Open Source: Opinions

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

T-Mobile, HTC and Google launched the "world's first Android-powered mobile phone" today and proudly announced that this phone was going to be "game-changing". But after reading details on the phone, the service and some of the new applications, I'm left wondering where the game is actually changing.

At a conference for UK press this week, Red Hat added some detail to its plans for virtualization, cloud computing and application messaging.

Service-oriented architectures are helping companies do everything from automate business processes to increase agility, but implementing the technology is not necessarily forthright.

The recent introduction of the Google Chrome browser wildly succeeded in setting the Web abuzz. Web digest after Web digest regurgitates the main points about the obvious user interface features and the cute corroborating comic, but is there more? The answer is yes, a bit of which — like it's foundation and some user-facing features — has already been around the browser world for quite awhile. But others, like several network-focused measures, will serve to be notable advances.

It started small. A faint grumble here. A clenched-teeth comment there. Then came the accusations. Google is abandoning Firefox! Google is unfairly exploiting its position! Google is ... acting like Microsoft!

Reports of data losses and system breaches are almost becoming passe but from time to time events happen that take on a life of their own and have effects far beyond what the initial breach would normally represent.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source.

As my colleague Martin Heller recently observed, smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. Trying to optimize every trivial performance issue in your code is just chasing your own tail. You should find the one problem that's causing the biggest performance hit and fix that first.

I love lampooning the FOSS community. These self-righteous cyber-hippies are almost always good for a blog entry or two per month. And because many of them can't resist airing their own community's dirty laundry, I have no shortage of story ideas to choose from.

I'm continually amazed at how the premier Web properties are willing to share what they are doing. We get to peek behind the curtain routinely. Google and Yahoo both have good lab pages, but there's some seriously experimental stuff on the Mozilla labs page. Here's what they're up to.