links for 2011-01-24: Forrester on the Future of Java; Honda 1-ups Segway; Linux distros switching from OpenOffice to LibreOffice

• The Future of Java - "Over time, developers will begin to view Java as a server-side language for enterprises — like COBOL."
• Honda Personal Mobility Concept U3-X - Honda 1-ups (or 2 or 3?) Segway.
• Ubuntu opts for LibreOffice over Oracle's OpenOffice - Justified or not, Oracle just can't win with open-source advocates, developers, and Linux distributions

links for 2010-12-11: Oracle 'anti-competitive'; Linux on SPARC; McNealy Speaks; Air Force bans removable media

• Oracle 'anti-competitive,' customers dissatisfied - I don't think it takes a report for people to see what Oracle's business practices are like, but how far is a company supposed to go to be "competitive"?  Isn't the objective to beat the competition?  Wouldn't other companies do similar things if they had the same opportunity?  Customers need to vote with their pocketbooks.
  
• Oracle to port Linux to SPARC - It makes sense.  Oracle wants customers to buy from Oracle regardless of the product the customer wants.
• McNealy on Sun and open-source - A good read, great to hear Scott talk.
• US Air Force bans removable media - I'm surprised it wasn't already banned.

links for 2010-10-20: SkySQL forking?; IBM, Oracle, and Java; Linux catching Microsoft; Developer Intelligence; Twitter predicts stocks; McNealy at PG West

• SkySQL will try to drive MySQL fork, Oracle's ouster - Not a fork yet, but supporting one (MariaDB) and not ruling out creating one.
  
• IBM, Oracle and Java: The Q&A - @sogrady's always well written Q&A with a kind mention of the questions I sent him.
• Linux Starts to Eat Microsoft’s Lunch in Servers - Shows Linux growth (79% adding more Linux vs 21% adding more Windows), but it is a lot easier to show growth when coming from behind.
  
• Introducing Project Arcturus, Part 1: The World’s First and Only Developer Intelligence Tool - A great use of data to provide insight into developers.  Kudos to RedMonk for building it.  ReadWriteWeb has a review here.
  
• Twitter mood predictions the stock market - Another fascinating use of data.
• Scott McNealy Keynote Speaker at PG West - A great opportunity to hear Scott speak.

links for 2010-09-21: Amazon Hiding in Plain Sight; PostgreSQL 9.0 released; iPad good for two things; Oracle and HP make up; Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel performance doubts

• Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services - It really is surprising AWS doesn't get credit or press for much of what they are doing.  When they announce something they have it working and available, often with a free/beta tier.  When most other vendors announce something, it isn't available yet and when it is, you have to pay for it, get a machine, install it, etc.
  
• EnterpriseDB Announces Support for PostgreSQL 9.0 - 9.0 has some great new replication features that make it even more of a natural cheaper alternative to Oracle.
• The iPad is good for only two things - Admittedly, the first thing is pretty big and broad.
• Oracle and HP settle spat - Having the issue prolonged would not have been good for HP.
• Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Which Is The Best Open Source DB Of Them All? - Will PostgreSQL fill the perceived void created by Oracle's ownership of MySQL?
  
• Oracle announces Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel - This story seems to doubt the performance claims.
  

links for 2010-09-16: Android benchmarks; Android market share up; AWS Linux AMI; Password resuse

• Benchmark showdown: High-end Android smartphones - Unfortunately, there isn't one "fastest" phone, but several do very well in multiple but different categories
• Android market share up, everyone else flat or down - Interestingly Palm is flat, RIM, Apple, Microsoft all down
• Amazon Linux AMI - Need Linux in the Cloud?  This should save you a little time
• Password Reuse - Hmmm, I'll be changing some passwords now thank you

links for 2010-08-20: Ellison to hire Hurd?; Laptop reliability survey; Google thwarted by California; Oracle vs Google on Java; Cloud data offers intelligence; Ubuntu advantages over Windows and OS X

• Mark Hurd to Oracle? Don't be surprised - An interesting idea.
  
