Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 28, 2010
by sjvn01
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Java developers’ reaction to Oracle, Google lawsuit

What do the programmers and companies that depend on the Java software family make of Oracle suing Google? To find out, we asked them.

[ The Five Winners of Oracle suing Google ]

The lawyers and analysts all see potential trouble ahead for Java developers and ISVs coming from Oracle suing Google, but what do they think? I looked around the Web and asked several of them for their thoughts on what Oracle/Google will mean for Java and their own work.

Charles Nutter, a JRuby developer, whose also a former Sun Java developer, recently wrote in Dzone, the popular programmer site, that the “collection of patents specified by the suit seems pretty laughable to me. If I were Google, I wouldn’t be particularly worried about showing prior art for the patents in question or demonstrating how Android/Dalvik don’t actually violate them.”

But, as Nutter noted, no matter the lawsuit’s result, “It’s obviously not great to have two Java heavyweights bickering like schoolchildren, and it would be positively devastating if Android were obliterated because of this. But I think the real damage will be in how the developer community perceives Java, rather than in any lasting impact on the platform itself.”

He also believes that “Nothing in this suit would apply to any of the three mainstream Java Virtual Machines (JVM) that 99% of the world’s Java runs on. Hotspot and Jrockit are both owned by Oracle, and J9 [one of IBM’s Java implementations] is subject to the Java specification’s patent grant for compliant implementations. … And so 99% of the world’s use of Java is in the clear.” At the same time though, Nutter conceded that “This certainly does some damage to the notion of open-source Java implementations, but only those that are not (or can not be) compliant with the specification.” And, that isn’t at all easy to do.

Still, Nutter thinks that whether you’re a Java or an Android developer, you shouldn’t “lose sleep over this.”

Others aren’t so sure. Anatole Tartakovsky, a managing director at Farata Systems, an IT consulting firm, thinks it’s high time “to create [a] Java Open Source Alliance to replace Oracle dependency. It has to examine all Oracle patents and steer away in VM implementation that is based on patents that can be challenged by Oracle. That is the only way to keep momentum Android built in Java space and provide Oracle with expiration notice on their stronghold on Java technology.”

Tartakovsky isn’t the only one who wants to open-source Java up more than it is currently. The idea of a Java open-source alliance or foundation has shown up in several places. On the other hand, there’s always been some desire in the Java community to free Java and the Java Community Process (JCP) from first Sun’s, and now Oracle’s, domination.

Others, like Warren Woodford, creator of MEPIS Linux and currently working at a stealth-mode semantic startup have decided that they want no part of Java now. Woodford said, “We don’t need the extra hassle of having to explain ‘the risk of Java’ to investors or of being shaken down by Larry if we become successful. Fortunately, the law suit was a wake up call. Until the cloud is removed from over Java, we will not be using it in our systems.”

It’s not just Java that has some developers worried. Some are concerned about what Oracle might do to or with other Sun open source programs. Kevin Shockey, an entrepreneur with 18 years of experience in the software industry, reaction to the news of Oracle suing Google was “betrayal. I’m really very upset with Sun for “selling-out” to Oracle. They were probably the worst possible new owner for all of the open-source assets that Sun owned. If this is what we can expect from Oracle then, I’m very worried what the future holds for MySQL and OpenOffice.”

Not surprisingly, Henrik Ingo, project manager and COO at Monty Program Ab, the creator of the MySQL fork, MariaDB. “What we are seeing now is a counter-reaction to Oracle’s hostility. We see open-source developers boycotting Oracle software. So this is probably one of the best things that could ever happen for increasing adoption of MariaDB.”

That said, “As for Java, my gut feeling is that developers will continue to develop with the language that they already know or which is their favorite language. To many this is Java. Most enterprise customers are already paying Oracle for their software licenses. If Oracle monetizes Java more aggressively, then paying for a Java license too won’t change much. They already pay Oracle a lot, and they already don’t like it,” concluded Ingo.

James Bottomley, a Novell distinguished engineer and a Linux Foundation director isn’t too worried about the lawsuit. “At the moment it looks to be Oracle trying to monetize the Sun acquisition by going after a tempting target. Since Google deliberately chose a clean-room reverse engineered JVM, this action doesn’t threaten the implicit patent grant of Gnu General Public License(GPLv2) or the explicit, but rather circumscribed, direct [patent] grant by Sun.”

“It’s sad they chose to go after Android, but Google has the resources to defend against this,” said Bottomley. There is a broader issue here though with open-source licenses. Bottomley added, “I think this also illustrates the consequences of an important dilemma facing mobile users: Google chose to develop the Dalvik JVM as a clean-room reverse engineering project deliberately because they were averse to using the GPL.”

“Now, Bottomley continued, “unfortunately, the implicit patent grant in the GPL isn’t available to them, nor will the community rally around them in the way it would if a GPL-derived JVM were attacked in this way.”

So, as far as Bottomley is concerned, “Until there’s evidence of any threat against the GPL licensed JVMs in common use, I think this is just a fight between two corporations … although, obviously, I’ll be taking a watching brief just in case.”

This wait-and-see attitude seems to be the most common position of Java programmers. Oh sure, there are some who are swearing they won’t ever use Java, or any Oracle product again, but most are just holding their breath to see if Oracle goes after anyone else besides Google. Until they do, it’s going to be development as usual.

A version of this story first appeared in ITWorld.

