So how does a man with such a seemingly high-flying executive background become drawn to work in the world of free and open source software?

Finette came to Mozilla through his wife, Jane, who was running Mozilla’s European marketing. Through her, Finette met with Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO, and Chris Beard, who was working at the time as the foundation’s chief innovation officer and heading up Mozilla Labs. Over dinner in a London restaurant, the three men got into conversation about what an incubator programme for Mozilla could look like.

The conversation continued via email until Chris Beard eventually asked Finette if he would help Mozilla to think the incubator plans through in a more structured way than a dinner conversation.

“From that, I started working for them, literally on the weekends. Because, well, I had a day job, I did run a venture capital firm.
“But the half a day a week turned into a day, then into two days, then three. I got so sucked into the Mozilla fold, and so fascinated by the Mozilla mission, open source, the people and the wider community. We came to this point where I sat down with Chris Beard and he basically said, ‘I really like what you are doing, why don’t you come and join us?’ ”

After a conversation with his partners at the venture fund, they all agreed that Finette should follow his new-found passion for Mozilla. So around three years ago, he started out in a new role heading up Mozilla Labs and working on projects such as Sync/Weave and Personas.

“Then around six months ago I picked up this topic which was in my head and in my heart all this time, which was: how can we help external projects?” explains Finette.
“I had long conversations with Mitchell Baker, our chairwoman, and Gary Kovacs, our new CEO, and a bunch of other people inside Mozilla and they basically all said ‘This is great! We should do this.’ And so, I did.”

So what is WebFWD?
WebFWD is a new unit within Mozilla, whose sole focus is to work with external projects and to help them in the form of an accelerator programme. It is part of a desire I tried to express when I was in Mozilla Labs, which is to work with external projects in a much more structured way than we have done before.

What kind of companies and projects are you looking for? Are there selection criteria?
We do have a theme, but this is malleable and it can and will evolve over time. Very broadly speaking, we look for projects which fit, as a prerequisite, into the Mozilla framework. This is defined by our mission, which is ‘Promote choice and innovation on the internet’, so we are definitely looking for projects which do something on the internet. If you do something really interesting with an Arduino chip, it’s probably not the right project for us. At least not at this point in time.

Secondly, there are a few requirements that we have. We obviously believe that open source is the right model for you to develop and deploy your software. And then we are broadly looking at two areas, the first being deep technology which pushes the web platform itself forward. This could be video in the browser or voice over IP in the browser, this is one of the interesting topics we are currently looking at. In these cases, these kind of projects very often do not have a business model, so I think this is one case where we as Mozilla can be very helpful.

Thirdly, I am also very interested in innovation on the user value side. Currently the two projects we have within WebFWD fall into this category. This is innovating, keeping the users’ interests deep at heart and building solutions for these users.

Which projects is WebFWD currently helping and what are the plans?

One of the companies we are currently working with is called OpenPhoto. And what they do is that they solve this problem: today you have your pictures which are often very close and dear to you; imagine the pictures of your kid growing up, you want to have those pictures around in 20 years time. You have this issue that you have these pictures on a multitude of online services today, so you have got them on Flickr, on Facebook, on Instagram, whatever.

What they do is that they wrote a piece of software that allows you to plug all of these service together, list the pictures and all the metadata: so all the comments and all the tags, and then put them into a storage bucket of your choosing. This could be Dropbox, your own website, Amazon S3, whatever. They make it easy for you to move them around, so that you become master of your own data.

You don’t need to rely on Instagram being around in 20 years time if you want to show your kid this is what you looked like when you were half-a-year old and you had your first spinach. For us this is a really interesting piece of technology, because it clearly solves a user need, in a specific niche where we believe the market has not yet produced the best response.

This is certainly a worthy cause. But if we look at things such as Google’s Data Liberation Front project or Facebook Friend Exporter, Facebook seems quite keen not to let you get to your data: certainly the metadata stemming from interactions on the site. Every time someone opens up a new method of doing this, Facebook seems to shut it down and it becomes a sort of arms race.

Yes this is surely a part of the challenge. But I think this shows you, even more, how much of a need there is for someone standing up and saying I will write a piece of software that allows you to do that. You don’t want to be at the whim of any entity when it comes to something as dear to you as your photos.

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Gerry Carr is a busy man. As director of communications at Canonical, it’s his job to make sure that everyone knows what to expect from the launch of Ubuntu 11.10 – also known, in classic Ubuntu fashion, by its animal codename Oneiric Ocelot.

“We’re describing it as an iteration rather than a revolution,” Carr explains of the release his company has spent the last six months shepherding towards release. “Really, it’s the first step towards this drive that we have to break down the separation between the operating system and the applications – the legacy of where Ubuntu’s come from – and the cloud, and the Internet, so basically where people get content and applications from outside of their local PCs.”

Carr, previously Canonical’s marketing manager, is used to having to sell Ubuntu releases to the Linux-using public. When he took responsibility for the Ubuntu.com site back in 2008, he spoke publicly of his desire to demonstrate what could be achieved with truly open tools – something which won him a great deal of respect in the community, even if he admitted to cheating occasionally with a copy of Adobe Photoshop.

Now, as communications director, Carr has the responsibility of keeping the community – and our readership – informed as to the goings-on at Canonical.

Talk us through the major new features of Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot,’ compared to the previous release.

“One of the most significant steps forward is the work we’ve done on this release to the Ubuntu Software Centre. That changed in this release in three ways. First of all, on a basic level, just in the variety and range and the number of applications that we’re making available through the Ubuntu Software Centre now, which will only ramp up significantly across the lifetime of Ubuntu 11.10.

“The other significant step forward, which is a very recent one but we’re already starting to see the benefits from, is the release of developer.ubuntu.com. Basically, what developer.ubuntu.com does is make it much more transparent about how to make an application available on Ubuntu, and at the same time how to develop an application natively for the platform.

“Finally, we’ve done a fair amount of work to make it much more integrated into the Ubuntu experience itself, so for instance if I got to Dash and search for applications, it’ll prompt me with applications that are locally installed and also with applications that are available via the Ubuntu Software Centre. That’s a big step forward we’ve made for Ubuntu 11.10, and I think it will become a more popular yet less visible part of what we’re making available ongoing.”

When Ubuntu 11.04 launched with Unity, there was feeling in the community that it wasn’t quite ready for release. Is that something that’s been addressed in this latest release?