• Acer makes the shoddiest laptops, say IT professionals - From those they surveyed, I'd agree Acer is at the bottom of the list.  It is interesting to see HP and Dell with high percentages in both the best and worse categories.
• Google accuses California of rigging bidding process for e-mail contract - I personally find Google's labels and search preferable to traditional e-mail clients.  Let's hope California didn't have a closed mind on the subject.
  
• Charles Nutter's thoughts on Oracle vs Google - A great read if you have the time.  If you don't, Stephen O'Grady's thoughts are good as well (and shorter).
• Intuit: Small businesses slow hiring; increase pay and hours worked - Another great example of how Cloud based services (Intuit's Online Payroll service) offer an opportunity to use volumes of data to offer intelligence.
  
• Ubuntu's two big advantages over Windows and Mac - Jason makes very good points.  I doubt it is going to cause a major shift to Ubuntu though...
  

links for 2010-06-16: Scott McNealy on 25 years of .com; Oracle cutting more Sun jobs; NetBeans 6.9 released; Twitter outages; Linux share increases; JPL in the clouds

• Scott McNealy’s Top 15 Reasons He’s Surprised We’re Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Web - It is always great to see Scott on stage, especially when he has a top-10 (errr 15) list.
  
• Steven Strogatz on the Elements of Math - I blogged most of his individual entries earlier this year, now you can get them all in one place.  Good stuff for those curious about math.
  
• Oracle Cutting More Jobs Tied To Sun Deal; Taking Big Charge - Seems to be tied to LEC completing in European and Asian countries, but still sad to see.
  
• Oracle Delivers NetBeans IDE 6.9: Expanding Support for JavaFX 1.3 and OSGi - It is good to see that NetBeans doesn't seem to be withering away.  But the preferred IDE for Fusion is still JDeveloper and Eclipse.
  
• Twitter: Sorry, but outages come with bigger improvement plan - Interesting analogy to road construction.
  
• Linux inches up on desktop, holds steady on servers - The only OS to gain share in May.  I can understand Windows dipping but I'm surprised Mac OS dipped too.
  
• NASA JPL, robots and the AWS cloud - Some interesting applications of EC2, SimpleDB, and S3.
  

Eclipse Community Survey 2010 Published; Interesting OS, app server, and open-source results

The Eclipse Community Survey 2010 is now available, and as a big fan of surveys and data, I couldn't help but dive in to take a look at what the community had to say.

First, as is the case with all surveys and data, one has to consider the audience when looking at the results to understand the context, and in this case, the survey was promoted on the eclipse.org web-site and related blogs/tweets.  It was also only available in English and 1,696 respondents completed it.  And over 50% of the respondents listed themselves as programmers.

Ok, with that out of the way, what are some of the interesting results or observations?

• Nearly 40% of developers now use Linux (32.7%) or OS X (7.9%) for their primary development OS.  The audience is clearly the reason this is much higher than you'd expect for the general desktop population, but both the Linux and OS X numbers are growing at the expense of Windows which is down 6% to 58.3% from last year.
• Linux (46%) is ahead of Windows (41%) for deployment OS.
• Sun Hotspot (69.8%) and Open JDK (21.7%) still dominate the JVM used for deployed applications.
• Scrum (15.4%) and iterative (10.9%) are the leading development methodologies.
• Hudson (21.8%) is the 3rd most used release management tool behind Ant (50.4%) and Maven (28.3%).
• There is a nearly even split among the primary types of apps being developed between RIAs (26.9%), Server-centric apps (26.9%), and desktop client apps (21.0%).
• For server frameworks, in something of a surprise given all the bashing EJBs have taken over the years, EJB (18.6%) and Spring (19.7%) use is nearly on par and ahead of Servlets (10.1%).
• It is no surprise that MySQL (31.8%) is the leading database used, but Oracle (21.6%) is not far behind and well ahead of the others.
• Tomcat (33.8%) far and away the most used app-server and disappointingly, GlassFish (2.9%) is last listed behind WebSphere, Jetty, and WebLogic.
• Nearly 60% have no plans to use the Cloud!  This is somewhat surprising given all the hubbub we are hearing about the Cloud.