August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Managing Developers 101

We all use PHP in our enterprises. It’s become the do-it-all language of choice for Web developers, from the smallest companies to the Fortune 500 and back again. However, PHP — which has been called “the one programming language that makes German look terse” — has problems with scalability. It is all too easy to write sloppy code that never-the-less works well enough to be rolled out.

Of course, as Luke Welling, Web Team Lead at Message Systems, a digital messaging management company and co-author of the “Bible” of commercial PHP/MySQL programming, PHP and MySQL Web Development, pointed out at an OSCON seminar in Portland, OR, that’s true of many corporate programming projects.

So what can you, as IT management, do about this? Well, for starters, Welling suggested that managers fight the attitude that sloppy programming is acceptable because IT can always “throw more and faster processors” at any performance problem. Sometimes, you can’t fix performance problems with hardware. You need to convince developers and their team leaders that writing to the minimum hardware requirements, rather than the maximum, is the smart thing to do.

You also need to fight the common programmer perception that all production code is temporary. This starts with the basics. Welling observed that many developers don’t even believe that the language or dialect they’re writing in is still going to be used in production systems in a few years. Wrong! According to Welling, the idea that “PHP code is going to hang around is not a crazy idea. Programming languages hang around for a very long time, as the COBOL programmers who were pulled out of retirement to deal with the Year 2000 bug found out.”

More specifically, you must convince programmers and their team leads that “No, the code you dash off today won’t be replaced properly next year. Unless the code causes real issues today there will never be time to replace it in the future.” Welling believes that “Inertia is powerful, platform changes are harder, rewrites are harder still, and people get stuck in their ways.” So encourage developers to get it right, or righter anyway, the first time.

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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The CIO and Patent Lawsuits

You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong.

In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

That’s because as Keith Bergelt CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), a non-profit, patent-protection consortium, observed, “Patent lawsuits have been doubling for the last three to five years, and I expect this trend to contribute.”

In particular, you can expect to see more attacks from patent trolls, companies that exist for the sole purpose of extorting money from businesses by threatening them with lengthy and expensive litigation. Bergelt estimated that win, lose, or draw, it costs $3- to $5-million dollars to defend against a patent lawsuit.

Ouch!

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Upgrading to Windows 7 isn’t Cheap

I’ve upgraded old XP PCs to Windows 7 and I’ve bought new PCs equipped with Windows 7. Either way I’ve found that it’s not cheap. Now, Gartner, the research company, has worked out just how expensive upgrading to Windows 7 can be for enterprises. In one word, moving to Windows 7 can be described in one word: “Ow!”

Charles Smulders, Gartner’s managing VP believes that “Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle. Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.”

In other words, Smulders claims you’re going to update faster than you had budgeted for. That presumes, of course, that you’ve budgeted at all for upgrading your desktops. Times are hard and I know many companies where the ‘upgrade’ plan is to run PCs until they break.

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August 27, 2010
by sjvn01
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Killer patents

n the computer technology business, we tend to see patents as being bad for developers and business. What we don’t realize that the problems we have with Microsoft’s bogus patent claims against Linux and Oracle’s patent-based attack against Google are nothing compared to the evils that IP patents bring to the pharmacy business.

Take, for example, the assault that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is now mounting on Abbot Labs. PUBPAT is formally asking the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight Abbot patents relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug Ritonavir, aka Norvir.

Ritonavir, a protease inhibitor, was one of the early HIV/AID antiviral drugs. Today, as HIV has grown tougher, it is now more widely used to enhance the efficacy of other protease inhibitors in AIDs drug cocktails. In this role, it’s still a critical HIV/AIDS drug.

It’s also, thanks to patents, a lot more expensive than it should be. The example that PUBPAT cites, which tells you all you need to know, is that back in “December 2003, Abbott raised the price of its Norvir brand version of Ritonavir from $1.71 a day to $8.57 a day.”

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August 26, 2010
by sjvn01
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Wi-Fi Convenient, but Dangerous

With the advent of standardized 802.11n Wi-Fi, it’s easier than ever to expand your business network wirelessly, but that may not always be a smart idea.

I’m sitting outside an office building in Portland, Oregon. The building has at least half a dozen businesses with about 40 Wi-Fi access points (AP). In the hour I’ve been sitting here, I’ve broken into 28 of these corporate networks.

While I certainly know more about networking than most people do, I’ve no special expertise. I’m no hacker. I’m just making use of a good network packet analyzer, Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) and several common-as-dirt, dead simple to use cracking tools.

The simple truth is that, given a few days and publicly available programs, any wireless network can be broken. Sadly, as I just rediscovered today, most Wi-Fi networks don’t require that much trouble. Heck, it barely requires any effort at all.

Indeed, two of the businesses (downtown businesses, mind you, not Harry’s Home Network) didn’t have any security on their APs. Sigh. Leaving an open AP isn’t just a matter of letting other people share your bandwidth. It’s also an open door into your network. Another three were even worse: They used the default passwords for their wireless routers and APs. As for the rest, most were little more trouble to unlock.

That’s because most Wi-Fi security protocols are pathetically easy to break. For example, it’s a good bet that every Wi-Fi device your company has supports Wi-Fi Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP). And many of you, including ten of the companies I just “visited,” use WEP for security.

It’s just too bad that WEP was broken, for all practical purposes, back in 2001. WEP stops someone with no clue about Wi-Fi networking security, but those are the only people that it will stop. However, every vendor still includes WEP as part of their laundry list of supported protocols; some reputable sources, like Consumer Reports, as recently as 2009 recommended WEP’s use. Consumer Reports subsequently corrected its mistake, but alas its “better” recommendation, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), is also pretty easy to crack.

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