“You learn far more by releasing a product than you do by developing it under wraps. I mean, obviously, we believe that the product is and was ready for prime-time, if you like, for a vast majority of use cases and a vast majority of users. We knew we were running pretty tight towards the release date of that product, and we had stopgaps in place if we felt it wasn’t ready but we didn’t have to use them.

“It was ready, but there will be some faults. We knew we wanted to get it out at least a year before the LTS releases, to give it that time to iron out the edges. 11.10 has six months additional development in terms of making it smoother and faster and better than Ubuntu 11.04.

“The Dash has become much more mature in this release. It was its first release with Ubuntu 11.04, and I think with 11.10 users will start to realise the centrality of its place in how to navigate their way around this operating system. The Launcher, we’ve done a lot of work – and learnt a lot about this – with improving the algorithms for search.

“We’ve broken down more the difference of whether I’m searching for applications or whether I’m searching for files, that’s much more of a distinctive location for either. We’ve also, with this release, made clearer what the Lens concept is: you can consider it a subset of Dash, which allows us to focus on a single type of content.

“We released 11.04 because we thought it was ready then. We knew that there would be some faults, but we’ve had six months to iron out those faults and I think 11.10 is better, and 12.04 will be better again – but that’s the inevitability of development cycles in software.”

You mention making the concept of Lenses clearer – what are the best examples of real-world uses of Lenses in Ubuntu?

“For a few months now there’s been a Help Lens, which is a Lens that accesses Ask Ubuntu – an external site with lots of help and support queries and answers for Ubuntu. So, a Lens uses the same interface, more or less, as the Dash, so users don’t have to learn a new interface in order to access different types of content.

“With this release, we’re bringing out the Music Lens, which offers a Dash-like experience and allows you to use the search bar to search for, let’s say, Abba – it’ll display all the Abba that you have locally on your machine, and it’ll also display any Abba available in the Ubuntu One cloud, and then also it will – and I’m not quite sure if this is going to land at release, or just after – but basically it’ll also allow you to access all the Abba that’s available on the Amazon Music Store or on the Ubuntu One Music Store, so I can purchase that directly within the same Lens.

“Once purchased that music will be made available through to Ubuntu One Cloud so I can stream that music to my local Banshee player on Ubuntu or I can play it on my iPhone or on my Android device, or however I choose to listen to my music. So, that represents a breakdown of where my music is available, how I access this music – so basically we’re sort of elevating the content away from the operating system. We’re starting to see that in various real ways that we hope people will find convenient and useful.”

We couldn’t help but notice that the traditional Ubuntu mail client, Evolution, has been swapped out in favour of Mozilla’s Thunderbird. What prompted the change?

“The short answer: user preference. Basically, at each UDS – which is the developer summit we hold every six months – we run through a check of the default applications, and ask whether they’re the right default applications ongoing. We were aware that lots and lots of users were using Thunderbird as opposed to Evolution as their preferred email client, but that had certain inconveniences: for instance, if I click on an email address that’s in a document it’ll automatically start up Evolution, but most of our users seemed to be using Thunderbird.

“So, now, if I do the same thing it’ll start up Thunderbird, which is the email client I prefer. So, really, it wasn’t a case of fault with Evolution, it was really a case of preference for Thunderbird and the fact that reality seemed to be that most of our users were using Thunderbird over Evolution, so it seemed a natural switch. We’ll still make Evolution available through the Ubuntu Software Centre – I’m 90 per cent, 95 per cent sure of that – so it’s still a simple install for users who want to use it, but it’s not the default email client from 11.10 on.”

Are you concerned that the decision to remove Ubuntu Classic – which allowed Ubuntu 11.04 users to drop to a classic GNOME interface – in this release will get a negative reaction from the community?

“We’re concerned in a sense that we never want to do anything to deliberately lose users, and we’re obviously concerned about anything that people would have a negative reaction to – but we’ve been pretty open and consistent around the fact that we think that the new user interface for Ubuntu is the direction in which we’re moving. We know that that’s caused problems, let’s put it that way, for certain sections of users around Ubuntu.

“We brought out the two experiences – the default 3D experience, and then the GNOME experience – because we needed to give people the option. We’re more confident now that we don’t need to have that second option – the Unity 2D option is ready.

“What we said then, we continue to say: we are committed to Unity, we see Unity as – for a variety of reasons, and across a variety of form-factors – as the principle driving force for where Ubuntu is going, so it makes consistent sense for us, at least, to make Unity 2D the default secondary experience for users with graphic-restricted PCs.

“So, are we concerned? Yes. Do we hope that people will come with us? Yes. Are we going to change our minds on that? No. We know it’s an argument that we have to win, we know it’s an argument we have to win over time, we know it’s an argument we’re not going to win with absolutely everybody, but we think it’s the right thing to do and this is consistent with that decision.”

Canonical has been very vocal about its support for the ARM architecture in the past – how is that project progressing?

“With this release, we’re releasing a tech preview of Ubuntu Server for ARM as well – Ubuntu Server 11.10 will be available on the ARM architecture for the first time, I think, any general-purpose software system has been available as a server technology, so that’s a very significant feature.

“We’ve done a lot of work to make the LAMP stack available on the ARM server product, so there are real applications for people to run and test out the applicability of ARM for data-centre use. We’ve done work to make virtualisation container technology available on ARM, which allows us to make OpenStack or Ubuntu Cloud available on ARM for the first time.

“There’s a lot of firsts in there on the server side. It is a tech preview, there’s a limited range of architectures available out there – so it’s not for everyone, put it that way. We’re not expecting production on these devices for some time, but ourselves and ARM are extremely excited that we’re starting to see real movement over there.

“On the client side, we going to start seeing ARM devices appear like netbooks – we’ll start seeing those running Ubuntu pretty soon. There isn’t a legacy of applications out there that have been in the market for as long as an x86 PC-type experience, but that work is ongoing. There are, obviously, areas where it makes sense to port applications across to ARM, and it’s a case of the industry deciding which ones make the most sense to focus on.”

Ubuntu has long been made available as alpha and beta versions for community testing before each version gets an official release. How important is the community feedback in the development of the distribution?

“Well, it’s hugely important – that’s why we do it. I can’t characterise how important it is, but as you know we have an alpha programme which is out very soon after the release of the previous product, we have an extended beta programme, we have many, many, many thousands of participants in that – the bug reports are probably the most essential part of making sure that our stability is right, and the features are working.