What is perhaps most interesting (and gets its own paragraph, not just a bullet :)) is the section on open-source maturity.  There has been a gradual shrinking of companies that have a business model that relies on open-source and a pretty big decline in companies that use open-source and contribute back.  There is a pretty big increase in those that use open-source but don't contribute back, so it would seem that use has not declined, but engagement and collaboration with the communities has certainly suffered.  And somewhat alarming is that, while still a very small percentage, the number of companies not allowing the use of any open-source software is growing.

What does this all mean?

• I believe that the growth of non-Windows platforms for development and deployment continues although it is probably getting closer to the ultimate balance point.
• Developers continue to use and adopt new tools and technologies that enhance their productivity but are not abandoning prior technologies that have had significant improvements (EJB with Java EE 6).
• Developers are taking a pragmatic or perhaps more pessimistic approach to the Cloud and open-source.  Perhaps due to the economy and companies having to tighten their belts, use of open-source continues but there is no longer the resources to fully buy into the model and contribute back.

What do you think?

links for 2010-05-13: Ellison on fixing Sun; Fragmenting Linux a bad thing; Apple's cache waning?; Infinity; SAP acquires Sybase

• Ellison on how he is fixing Sun - He doesn't hold back on pointing out Sun's pre-acquisition flaws.  It is unforgivable if they are all so easily fixed.
• Fragmenting Linux is not the way to beat Apple - But will the vendors using Linux as the core of their mobile strategy align?
  
• Is Apple's cache waning? - The iPhone 4 announcement in June will tell us a lot in answering this question.
• Android's army passes iPhone OS, says NPD - The jump seems pretty big when comparing with other research from 2009, but the trend is clear regardless of the actual numbers.
  
• Infinity - The Hilbert Hotel - If you ever wondered what infinity squared is, this one is for you.
• SAP acquires Sybase - This is a reflection of being a software vs hardware company, but Oracle pays $7.4B for Sun with >$10B in revenue while SAP gets Sybase for $5.4B with about $1.2B in revenue

links for 2010-04-12: What Microsoft and Apple can learn from Ubuntu; Who will buy Palm?; Greenplum moves data to Cloud; Calculus explained

• One big thing Microsoft, Apple, and all CTOs can learn from Ubuntu - "What Canonical does really well is to methodically produce incremental upgrades to its OS. It is transparent about its goals and plans, and it releases its software on schedule. In fact, this incremental approach is Ubuntu’s most potent competitive weapon against rivals Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X."
  
• Who may buy Palm? - Interesting question.
• Greenplum pushes enterprise data cloud with new releases - Interesting that McNeally is an advisor to Greemplum and they have their sights set on Oracle.
  
• Change We Can Believe In - The next in an excellent series of blog entries explaining math.

Further Analysis of Java Platform Survey Results

I wrote about some initial observations and issues with a recent Java platform survey earlier today, but couldn't help myself and downloaded the raw data and did some further analysis myself and came across some additional interesting observations.

First, I dug into the Java EE app server data and like Rich fixed some of the grouping, specifically trying to get proper JBoss and Tomcat numbers.  Our numbers differ a bit as I think he may be double counting a bit for Tomcat and JBoss which I made sure not to do.

I've ignored Jonas/JRun/Jetty/Orion so the other likely represents GlassFish and Geronimo.  My chart shows JBoss behind WebSphere but ahead of WebLogic.

Since multiple answers were allowed though, it is interesting to see which combinations are most common.

Here, Tomcat is clearly the preferred second app server in a dual strategy, but perhaps surprisingly, there is a fair number that have both WebSphere and WebLogic.

Last, I took a closer look at the operating system data.  I first combined the different Linux responses into a single one.

As I mentioned in my earlier entry, Linux usage is nearly surpassing Windows and Solaris is well behind those two.

Next I looked at what operating systems were commonly included in the same response.

Not surprisingly Windows and Linux are the most common combination and the combinations with Solaris fall behind with Linux and Solaris slightly behind.

These results may match what you'd intuitively expect, but it is always good when the data backs up your intuition.