In 2008 I plan to begin developing the first of a suite of applications. In the back of my mind I know that I want to use the GPLv2 or GPLv3 license, although I will read them fully before deciding. I'll also read into other licenses. One of the things that makes me question the GPL is that I read comments in various blogs saying that GPL is a bad choice because businesses jump up onto their chairs or run away quickly when they hear GPL. Why??

Are these "businesses" really programmers or software development companies who are thinking about using a library but can't if it is GPL because their license is not compatible? If that's the case I know LGPL helps, but my applications are not libraries for reuse. I can't think of any reason why a business would not want to use my applications based on which license they use.

The other thing I've been wondering about is this "free as in beer" saying. To me free as in beer == not free. I don't know about you, but I've never gone to the beer store and come home with free beer. What do people mean when they say free as in beer? Free to do whatever you want including re-branding, selling for profit, and not contributing back to the main project? Those are the kinds of things that scare me away from the Apache license. I've head of project owners who are overthrown, lose their commit rights and say in their own creations to "the community". I've also heard conspiracy theories such as how IBM wanted OpenJDK to be Apache licensed so that they could do what they want with it and not contribute back. Even if it's not true, it's a scary thought.

The other day I received a phone call from Tom Manos of Centric CRM asking if I'd be willing to help get their CRM product running on Glassfish. He said that Sun would like to see Centric CRM running on Glassfish, and that he found one of my posts in his forums asking about Glassfish support. I offered to look at it over the weekend. Today I got Centric CRM running on Glassfish V2/Java 6/PostgreSQL 8.2/Ubuntu 7.04. I had to modify the build.xml script to support Glassfish, and figure out a couple of other small details. I have posted the build.xml patch in their File Submissions forum, and instructions in my original thread.

I've had a blog for about seven years now. It started out as a bunch of static HTML pages that I would edit by hand, then later evolved into a dynamic PHP site that I wrote while in college. For many years I was happy to see 5-10 visits a day, if that. I suspect most of those vists were from my mom and co-workers :)

In May 2007 I decided to join the present and use an open source blog engine because my blog was very dated and lacking features; such as RSS. It seemed wrong to spend time writing my own blog engine again when there are full featured blog engines freely available. I chose Roller because it is written in Java. While setting up Roller I learned about "pings", which is a feature where my blog can tell blog aggregaters about my new posts. Pings, RSS/Atom feeds, and blog aggregaters have brought me more visits in four months than the sum of visitors in last seven years!!

I have been using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop OS at home for the last year. I've had to find Linux alternatives to the software I've been using on Windows. Luckily for me many of the programs I use on Windows are also available on Linux such as Firefox, Thunderbird, FileZilla, Flash, Java, NetBeans, Sun App Server/Glassfish, Postgres, etc...

In previous blog posts I talked about installing the mscorefonts package in Linux to make OpenOffice render and edit MS Word documents perfectly. I also talked about how Star Office, the commercial version of OpenOffice (around $70), comes with many more proprietary Windows fonts and possibly other fonts. It also comes wit a better dictionary, and clip-art. Today I found out that Google is now offering Star Office for free as part of their Google Pack. That's great news! I think Star Office is free for students and schools, and also comes free on Solaris.

What OpenOffice/Star Office is missing is an MS Project clone. Today I found OpenProj:

OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Project-ON-Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.

I downloaded OpenProj and gave it a quick try. The first thing that I noticed (because of the file extensions) is that it is a Java application! That means I can use it on Solaris too. OpenProj seemed very feature packed and fast. What a great addition to the world of open source. I know that there are other free MS Project alternatives out there, but I don't think many/any of them attempt to be fully compatible with the MS Project file format. That is important to me because I half expect to be sharing files with people who use the MS family of products.

Today Sun unveiled their next generation UltraSPARC T2 processor which was designed for virtualization. This CPU has already broken two world records for single chip CPUs. I watched the web cast after work and am feeling very inspired. At the beginning of the webcast they showed two full sized server cabinets side-by-side representing relatively current high performance servers from Sun. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, held a new UltraSPARC T2 processor in his hand and told the audience that this one chip is capable of replacing both cabinets – 64 servers. The T2 is made up of eight cores, each capable of running eight simultaneous threads. That is a total of sixty four simultaneous threads running at 1.4 Ghz each, or 89.4 Ghz total. (The clock speed of SPARC processors is different than x86 processors -- 1.4 Ghz is fast.) Sun says that developers who use the Java platform already have the infrastructure to take advantage of a 64 thread system without having to learn anything new. Solaris 10 and Ubuntu Linux will be the first operating systems capable of running on the T2.