“It’s certainly something that our development teams pay huge attention to, the entire community pays huge attention to. It’ll become even more important with the next release, which is the 12.04 release, which is all about stability and precision as Mark [Shuttleworth] announced. So, the beta programme, the extended beta programme, the entire development process which you could call a beta programme – it’s what Ubuntu is about, it’s how we crowdsource and how we make sure that the product is quality is by getting feedback around where we’ve fallen down and to try and fix it.”

Thanking Carr for his time, we ask him if he has a message he’d like to pass on to our readership. “It’s not for me to lecture people about how they should or shouldn’t react to releases,” he explains, “but I think that they should understand that what we’re trying to do.

“The best of our efforts, and what we talk about all the time, is basically ‘how do we get free software into the hands of more people?’ We take decisions around interface design, product design and application integration, but they’re all designed for a single purpose: to put more free software into the hands of more people.”

It’s clear from his words that it’s a topic Carr feels passionate about, and one he believes is fully supported by his employer. “While we may disagree in terms of tactics,” he admits wryly, “the strategy is shared between us and the broader community in open source and elsewhere.”

Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ is a launch which Carr and his colleagues is hoping will win back support lost during the transition to Unity with 11.04, and will be followed in April next year with the company’s latest Long Term Support – LTS – release, Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin.’

Read out our review of Ubuntu 11.10

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Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of the Middleware business unit at Red Hat, is a busy man. While Red Hat is known for its Linux distribution(s), the company acquired a major enterprise software business in JBoss. That was back in 2006, when words like “SOA” and “AJAX” were all the rage.

We caught up with Craig to check in on what exactly is going on in the world of JBoss Middleware, these days. With the Java world preparing for the release of OpenJDK, JBoss and Red Hat have taken a key role in both the present and future of the platform. The company was even recently responsible for kick-starting the Java EE 7 specification inside the JCP.

Here’s what Craig had to say about the future of enterprise Java, and of the JBoss Middleware platforms…

How is the middleware business doing in this age of cloud computing?
The middleware business here has been doing quite well. It’s been growing at about double the rate of the Linux business. It’s a big growth engine here at Red Hat. We had great strength in all regions last year, including Japan, Brazil, and Latin America. Our goal has been to build out a portfolio of middleware products that would enable us to offer an alternative to proprietary middleware stacks. We’re offeirng ourselves as an alternative by enabling companies to standardize on us, or to use us strategically. We’ve introduced eight major new products in the last couple of years. Now we have high speed messaging, business process management and rules management. We have a portal offering, and a data integrations offering. We’ve really been building out the portfolio. Some of those are doing quite well, in particular the integration products.

The nature of the deals has changed too. Look at four years ago. It was primarily about application servers. JBoss was usually used pretty tactically, for Web-based applications and  non-mission critical applicaitons. Now companies have gotten more secure, and they feel more comfortable with JBoss. The number of companies that have migrated completely is lengthy. Nissan and NTT in Japan, Fed Ex, Geico, Verizon, Ing, the New York Stock Exchange; they’ve all standardized on JBoss now, and use it predominantly in their organizations. They’re migrating away from the big guys, the proprietary Java stacks.

What has been the focus for JBoss Middleware lately?
We’ve been doing more to make the platforms much more flexible by supporting different languages. Not only are we the best place to run Java EE, we have quite a high percentage of customers using us to run Spring, Struts, and Groovy on Grails.

This idea of flexibility is about moving toward operational flexibility. With the next release we have is on the application platform. Our Java EE 6 platform becomes a much more configurable platform.

EE 6 is all about laying the foundation for modularity for the platform, through the new Profiles. How is JBoss taking advantage of this?
What we’re announcing next. JBoss Application Server 7. At the core of this is a micro-services container. We came out years ago with the concept of a micro-kernel. Java EE 5 came out with the idea of a micro-container on top of the Java Virtual Machine. Now we have this concept of more modularity. If you have transactionality in JPA, or caching, or messaging, or clustering security, all of these services can be added or subtracted easily from the micro-services container.

The other thing this does is allowed us to add a lot more manageability capabilities. We’re extending the API so that the platform container can be more easily managed without having to bring in something hard-coded. You can manage and configure and deploy this environment much more easily. We’re doing a lot for flexibility for the developer, but also for the operational excellence and managing it after the fact.

We have a profile which is essentially Tomcat, slimmed down. It’s just the servlet engine, but then you begin to build on top of that with micro-services containers. The problem with Tomcat is that it’s really simple and easy to deploy, but the problem is if you need to scale it up and add services, thats not so easy. If you need transactionality, if you need highly distributed caching capability, you can’t do it easily with Tomcat.

I’d say Tomcat is still healthy. It seems like from the market research data we have, show that its usage hasn’t declined, but it hasn’t increased either. What these other vendors (Mulesoft, SpringSource) are doing is, they all need a container. With Mule, their ESB needs a container, but if you need it to be more than the runtime environment for the ESB, you will not have services to do that. I think that’s the dilemma. Some of these companies are offering their own Tomcat versions, but can that be a rich environment or not?

How goes the work on Java 7, both SE and EE?
We participate in the Executive Committee for Java EE 7, and for SE. We participated in the recent EE 7 announcement. In terms of SE 7, we are on the expert group for that. We’re feeding in our comments and making sure we’re part of the process. We are also the number one contributor, outside of Oracle, to OpenJDK. We have quite a few people working just on OpenJDK. We have had a Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) compliant Java for around 4 or 5 years now, and we ship it with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We plan on continuing that tradition, and we’re fully behind OpenJDK. I think what is uncertain is what happens beyond the OpenJDK, in terms of what Oracle does.

They may package up another distro based on OpenJDK, with Hotspot and Jrockit. What types of add-ons will they put in that environment? From the market standpoint, they said they want to add value on top of Java, but I think it’s unclear where they’re going to go. We want to make sure the specification itself and the reference implementation is nice, and strong, and healthy, and has all the capabilities at a base level that everyone at the marketplace will need.

What about the Apache Foundation’s dispute with Oracle over the licensing terms of the TCK?
They’ve been a  little mum on that so far. They have not disclosed all of the license terms for the new TCK when SE 7 does comes out. We’re hoping they continue to be benevolent. So far they have been open in terms of the process, we’re waiting to see.

