Up The Irish! O'Reilly's Open Source Wingding Packs Them In - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, August, 2000 by Dave Trowbridge

The recent O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention in Monterey, CA reminded me a lot of the early Interop shows. There was the same excitement, a sense of being in on the beginning of something big (for all that open source has been around for a long time and, indeed, built the Internet), an intellectual ferment that is now entirely lacking in the Networld+Interop show. I was unable to attend any of the keynotes or sessions and had to content myself with poking around the exhibit room (barely a hall) to connect with some of the commercial efforts in the open source world. Nonetheless, what I saw confirms the vitality of the open-source world and that VARs and integrators need to pay attention to the products and services coming from it.

Perhaps, the most interesting insight to emerge from the conference for me arose from comments by Andy Hertzfeld of Eazel Software (Mountain View, CA), a vendor that is creating a new user interface for Linux based on GNOME. For him, the final frontier is usability (not surprising for one of the original Macintosh designers) and open source is the key. After all, as Eric Raymond has famously observed: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." What gets more eyes than a computer's user interface? Stated that way, it seems obvious that only the open-source world has even a chance of delivering the next thing in user interfaces. No one else has enough programmers!

A big piece of news at the conference was Sun's announcement that it will release the source code for the StarOffice Suite under the GPL, the freest of the open-source licenses. The company is also spearheading the formation of OpenOffice.org, under the aegis of Collab.Net, to coordinate development of StarOffice. The real significance of this move has little to do with the StarOffice suite itself; what's important is that, now, the StarOffice code for reading and writing Microsoft Office formats will be widely available to the open source community.

As Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates points out: "Microsoft's lock in on its Office file formats is arguably at least as important to their monopoly position as their control of the operating system itself."

No more! Of special interest to VARs and integrators was the announcement by HandsFree Networks (Newton, MA) of an open source automated support system based on the company's existing technology. The HandsFree Networks support system, currently available only for Win32 systems, uses a low-impact, event-driven symptom detection and resolution engine that detects events on a desktop, server, or network. It then searches a database of automated solutions and if one is found automatically applies it without user intervention, if no solution is found, the system administrator of the system is notified and, after resolution, the solution is encoded in the database.

The system is available as a subscription service, which will continue to be the case for the open-source version. What the company is releasing is source code for the database of automated solutions, the tools to develop solutions, and the run-time version of the symptom and detection engine. In effect, HandsFree Networks is putting Raymond's dictum to work for profit, gathering eyeballs to make system bugs shallower. If this catches on, it could solve a lot of problems (pun intended) for VARs and integrators who want to cash in on the open-source revolution, but are concerned about support issues.

Sleepycat Software (Berkeley, CA) announced the availability of the open-source Berkeley DB database for the VxWorks real-time OS from Wind River Systems (Alameda, CA), addressing the growing frenzy in the open-source world over the potential of embedded systems. Although not as well known as its commercial cousins, users of the Internet encounter the Berkeley DB every day; the company claims it is deployed in millions of systems (it's been around for a decade) and is the system of choice in many critical Internet server applications. The database is capable of handling terabytes of data and scales from a simple data store for mobile devices to full-blown transactional applications. While the database is available for free download and use, distribution of applications in binary form requires a license from Sleepycat Software; it can, however, be redistributed on any platform without royalties.

Finally (although there was much more at the conference, there's no space for it here), anyone who depends on remote control software such as pcAnywhere will be pleased at the release of TridiaVNC by Tridia Corp. (Kennesaw, GA) and the establishment of www.developvnc.org by the company to support further development of the software. VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is an open-source (GPL) remote control application that enables the monitoring and control of desktop computing environments across platform boundaries. You may, for instance, control a Windows desktop from Linux or vice versa. In addition, VNC is stateless, enabling the user to disconnect from a server session (a server, in this case, being the controlled machine), go to a different machine, and re-establish the session, picking up right where he or she left off. It is very small (the Win32 viewer is about 150K) and consumes very few resources when idle. Tridia offers a commercialized version of the application with documentation, improved install ation, support, and custom development and consulting.