Recently, someone from our local marketing team asked me to remove my signature from a paper we were about to publish in the local IT press.
The argument was that publishing my name alongside with the article is like sending my resume to a recruitment agency, something they’d like to avoid obviously.
What about the blogs ? Aren’t they much better source of information for recruiters ? And they are officially authorized by Sun !
Honestly, I don’t understand marketing…

I did not post anything to this blog in the last three weeks, part of that is due to my project in Portugal that kept me busy for almost two weeks and part of that is the end of summer blues : you know : days are shorter, temperatures drop and kids go back to school.

I recently installed OpenSolaris on my laptop, just to see it. The installation is still tricky as the installer is not open-sourced yet.

• First step is then to install the real Solaris, using Solaris Express to get the latest bits (Nevada build 20)
• Second step is to get the latest binaries from OpenSolaris.
• Third and final step is to upgrade Solaris Express to the latest OpenSolaris bits

When you follow the exact instructions provided by the documentation, everything runs smoothly, at least it does for me.

-bash-3.00$ cat /etc/release
Solaris 11 nv_20 X86
Copyright 2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 01 August 2005

-bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS dhcppc1 5.11 opensol-20050818 i86pc i386 i86pc

“What’s the point ?” asked my a collegue of mine. None ! Just wanna see the bits in motion.

Some of the things I enjoy :

• Solaris now uses the grub loader, like most Linux distro, making it easier to multiboot with other OSes
• We do integrate the Java Desktop System 3.1

Some things I regret :

• The driver for my video chipset is broken in this build. It will be fixed in the next build.

I am traveling to Lisbon this afternoon. This gives me some extra time to read some news on real paper. My choice for this short 2h40 flight was the french paper “Le Monde“. And I found out a couple of very interesting articles and editorial about the evolution of the Internet market in China. I did not translate the articles, they were definitively too long, but here is short summary.

Is China the next Internet Eldorado ? After e-bay, Amazon, Google and MSN, it is now the turn of Yahoo! to invest in a chinese dot-com. Yahoo! announced its intent to buy 40% of Alibaba, an e-commerce web company, the deal is estimated at 1.000.000 USD.
This is the fifth major move on the chinese .com after e-bay and eachNet (180 millions USD), Amazon and Joyo (75 millions), the MSN – Shanghai Alliance Investment agreement for a hundred millions and the Google participation in Baidu (2.6% “only” or 5 millions USD)

As everyone knows, the Chinese market is one of the biggest, with 103 million internet users (mid-2005), China is the second country after the US. But with less than 10% person currently connected (vs. 60% in the US), this market has a tremendous growth potential.
The market valuation of some chinese dot com companies are unrealistic and continue to increase very quickly. Sounds like “deja-vu” ? Are we seeing the beginning of a new dot com bubble ? Watch the market during the coming months.
These investments are not irrelevant. It proves that 10 years after their creation and four years after the end of the bubble, the surviving dot-com companies are well alive and ready to grow and gain market shares again.

But beside the economics, the real question is what Internet are we offering to the chinese ? Government and local authorities control is everywhere. The city of Shanghai, like other cities, are requesting an official authentication number each time you connect (equivalent of passport number or SSN) to be able to track your online activities. Some keywords are “forgotten” by the search engines. Try a search on “democracy”, “tienanmen”, “independent taiwan” on a chinese search engine and you will get nothing but an empty page, while access to the original version of Google, Yahoo! and the like are denied.
Blogging or other kind of free expression is severely controlled and some estimates indicate that at least 60 people are in jail for having expressed their political opinion on the Internet.
All foreign dot-com companies are obliged to sign a contract with the chinese “Association for Internet Access”, granting the government they will not sell or give access to “subversive information”, a category that includes every politically incorrect information : from political opponent’s books to pornography.

But “business is business” for US companies and all are playing the game following the rules imposed by Beijing. How many years will be needed before the people from china will benefit for freedom of speech, freedom and choice of information on the Internet ?

(source : “Le Monde”, 14-15 aug. 2005, page 8 & 13)

Are we starting an Internet with two different sides ? The free one and the controlled one ? What if 50% of the Internet users does not receive the same information as the other 50% ?

Let’s imagine you are walking downtown in any big (U.S.) city. You open your PDA (or cell phone)-based browser and you start browsing the Internet for free. At the same time, the ISP providing you this service is able to locate your position and send you ads for services located in your immediate proximity.

What sounded-like sci-fi a few years ago is now technically possible and might become true in a near future : it’s GoogleNet

What worries me in this story is the ubiquitous need of Google : as of today, a web site that is not referenced by Google does not exist on the web. What if tomorrow Google controls not only the content (or at least the reference to the content) but also the transport stream (what used to be the wires – but what are wires in a wi-fi world ?) ?

Will Google be to the Net what Micosoft is to the software ?
What will be the “open-source” community of Net access ?

Like all users of this web site, I regularly receive some usage stats. Interesting section is the browser identity.

I realize that the communities reading Sun’s employees blogs are probably more Unix minded than the average Internet user, therefore yielding a higher usage of Mozilla family of browser. Howvere, I found these figures surprising : Mozilla had a 50% market share and Safari almost reached 5%.

These stats are for the current month (first two weeks of August) and were observed for 107K unique visitors.

I am looking forward the next stats in a couple of weeks.

A friend of mine recently sent me this link.
This is a blog describing all sort of “poor choice” for UI design (should I use the word “UI disaster” ?)
Definitively a nice reading.

As far as I know, this is a first and an interesting sign of how open-source software is being considered by the industry.
Llyod’s of London is planning to offer insurance protection against IP litigation involving open-source software.

I can not resist to comment on that one.
An HP VP made a call during his yesterday’s speech at LinuxWorld Conference San Francisco for IBM and Sun to invalidate their current open-source licenses and re-publish the code under the terms of the GPL.

I can’t disagree more !

One of the essential value of open-source software is freedom, and one of the concept behind this freedom is the concept of choice. The choice a user has to choose one operating system or another, the choice the developer has to license its code using the legal framework he wants.
I can not see the advantage of having a single open-source license for the whole community and for all pieces of code, and does not understand the value HP could have in that situation.
The GPL is, in my opinion, a very restrictive license, obliging developers to publish any derived code under the term of the very same GPL (see section 2.b.). And although the third version of the GPL is just around the corner, I don’t read any significant changes in its major directions.
Other licenses offer more freedom of choice to the developers : Apache and the other BSD derivatives, Sun’s CDDL etc …
Maybe I missed something in HP’s strategy ? Please share your thoughts as well !

Most often, I found the US government and its agencies quite Microsoft friendly. Wanna have an example ? Here is the latest one.

The Copyright Office invited comments on an upcoming Web service for prospective copyright owners that may launch with support for Microsoft Internet Explorer only.

“(…) At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office’s system for online preregistration, it is not entirely clear whether the system will be compatible with Web browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.1 and higher (…)”

Should this be accepted, this means that people will need a Windows-based PC and IE to preregister copyrighted material in the future.