In 2007, Oracle published a number of papers and blogs about the JCP and how it should be run. It was just some in general comments on what some of the best practices should be. They have seemed to slow down a bit in terms of their own stated goals were in the past. At the same time, they have accelerated the release of new specifications. We’ve got one for Java SE 7, and we’ve got one for EE 7, and intentions for SE 8 and EE 8. I think everybody is hoping and being optimistic.

How are you responding to the trend of other languages being run on the JVM?
We have a strategy called open choice. This was the idea of taking anything JVM-based–and some things that aren’t–and being able to make sure you’ve got a runtime that adopts a number of different languages and component models. We’ll run any framework certified against Struts or Spring. Ruby on Rails runs on top of JBoss. With a component model like OSGi, you design your whole application with OSGi and you build OSGi bundles, and we will take and consume all those bundles. We are looking at all of those languages, providing and certifying support of them. We’re saying you still need a runtime, you still need a container and services, and instead of duplicating the effort for every language, and every framework, and having a plethora of environments, you might end up with five or six different platforms. We will leave it up to the developer which languages and models are the best for them, but you will always have the same runtime and same services.

Some vendors are supporting a couple of different things. Others, like VMware are not. They’re saying Spring and Groovy only. We’re embracing the variety in the environment.

How is Seam doing?
Seam is doing very well. It became the Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) specification in Java EE 6, JSR 299. It’s really a more modern framework. It’s what Spring had set out to solve six years ago, when they had difficulties with Java EE. We finally have come full circle, where Java EE incorporates some of these concepts with a more modern framework, which is CDI.

Gavin [King, creator of Seam] has also been experimenting with some new languages. Ceylon takes some of the concepts of Seam and puts it into a language. Maybe one could compare it Scala, but talking to Gavin it’s not intended to be a replacement for some of these newer languages and langauge types. We’ve been asked what are we doing with this? Our spirit is that part of open source is a lot of R&D and experimentation. We’re trying to see if what he’s created is interesting to people.

What’s next for JBoss?
What we’re doing is, we’re evolving the application platform, and the seed of this is in Java EE6. It’s where this micro-services container becomes the foundation for everything we do. We start to look beyond monolithic application servers and looking towards application fabrics. You have a very lightweight footprint that can run some things like iPhones and plug-based computers. Things that are highly mobile, yet supports HTML 5, and different clients. It’s dynamic, where you can plug and play services. We’re looking into self scaling and self healing. It’s policy-driven where you reduce a great degree of human intervention. That’s where we’re heading with this.

One can start to see the portfolio acts differently. The ESB or rules management systems that are standalone become part of the fabric. That’s the long term vision over the next several years. In the short term, Red Hat is in a great position to be a major player in cloud. We bring all the pieces to the table. We have KVM, the OS, and all the middleware components, the platform runtime, and the services and components. We bring that all of that to bear.

Tell us about Cloud Forms and Open Shift.
We recently announced Cloud Forms, and OpenShift, which is our platform as a service offering.

The JBoss product line is bringing together all these pieces we have and offering them as services in OpenShift. People can use us as the engine in their cloud. It doesn’t end at the container. Think of an integration service from Salesforce.com to an internal ERP. On top of that, you get busineess process management as a service, and user experience and collaboration as a service.

JBoss Application Server 7 is the engine in our middleware offering in the cloud. This goes live within the next several weeks, and JBoss Application Sever 7 is the engine driving that in OpenShift.

What are your goals for your platform as a service?
I think the primary requirement is making it very accessible and easy and to attract developers from corporations that need to do development in the cloud and bring it back on premises. Also, people who have ancillary applications that are mainstream, so it doesn’t make sense to do it on-site, so you do it in the cloud. Why start on premises? Do it in the cloud? For smaller organizations that need Web-based applications, do it right in the platform as a service. I think one of the key requirements is to make it easy for all these audiences to use OpenShift. Second is to make it portable so they can move from cloud to cloud, or cloud to on premises.

We’re trying to embrace applications, whether its Spring or EE or Ruby on Rails, or PHP. We embrace all of these, and let the developers use the workload that best suits their needs.

Stepping back a second, I think Red Hat is always looked upon as only a Linux company. But I think, as people get to know us more, they realize we have really a full portfolio of infrastructure as well as development and middleware offerings, and we bring it all to the table. I think it’s good for all developers that they understand Red Hat is more than a Linux company. It’s a middleware company. It’s a management company. It’s a cloud company.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. In this capacity, he heads up the efforts of the Foundation by bringing important people and organisations together to fix problems. We spoke to Jim two years ago about printing, desktop disparity and the future of Linux on consumer devices. This past April, we caught up with him again while playing his role as Linux User’s guest editor in this our centenary issue, and checked in on those topics.

Perhaps the single biggest change since our first interview with Jim has been the widespread popularity of Linux on handheld devices, mostly thanks to the Android platform. But that’s not all that has changed. Linux has continued to grow in popularity around the world, and recently Zemlin jokingly referred to criticising Microsoft as similar to “kicking a puppy”. Linux, he said, is the default choice for almost every new device-based project,
and on the servers of startups, governments and other cash-strapped organisations.

Jim recently broke his leg while skiing, so he was easy to catch at the annual Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. We chatted with him about the 20th anniversary of Linux, the future of embedded Linux devices, and the current state of the kernel…

This year sees the 20th anniversary of Linux. Why has it been so successful over the past 20 years?

I think it’s more of an industry shift, where you’re seeing this massive adoption of Linux as the underlying fabric of a lot of different computing. All of the fundamental advantages Linux had – in terms of the availability of the source code, the low cost, the fact that you can own this stuff and build your own things on top of it –have turned out to be truly fundamental advantages. It’s amazing to look at.
In Silicon Valley there is not a startup today that uses proprietary software to build their company. In the hottest segment of the market today, it’s not Web 2.0 any more… It’s the new wave of social media companies like Groupon. Go to any of those companies and they all build their technology using open source. It’s Linux. It’s open source databases. It’s Apache web servers. It’s all open source. They’re doing that not just because the stuff is high quality, provides high availability and fast throughput, but also because it’s cheap for them to build. I was one of the founders of a company called Corio. When we went public, the number-one risk statement on our sheets was that we didn’t own the software. We hosted it, but it was built on proprietary software. It really is true. When I ask if Google could be the company they are today if they used .NET? Maybe not. There’s this fundamental advantage Linux has for people to own their code.

