprietary licensing model, and switch to Java, Linux and Open Source! And they asked me to evangelize the products that come out of this new group.
Now I understand why Scoble wouldn't talk to me during the conference: he was preparing his own move to Google!
I'll be part of the Java Open Source Team at Microsoft, and won't be alone: believe me their recruitment team have done their homework! Many of my friends from the Open Source Get Together Paris announced that they all join at the same time: Ludovic Dubost, Jérémi Joslin, Vincent Massol, François Le Droff, Didier Girard..
Compared to the puny Open Source contributions that Google have made, what Microsoft plans to contribute in the next few years (it'll take me some time to get used to their way of announcing products a few years before they actually ship in order to lock the market:-) is staggering:
- Windows will be open sourced for whomever wants to maintain it. Microsoft has not interest in the codebase anymore since they switch to Linux (they'll buy Red Hat to get some folks to train their developers) for all their products. The Windows codebase will live in the subversion servers of the Computer History Museum in Moutain View... where they belong.
- a complete rewrite (they like total rewrite, it keeps developers busy) of Visual Studio.NET on top of Eclipse (Eric Gamma is the new architect for the Visual Studio team)
- They're going to announce they buy Sun next week, in order to be able to open source the Java VM under the GPL. A nice side effect is that Jonathan Schwartz will take Scoble's position as chief blogger.
- Scrap the .NET CLR and replace it with the Java VM.
- XAML is discontinued. Instead extensions to XUL and SVG will be proposed to the relevant standards body.
- More generally Microsoft will now use only standard data formats, and all their data will be open for external services to use them. They hired Marc Canter to lead their open data division.
- The IE team will drop their current codebase and start contributing to FireFox.
- The Office team is reassigned to Open Office.
- All their enterprise software will be replaced by a stack of open source java servers that will be developed under the auspices of the Apache Foundation.
Chris, Bret, when do you join us? We have plenty of open reqs in the developer evangelism group!
What makes all these changes possible? All these software will ship for free, but with ads served by Microsoft AdCenter. It's unfortunate that end users will have to provide a thick binder of data describing themselves before being able to use the software, so that AdCenter can target them a bit better, but I'm sure they won't mind:-)
It seems there's a bit of shuffling in the industry today: Matt and Jeremy are switching places at Yahoo and Google.
I loook forward to get started at work, and ditch my faithful Mac PowerBook for a nice Origami running Microsoft Linux!
The Democrats Get Balls
Posted by pat 193 days ago
Another hilarious presentation from John Coryat's brother (John is the guy behind the great maps.huge.info Google Maps mashup): The Democrats Gets Balls.
My autogenerated "dotcom predictions for 2006"
Posted by pat 263 days ago
After reading John Battelle's 2006 predictions, I decided to try out Matt McAlister's hilarious Dotcom Prediction Generator. Here's the result:
Last year I made several predictions that now seem ridiculously enthusiast. But a few ideas were pretty close. I've got a feeling that 2006 will be a big year, and here are some of the reasons why:
- A Menlo Park startup is going to open our eyes to some new ways that Atom can influence culture. Doctor Dobbs will pick up on this and run several cover stories on the founders.
- Eric Schmidt will be in the spotlight for his decision to support atom. This will upset John Battelle, and the blogosphere will react excruciatingly. The noise will quiet before the end of the year and it will all be forgotten soon after the shock.
- Google will see their stock skyrocket after their Advertising business starts taking off. We've seen it coming for a while now, but 2006 will be the year it really kicks into gear.
- Either Yahoo or Microsoft will seek to expand their Subscription business by acquiring xWiki. eXo platform will be overlooked in the process, and they will see a management shakeout later in the year.
- One of the big leaders in the Media industry will wake up to the threat of the Internet and the Web 2.0 trends. After months of speculation, they will make a key acquisition that will shake up the landscape for years to come.
