Blackmoor Vituperative

Chris Hardin has written a really good (if brief) introduction to Maven 2.0. Check it out.

Interesting news:

Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, announced on April 10 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open-source Java middleware company JBoss.

JBoss has been rumored to be on the acquisition block for months. Earlier this year there was much speculation that Oracle was going to acquire the Atlanta-based JBoss, but JBoss CEO Marc Fleury said he had no immediate plans to sell the company.

Red Hat will pay at least $350 million for JBoss. That will be made up of 40 percent cash and 60 percent Red Hat stock. An additional $70 million may be paid depending upon JBoss’ financial performance. Oracle had been alleged to have been looking to pay from $300 million to $480 million for JBoss.

The deal is expected to close in May. If completed as planned it will add to Red Hat’s earnings next year.

In early Monday morning trading, the market enthusiastically greeted the proposed deal with a jump of almost 10 percent on extremely high volume.

(from eWeek, Red Hat to aquire JBoss)

Also worth reading:

Oracle refuses to confirm or deny that it spent the past few months working through the details of acquiring JBoss. But the rumor mill has suggested that Oracle uncovered code ownership issues when doing due diligence in preparation for an acquisition.

With Oracle refusing to comment, there’s no way to confirm that premise. But if it were in fact true that the deal proved too risky for Oracle, why would it be OK for Red Hat to buy JBoss?

(from eWeek, If Legal Questions Killed an Oracle-JBoss Deal, Why Not Red Hat-JBoss?)

I have been doing a lot of reading about the technology in Star Wars in preparation to run a space fantasy game heavily inspired by that movie (and, to a much lesser extent, the debased version later released by Lucasfilm, and its five sequels). I have run across an amazing amount of material. The two most technical web sites I’ve discovered so far:

Star Wars vs. Star Trek
Star Wars Technical Commentaries

The funny thing is, even though I want to know as much as possible about the theoretical technological underpinnings of the Star Wars setting, I fully intend to ignore as much of it as a I like. My Dark Empire game, like Star Wars itself, is space fantasy. The poetry of science will only be used to lend verisimilitude to the setting. I’ll toss real science aside the moment it becomes inconvenient.

Is this sentence grammatically correct?

The vast majority of people never leave the planet of their birth.

“Majority” is the subject. It is implicitly plural. So it seems to me that “cities of their birth” would ordinarily be correct. But this seems to imply that each of the people is born in more than one city, which is nonsense. I think that the above sentence is correct, but I am not certain. Hmm.

I have tremendous respect for people who learn English as a second (or third or fourth) language, and who become as proficient with it as native speakers are.

The Legion Omnicom has a really great description of the legal tussle over Superboy, with lots of links and really tight commentary by knowledgable people. So go read that: I won’t waste your time by trying to summarize it here (any more than I just did, anyway).

Of course, if Disney hadn’t kept bribing lobbying Congress into extending copyright protection ad infinitum, this whole thing would be a non-issue. (Because it would be a trademark issue instead, and trademarks never expire. Yeah, that’s a mess, too….)

There’s a really interesting article at SearchOpenSource.com about FSW Inc. switching to Linux. (FSW is a Connecticut nonprofit that offers people healthcare and social services.)

What makes this article different from most that I read is that it doesn’t just mention Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice. These are great, and they’ll meet the need of 90% of the small businesses out there, but for large enterprises, they need more. They need virtualization. They also need something to replace Microsoft Exchange. This article doesn’t go into exhaustive depth on the decision making process FSW went through, but it does touch on these issues, and mentions what products they considered. This is good ammunition for IT directors out there who want to reduce their agency’s costs and increase their reliability by moving their core infrastructure from Windows to Linux.

The article also doesn’t gloss over the work involved. It’s a lot of work, make no mistake. But at the end of this phase of the transition, FSW saved $100,000 on their HIPAA compliance effort. That’s not trivial, and the great thing is that those savings carry forward — every time it would have been time to upgrade, or renew a license, FSW will save again.

This is really a great article. I think it does a lot to dispel the FUD that Microsft spreads about TCO.

eWeek has a head-to-head review of Apache Jetspeed-2 and JBoss Portal. The last time I was reviewing open source, standards-based Java portals (which was a little less than two years ago), neither of these was ready for prime time. At that time, the two main contenders (in my opinion) were Liferay and Exo. At the time, I selected Liferay for the project I was working on, because its security model and architecture was more compatible with my project.

It looks like Liferay and Exo are still going strong, but if I were evaluating Java portals again today, I’d probably take a good hard look at Jetspeed-2. It supports portlets written in other languages, which helps transition legacy systems into the portal framework, and it plays well with other Apache products most of us are already using.

One portal system I have not examined at all is Plone, although I keep hearing nice things about it. The next time I need to evaluate open source, standards based Java portals, I guess I will have to add that to the list, as well.

The 2006 Congressional Pig Book is here:

The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW’s annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2005 Pig Book identified a record 13,997 projects in the 13 appropriations bills that constitute the discretionary portion of the federal budget for fiscal 2005, costing taxpayers $27.3 billion. A “pork” project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.

Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java? Peter Yared, formerly of Sun and now CEO of ActiveGrid, poses that question in an open letter to Sun.

Dana Gardner follows up with what he thinks is the answer: IBM.

I get irritated when I read someone who ought to know better defend universal surveillance. Larry Seltzer on eWeek makes the claim that there is no privacy interest in public places. He draws a comparison between having a camera on every corner and having a police officer on every corner, as if there is no difference. A camera on every streetcorner is vastly different from a police officer on every streetcorner.

1. Police officers can respond to a citizen in need — cameras can’t. Even if every camera is actively monitored by a human being (which is impossible), dispatching assistance to a camera’s location takes as long as responding to any other 911 call.
2. Police officers are not all networked to the same system which stores what each of them sees. Cameras are. There is a HUGE difference between having a single human being aware of what’s on this corner, today, and having that same human being watching this corner, and every corner, every day. No one can be trusted with that level of omniscience. No one.

Universal surveillance is a huge invasion of privacy: that is its sole purpose. “Privacy” does not simply apply to what is done behind closed doors (although there are cameras to record that, as well.). “Privacy” applies equally as much to not having one’s activities tracked and monitored on a continual basis.

Universal surveillance is not a “slippery slope” to Big Brother: it is a pit trap, and Big Brother is waiting at the bottom.