What’s interesting in Silicon Valley is that in addition to all these companies building on open source, they’re not just not buying software, they’re not buying hardware either. They’re launching using cloud services from Amazon and other providers. That’s reduced the amount of risk and the amount of capital required. I guess if you’re interested in old workloads and using MS Office, you’d say Windows is doing pretty well. And I wouldn’t deny they are, but if you’re into any new kind of workload, or into greenfield deployments, it’s all Linux.

If you go into other segments, like mobile, the same fundamental advantage holds true. In the consumer electronics world, it’s even more compelling. You’ve got this twofold pressure in the world of TV makers, or phone manufacturers, or DVD makers, which is that you not only are needing to spend more money creating these devices, it’s also a cost that is largely derivative
of software.

Take the top ten smartphones on the market today, turn off screens, lay them side-by-side and tell me which is which. You’ll have ten blank screens in a candy-bar form factor. It’s hard to tell an iPhone from a Droid until you turn it on and see the software is very different. When the software becomes the primary differentiator of these devices, the software component becomes very expensive. In addition to that price pressure in terms of building, these things are only on the market of 12 months. That gives these guys a lot less time to make money off of these things. They’ve decided that instead of making money off the hardware, I’m going to offer products and services on top of that. The only platform that allows you to control your own destiny is Linux, because it’s open source. We have these fundamental structural advantages in the market due to the licence cost and due to the critical mass that Linux has in terms of this broad architectural support. Once it’s taken on that critical mass combined with these advantages, it becomes something that’s very, very difficult to compete with, if you’re a proprietary software company. Microsoft… It’s evident they truly struggle.  In the markets they seem to care about and try hard to win, Linux seems to be doing a pretty good job competing.

How has Linux changed the world since it was created 20 years ago?
It has fundamentally changed the way people live every day. Let me give you an example. I think Bill Gates changed the world. Bill Gates changed the world with a simple vision of a PC on every desktop running Microsoft software. And the PC did change the way people interact in their daily lives. Linux has gone even beyond that. It’s not just powering desktops, but it’s a fundamental component of the global economy. It runs 75% of global equity trades. Wall Street and Linux are inextricably linked. It runs air traffic control systems, trains, Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. It’s in your phone. It’s in your TV. I mean, it’s changed the world so fundamentally, and people aren’t even aware it exists, which I think is one of the most elegant things about Linux.

It has driven billions of dollars of cost out of the IT industry. It has enabled services that are a part of everyone’s daily lives. It has changed fundamentally the way people think about developing software. It has proven the collaborative model is better.

Why do Linux communities work while many others fail or collapse in drama?
These are all self-forming communities. When you say, why do things stay the same versus change? One of the reasons for that in Linux is because what works tends to stay and what doesn’t work tends to fade away. That’s the beauty of these self-forming communities. There’s no artificial hand out there trying to force Linux in any direction. It takes on its own life and flow. That has been hugely advantageous as it jumps from one industry to another. And it does this with a single freakin’ kernel, which is freakin’ amazing.

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Mark Shuttleworth has been a busy man since last we spoke to him in 2009, but at least this time, he’s remained on Earth. The world’s second space tourist, Shuttleworth is the father of Ubuntu and founder of the company behind it, Canonical. Originally from South Africa, Shuttleworth currently resides in the UK, where he works both on Ubuntu and as a venture capitalist.

Shuttleworth has removed himself from running the day-to-day operations of Canonical, but he remains at the top of the Ubuntu food chain, where he wields supreme executive power over the code naming process. And on that topic, he even references T S Eliot on the naming of cats. As he wrote on his blog, when discussing the naming of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot: “Oneiric means ‘dreamy’, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.”

We caught up with Shuttleworth a couple of weeks ago to ask him about the various projects and events under the Ubuntu umbrella, and about the future of the platform as a whole.

We last spoke two years ago. What have been the biggest changes for Ubuntu since then?
Wow! Two years is a long time. That’s the time frame between LTS releases, so we get a lot of change in and stabilised over a two-year period.

On the Enterprise front, the biggest changes have been in cloud computing and virtualisation. We were the lead distribution to adopt KVM, and that’s now become an industry standard in Linux. Ubuntu has taken off on EC2 and Rackspace public clouds, where people are doing amazing innovation, and we’ve added some features just for cloud deployments that make it easier to keep your infrastructure in the cloud up to date and manageable. We also shipped the only free and open cloud infrastructure, which lets you create your own cloud with a few servers and the standard Ubuntu Server CD.
On the desktop front, we introduced Unity, the brand new desktop experience that is designed and tested for usability and efficiency. We will make that our default desktop in 11.04 this April, and we have an implementation both for high-end computers with OpenGL and for low-end computers where memory and graphics are less advanced, in Qt. By 12.04 LTS, that will be the only desktop experience in Ubuntu. We added support for touch and gestures, which is unique to Ubuntu, based on uTouch from Canonical.

How have your Enterprise customers been evolving and growing? What do they like about Ubuntu, and has that been a lucrative business for you?
Enterprise customers can use Ubuntu, with free security updates, without any support contract, so no it isn’t lucrative, but it’s growing quickly as companies who have deployed Ubuntu realise the advantages of having a relationship with us. We’ve solved a lot of thorny problems for customers, who are deploying Ubuntu on thousands of machines. We have a management solution that’s included in those relationships as well as providing assurances on copyright etc. So the customer list continues to grow steadily, mainly in Europe and the US.

I know you’ve stepped back from a leadership role in Ubuntu. How are you adjusting to letting the OS develop without your oversight?
My role in Ubuntu hasn’t changed, but in Canonical Jane Silber took the CEO reins from me (thank you!) and I now lead product design and strategy.

How are relations with Debian at the moment?
Quantum mechanical – Debian is a collection of more than a thousand individuals, and each of them has a different relationship with Ubuntu, so I would describe our overall relationship as a wave function rather than a vector ;-). However, the good news is that I think the bulk of people concerned have found positive and constructive ways to work with each other, so we can say the probability density is highest in the ‘good’ part of the spectrum. That said, the wave function does have long tails; there are people who are unhappy with Ubuntu or have moments of unhappiness, and we try to address what we can and have a thick skin where we can’t.

