These Things Matter To Me

(graphic based on screengrab from IntelliAdmin’s very nice Vista interface review)

• wowza. Five kinda serious usability issues with Microsoft Vista. ( really well written)
• very funny podcast with mostly-Mac blog Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, and Panic’s Cabel Sasser (this was done at Macworld, soon after The Keynote. Lotsa Steve Jobs mocking that comes from a place of love.)
• For real. IBM announced gigantor social software suite, Lotus Connections. This kinda competes with Microsoft’s gigantor Sharepoint. Many companies will pay for the privilege of buying these packages, and then learn how to use them and in some cases, if to use them. (see also, Enterprisey) Drupal’s Dries Buytaert suggests an IBM/ Drupal collaboration.
• wait. that deserves its own bullet-point. Enterprisey. (”…a derogatory term describing sophisticated software architecture which is claimed to be good enough (robust, flexible, etc.) for use in enterprise applications, but in fact is merely excessively complex…”)

Click To Play

Wowza… So… Parallels for Mac OS X has been out a for a bit. But it’s previously been best described as “…like VMware Workstation for a Mac.” In other words, cool, but nothing beyond VMware, and if VMware actually had a product out for OS X, then you’d probably grab that.

But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of “abstraction.” Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS’s windows, there is a “coherence mode” option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!

Wowza… so much hub-bub yesterday about Sun open-sourcing Java. It almost drowned out this news:

• Samba project asks Novell to back out of Microsoft agreement
  They say:

Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community.

And somehow this gets connected to the Sun Java announcement. Samba isn’t the only one bugged by the Microsoft/ Novell arrangement. While Sun already had plans to open source Java, they had not decided on a license. It turns out that Sun decision to use the GPL is directly related to the Novell/ Microsoft agreement.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz writes:

… one of the strongest motivations to select the GPL was the announcement made last week by Novell and Microsoft, suggesting that free and open source software wasn’t safe unless a royalty was being paid. As an executive from one of those companies said, “free has to have a price.”

That’s nonsense.

Free software can be free of royalties, and free of impediments to broadscale, global adoption and deployment. Witness what we’ve done with Solaris, and now, what we’ve done with Java. Developers are free to pick up the code, and create derivatives. Without royalty or obligation.

Those that say open source software can’t be safe for customers – or that commercially indemnified software can’t foster community – are merely advancing their own agenda. Without any basis in fact.

They’re also fighting a rising tide.

Related:

• Ubuntu to include Java, now that it’s GPL‘d
• Novell stock down after initial bump since Microsoft announcement (via CRN)
• David Berlind correctly predicted Java going GPL, before it happened
• Novell blog addresses open source community’s negative reaction to Microsoft/ Novell agreement
• Sun’s Tim Bray on the internal discourse and resistance and encouragement, of the open sourcing of Java