Open Source Funding: Clojure

This past week, the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey, sent out a plea for funding.
Since then, Clojure group at Google have been deluged with suggestions on how to fund open source, in general.

A number of companies "open sourced" their APIs, frameworks, SDK, etc in order to cultivate the development ecosystem around it.
This has the effect of:

1. Propelling the company's name into recognition as being a technology leader;
2. Garnering inputs and refinements from its users/contributors ecosystem;
3. Making a head start in marketing products made from the open sourced software.

Hence, the above open sourced software model is not created from the scratch, on one's weekends
but reaping result of development over several years by several paid developers.
The software thus open sourced is probably quite "mature".

The case where one starts out alone, as in Clojure, is very different. The originator probably has the master design in his/her head. As enhancement requests and bugs come in, the originator has to spend probably large amount of time to triage and prioritize them besides guiding the project thru its team of contributors. This will probably get better as more contributors/committers can step up to the plate.
The key revenue source, open sourced software, I think should be from commercialization stream.
In others words, non-commercial users can freely download and learning to use it but companies that incorporate open sourced software as component of their software release should pay for it.
After all, open sourced software encompasses some intellectual properties that most big companies protects and demanded royalties for use.

Agile and Cinderalla's shoe

Today, I read with interest the article by Ivar Jacobson and Bertrand Meyer,
"Method Need Theory" in Dr. Dobb's.

Personally, I like certain things about Agile but I think it's oversold as panacea for all software development solutions. Use it where the shoes fits. There are sweet spots where Agile really shines but like Cinderalla's shoe, sometimes it doesn't fit and we tried too hard to fit our software development process into it.


Hope you enjoy the story without cutting the toes!

Parallel Programming Patterns

Here's a good link to Parallel programming patterns.

2010 - The year of SEMAT vs ANTI-SEMAT ?

Today, I stumbled on SEMAT(Software Engineering Method and Theory) on Ralph Johnson's blog. Yes, one of the folks from
the GoF Design Patterns Book.

The following people have signed the Call for Action statement. This list is dynamic; the up-to-date list is on the SEMAT web site.

* Pekka Abrahamsson
* Scott Ambler
* Victor Basili
* Jean Bzivin
* Dines Bjorner
* Barry Boehm
* Alan W. Brown
* Alistair Cockburn
* Larry Constantine
* Bill Curtis
* Donald Firesmith
* Erich Gamma
* Tom Gilb
* Ellen Gottesdiener
* Sam Guckenheimer
* David Harel
* Brian Henderson-Sellers
* Watts Humphrey
* Capers Jones
* Martin Griss
* Ivar Jacobson
* Philippe Kruchten
* Robert Martin
* Stephen Mellor
* Bertrand Meyer
* James Odell
* Meilir Page-Jones
* Ken Schwaber
* Alec Sharp
* Richard Soley

I recognize Sam Guckenheimer(now at Microsoft) from Rational Software days when we worked there.

It will be interesting to watch how this battle is being fought out.

The start of a new blog journey

Today I finally begin the journey into the blogsphere which I have put off for so long.
I borrow the lines from "Walrus and Carpenter" from Lewis Carroll's narrative poem,
through his book Through the Looking-Glass, published in December 1871 to start this journey:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

The above lines from Walrus seems appropriate to launch this blog.
The next few weeks, I may blog some things about Clojure, the new JVM Functional language.

Thanks to Stephen C. Gilardi, my former colleague at Avid Technology who get me started on Clojure.