Red Hat began signing its packages recently, in an attempt to maintain its revenue streams for enterprise Linux. What do you think of Red Hat’s situation?
I think the actual change was more about how they publish their source code – as a single lump rather than coherent changes. They still manage the changes internally as separate patches, but they only show that work to customers; everyone else just sees an opaque blob of code. It’s within their rights to do so – probably (there are debates about sharing code in the ‘preferred form for modification’) – but it’s been seen as a negative move by others. I think the rationale for them is that Oracle and Novell are using the patch flow to compete directly with Red Hat; I think that approach by Oracle and Novell is doomed to fail, so I wouldn’t have bothered with obscuring the work, myself.

What do you think of tablets?
I think they will be a serious form factor that’s widely used, alongside clamshell (keyboard/notebook) form factors, phones and TVs.

What about Android?
I like the model Google follows, I think Android itself is a bit of a lump, and I prefer the cleaner, component approach of the traditional Linux stack as we have it in Ubuntu. I think it’s great that free software is seeing such concentrated investment, and a pity that so many free software people are so critical of Google. If you look closely, you’ll see that each free software player has different constraints – different things are easy or hard for them. None of them are inherently more moral than the others – look at Red Hat’s kernel moves to which you alluded earlier. So it’s weird that we spend so much energy on belittling different company approaches, rather than just getting on and enjoying the fruits.

We know Ubuntu was planning on helping out MeeGo a few years ago. Has that effort fizzled out?
The MeeGo developers felt it was important to use the RPM format and moved off Ubuntu as a base, which gave us little to collaborate on. We wish them well.

What types of companies are you investing in right now?
Mainly companies that are helping to create sustainable economic development in Africa and other frontier markets. And companies that give software away ;-)

Any plans for returning to space soon?
Not soon, no, but I would very much like to return. I feel I need to do something on Earth that I can be proud enough of to justify the great privilege of another orbital flight. And I’d like to go further, perhaps around the moon, or deeper into the solar system, than just repeating the experience of working on the ISS [International Space Station].

Finally, what’s the next big thing?
The internet, again!

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When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company inherited a large portfolio of open source projects. While Oracle has made a distinct effort to push many of these projects either forward or backward, OpenOffice.org was largely left alone. While Oracle set about infuriating the Java community, and outright killing the OpenSolaris community, the one project in its open source stable that had withered and been left unloved for so many years was completely ignored.

Enter the Document Foundation. As an aspiring non-profit organisation, the Document Foundation has already spent six months helping to bring new contributors and new code to OpenOffice, which the Foundation has essentially forked and renamed LibreOffice. From making word count actually work, to repairing bugs that caused the number 1,000,000 to be ignored entirely in certain situations, those six months have already made a huge difference to the project.

On to our interview with Michael Meeks…

What was your first computer?
Goodness. Well, really one of two. my parents bought a BBC Model B with a 6502 processor, and 32K of memory (to share with the frame-buffer, OS and apps). It was a fantastic investment, when I look back at it in their children’s future – and cost a lot at the time. A really good machine, hurt only by the one-bit-per-channel DAC which severely limited its graphical possibilities. I learned most of my programming on that beast as an early teen.

That was fine while I did garden rubbish removal to save up for my own computer; which after much excitement, was a speeding Pentium 60. It could even (just about) play ‘multimedia’, by which we meant a postage-stamp-sized picture on the screen.

What was your first programming language?
I learned the syntax of BBC Basic by typing in games from magazines with a friend – a surprisingly social, and rewarding pre-figurement of ‘pair programming’, that I suspect is gone forever. Since our typing was inadequate at best, we learned to parse the obscure syntax errors and fix programs before we understood anything about the language. Then writing menu systems became fashionable, along with basic games, before graduating to 6502 assembler to write some yet more interesting software. From the bottom up, all programming problems are solvable, with enough time, patience and of course all of the source code to read.

What’s your favourite language?
I program habitually in C or C++. I’ve done some chunks in C#, Perl, Python and shell. I get to see and read a lot of code, and my general feeling is that all programming languages are, in general, the same. Personally I think C# is a pretty sexy language. I like using language-integrated native query; that’s a genuine innovation. Some of the cleanups between Java and C# are really cool: using delegates and tools, for example. My favourite would probably be C#, then C or C++ in that order. LibreOffice is all C++. You can do good things with C++, and also some terrible things.
I don’t program in OpenOffice.org. Occasionally, I do do some programming in Notepad. Emacs is my choice, but I have a lot of respect for vi people too.

How did you come to Novell?
At university I cast around for some free software projects to get involved with, having been introduced to Linux for some web roles beforehand. I stumbled across several and landed in GNOME, working on the spreadsheet application Gnumeric. There I met some great guys: Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, who set up a company called Ximian to drive the free software desktop forward. We did a lot of interesting work there – including, towards the end, getting involved with the creation of OpenOffice.org and shipping an enhanced version with our product.

How did you become interested in free software?
At first introduction it seems so obvious and refreshing. Having tasted the freedoms free software gives you, why would you ever want anything else ? However, as I began to travel more widely, and speak at conferences – I began to realise that many people had no idea of the benefits of software freedom and needed telling. So I suppose my political interest in free software as a concept and movement comes from trying to persuade others to share the fun I had. Latterly that has translated into attempting to encourage people to create genuinely open, fair and friendly developer communities, such as LibreOffice.

How did the Document Foundation form?
The OpenOffice.org project was launched in 2000. At the time, it was promised that we’d get a foundation behind that to support development and be vendor neutral. Unfortunately, ten years on, the opportunity to create that hasn’t been created. We took it upon ourselves to create this. We’re not yet a non-profit, but we’re bootstrapping using a German non-profit. We opened the code and dropped the required copyright agreements. We’ve got 90 entirely new people contributing code to the project since launch. We’re introducing changes at a rate of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. We’re including changes from Oracle, as well. The project is getting rapidly better. What held the project back, before, was the lack of individuals jumping in and contributing to the code.

How’s Oracle taking all of this?
We like to talk about the positive things LibreOffice brings. A lot of the benefits are really good for Oracle too. There’s a genuine and real invitation open to them to join. We’ve structured a way they can join. We know they don’t like the LGPL, so they’ve refused to accept code submitted under the LGPL. OpenOffice includes a huge chunk of Mozilla code already. It would be fantastic to be involved with Oracle again. I think in due course they’ll see the added value there.

We include code from Oracle, of course, because it’s under an open source licence and we include that code under those terms. There are contributions from entirely new people, and a whole load of translators on top of that. There are lots of new languages, too.

Continue to: Page 2 – Is it a fork?

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What was your first computer?
I didn’t start programming until I was in university. I got my undergraduate degree is in business. In my second year, I took a COBOL programming course that had me on a Honeywell mainframe running the CP6 operating system. Despite the fact I started with COBOL, I actually enjoyed programming. I filled all my electives with programming courses: Fortran, Pascal, APL. When I graduated, I got a job at Bell Northern Research, where despite the fact my title was financial analyst, I spent every day programming in APL.

I went back and did a master’s in information and systems sciences. I did it backwards: I got my business degree first, then went back for my computer science. Before they even let me into the program I had to take two full credits of third-year math in night school. That was tough. I would not recommend it. When I went back doing my masters, at Carleton University in Ottawa, they were really big into object-oriented programming and Smalltalk, so I programmed a lot of stuff in Smalltalk. I did my master’s thesis in Objective‑C. I then went to work back at Bell Northern Research in the development group, working in Smalltalk on a Mac. I was also using Gemstone, which was a Smalltalk-based object-oriented database. I worked on what eventually became ObjectTime, which was then bought by Rational, which then became Rational RealTime.

The first computer I ever bought with my own money was a PC. I didn’t get an Apple II or anything like that. I did program on a Lisa while going to school, though.

How did you come to be executive director of the Eclipse Foundation?
In 1989, I got recruited to work at a startup called Object Technology International. I was employee #12 at OTI, and we were acquired by IBM in 1996. For the time when I was working at OTI, I was a Smalltalk developer; we created a product called ND Developer which was a collaboration-based SCM system for Smalltalk developers which eventually became the underpinnings for VisualAge for Java and for Smalltalk. That was acquired by IBM in 1996, so I worked for a couple of years at IBM. My pay cheque always said ‘OTI’. I never got a pay cheque that said ‘IBM’ on it. I left there in 1999 and went to a couple startups. The first was The Object People, the ones who created TopLink, the object relational mapping tool. They were acquired by WebGain in 2000, and WebGain failed during the .com implosion. In 2002 the TopLink piece of WebGain was acquired by Oracle. I ended up at Oracle for a couple of years as a VP in their development group.

In 2004, when they were creating the Eclipse Foundation, I was recruited into this job. I was a good fit because I had a good mix of both technology and business backgrounds. OTI was the group inside IBM that formed the core team that built Eclipse. I’d worked with them for a decade. I hadn’t been working at IBM for five years, and they wanted someone who was not an IBMer.

I had been mostly competing with Eclipse until then. At WebGain they had WebGain Studio, which was based on Visual Café. When I was recruited into the job, there were already a set of bylaws and membership agreements. I wasn’t walking into a completely blank slate. When I came on, there were no employees. I was the first employee, so there was a lot of work to do in terms of creating a functioning organisation… A lot of work to do in the startup phase. Some of the work was transferring the IT infrastructure over from IBM to the Eclipse Foundation: the CVS, the Bugzilla… getting those moved over without any serious interruptions. Part of setting up the foundation was the transition from the Common Public License to the Eclipse Public License: tracking down all the contributors and convincing them to resubmit their work under the EPL was a lot of work. I had to implement the IP policy the way it had been envisioned by the board.

Was there a lot of influence from IBM early on?
One of the things to realise is that the developers who had been working on the Eclipse team had worked extremely hard to build a reputation for Eclipse as a rock-solid platform upon which people could build tools and base an ecosystem. We’ve been growing pretty rapidly ever since the creation, and there were a few moments along the way where people had that feeling of letting go. Now all of a sudden there was this organisation acting as an intermediary. But the IBM team in general were great about it. They embraced the fact that the foundation was a good idea and needed to succeed.

Speaking of Eclipse as a solid platform, how goes the Rich Client Platform project?
The RCP project has been a big success, but I find – in terms of companies willing to talk about what they’re building – I see a lot more adoption of RCP in Europe than in America, for reasons I do not completely understand. The kinds of things people are building on top are many and varied. They’re mostly business applications, especially where a really rich user interface is required. Also, NASA has done work on RCP, in terms of building scheduling and simulation tools for the Mars Rover.

We’ve seen people building the Swiss railway system build a very complex scheduling systems on top of RCP. There’s a very wide variety of things being built on top of it. I think the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) has been a welcome addition, as well. It gives them a way to deploy a common code base to the desktop and also to the browser. In the Eclipse 4.0 stream, a lot of the value proposition is really for people building RCP applications. The thing 4.0 does is to make it easier to build applications that do not look in any way like a workbench or an IDE. In previous versions, to build an RCP application that didn’t have that explorer on the left side… if you didn’t want to build something that looked like that, it required you to jump through a lot of hoops.

Continue to: Page 2- OSGi, supporting Java 7 in Eclipse and more

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The success of the Apple iPad has prompted other manufacturers to launch their own tablet devices, mainly based on the Android platform. But can Android have the same impact as it has done in the smartphone market? As well as putting together an excellent insight into the Android Tablet scene with his recent feature ‘iPad Killers?‘, and weighing up features of the Samsung Galaxy Tab versus the iPad, Phil King also talked briefly to Tommy Forslund, producer at Swedish mobile developer Polarbit, to see what front-line developers make of the transition…

Will Android tablets be able to mount a serious challenge to the iPad?
They stand a good chance to. Android has shown itself able to compete with Apple in the smartphone sector, and I see no reason why the same shouldn’t be true
for tablets. Apple has an advantage in their nicely integrated media services, like iBookstore and iTunes. Android will be getting their music store soon though, and there’s nothing to stop first-generation Android tablet users from installing Spotify and Kindle for Android and get music and eBooks through those services.

From a developer’s point of view, how does the Android Market compare with others, such as Apple’s App Store?
Apple has slightly tighter control on what goes or doesn’t go on App Store, both in terms of actual content and in making sure applications function as intended on all target hardware. Android Market leaves this up to the developer to a larger extent. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.

How difficult will it be to scale up existing Android apps to work well on tablets?
They’re running the same OS as the Android smartphones, so basically it’s a question of adapting graphics to higher-resolution screens, and to make sure controls work okay and feel comfortable on a larger, bulkier device. We design our games to be resolution independent from the get-go, so for us there won’t be that much effort involved.

Does Google need to change the way in which the Android Market works to make it easier to develop apps for tablets?
It might be a good idea to allow users to search for tablet or smartphone applications separately – as long as they allow applications that work across the line to be listed under both headings.

Will we have to wait for Android 3.0 to reveal the true potential of Android tablet devices?
Mobile software and hardware tend to evolve at a very rapid pace. The second you grab the latest device or the latest OS update, you know there’s something shiny and new waiting just around the corner. While Android 3.0 will bring a lot of nifty improvements, for users as well as developers, tablets running earlier versions of the operating system will be perfectly capable devices in their own right. And when we do get 3.0, we’ll be lusting after 3.1 and 4.0 instead – and the circle begins anew…

If you’ve got a question you’d like us to put to a developer, get in touch via the ‘Contact Us’ page…

You might also like:
iPad Killers?
Samsung Galaxy Tab vs Apple iPad

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Stormy Peters has been a champion of the GNOME platform since 2000, and in 2008 became the executive director of the non-profit Foundation that oversees GNOME development. She chatted with us about the future of GNOME, the history of the project and how computers can change the world even in places without power or internet access…

How is development of GNOME 3 coming along? What are the big features? Any more delays expected?
The goal with GNOME 3 is to make it easy for users to focus on their tasks by minimising distractions. For example, instead of distracting pop-ups, you’ll get a notification that displays for a few seconds and goes away. Applications will be brought up with a few keystrokes; things you use often will be even easier to reach. Desktops are easier to manage – they’ll be created as needed and easy to sort by activity.

In addition we’re making a lot of changes in the developer infrastructure. We’re adding things like Clutter and geolocation. We’re integrating some of the external dependencies, moving the bindings closer to the platform and creating a staging area for libraries. And we’ll release when it’s ready!

And the GNOME development processes – any changes afoot?
The whole idea is to continuously improve the process. We’ve been making it easier for developers who want to work on GNOME. It wasn’t hard before, but there were terrible stats. We’re trying to make it easier for people to make GNOME applications. One of our missions has always been to be a development platform first. You could argue we’re a development platform first, then a user platform second.

We’re very much an open source project that interacts with developers. We’ve been working hard for a long time so that developers can work in GNOME in a lot of languages. That’s why we created SeedKit. It lets developers use web technologies to build desktop applications. They can use all the GNOME stuff in their applications while they code in HTML and JavaScript.

We listened to a lot of web developers out there. They said we should make it easy for them to develop for the desktop. With GNOME on a lot of different types of devices, we need to attract developers who are trying to develop for things like phones and tablets.

Are you dealing with Canonical to co-ordinate with Ubuntu releases at all?
We keep our six-month release cycle so that our downstream partners can count on when GNOME will be released and plan accordingly. We were the first project to this and we continue to get lots of positive feedback from our downstream partners about how this allows them to plan and serve their users best.

How do you successfully manage an open source project that’s so big?
I don’t. :) Seriously, I run the GNOME Foundation which supports GNOME. The community runs GNOME. The release team co-ordinates the six-month releases, decides what goes in them and what the release date will be.

We’ve always wondered: why is the GNOME logo a foot instead of some sort of garden gnome?
My understanding was that there was a contest a long time ago and the foot won. Well, actually I think Miguel de Icaza and others picked a foot and then there was a contest to design the actual foot logo using GIMP, sponsored by Red Hat. The logo you see now, that resembles the letter G, is the one
that won.

Ever play a gnome in World Of Warcraft?
Nope. I avoid games like Word Of Warcraft. I find them too addictive to be compatible with work and family. And food and life.

Any difference you can see in the styles of coding in the US and Europe?
I have to admit that I haven’t read very much code in a few years, so I do not know… Certainly there are cultural differences. One of the things I really like about GNOME, and other large free software projects, is how people from around the world, from different time zones and different cultures, work effectively together. Without taking any corporate classes on working in virtual teams! As an example, our board of directors is made up of seven people that live in five different countries on three different continents in six different time zones and speak six different first languages.

What’s interesting about working with GNOME?
It’s always interesting to tell the person next to you on the plane what you do. The part that’s new to me is the non-profit. 40% of the community is paid to work on GNOME by another company, like Novell or Red Hat. Most or all are doing it because they’re passionate about GNOME. The non-profit part means we have more control.

How is GNOME working to increase adoption in developing worlds?
It is something we’re working to promote. We have a strong presence in Latin America, especially in Brazil. We’ve been working to promote GNOME in Africa. We sent a couple GNOME team members to Ghana. They held training classes and a booth at a conference.

One of the problems in Africa is that there aren’t any internet connections. So they have a lot of good observations for us. People in Africa couldn’t even download the source code, for example. We were showing them how they could use their phones to send email. Also we have been pushing really hard in Asia. We had our third annual GNOME Asia conference in Taiwan this year. It’s fun to do because each year you see it expand in new ways you wouldn’t see here. In Vietnam they recruited women from the college to be translators. There were more women at that conference than at any other technology conference, anywhere, ever.

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Google is one of the few companies in the world that has gone from being a noun to a verb. Along the way, the company has also gathered a reputation as a hotbed for the development of interesting tools and projects, such as Google’s free cloud hosting service, App Engine, and its Java-to-JavaScript web framework, Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

We tracked down some of the biggest brains at Google and posed them some tough questions about how their projects will evolve and change to accommodate the ever-shifting tides of development. In the first of our two-part series Linux User & Developer sat down with with Fred Sauer, developer advocate, Google App Engine. In the concluding part, we talk to product manager for developer tools, Brad Abrams to chat about Google Web Toolkit and WebM…

In the recent Eclipse User Survey, GWT was not very popular in the ‘frameworks used’ category. We believe it was around 3% of the overall frameworks used in Eclipse. Are there any plans to entice Eclipse users and, by extension, enterprise users to use GWT?
GWT actually has a very strong reputation as a powerful compiler and code optimiser. GWT takes the Java code that developers write and turns it into very highly optimised JavaScript code. In addition to the standard stuff – removing white space and obfuscating identifiers – the GWT compiler does significant ‘deep’ optimisations, including dead-code elimination, inlining and more. The most innovated optimisation in GWT is developer-guided code splitting, which lets you easily fracture your code such that only the fragments you need are downloaded, as necessary – sort of like streaming a movie online. This makes network-related latency much lower.

In addition GWT provides some great tools to make your Ajax applications fast. Talking to many customers, we have found that Ajax applications often have performance issues because of network latency (the round trips to the server). But it is not always easy to know what all the round trips are and how long they are taking. Speed Tracer offers an inside look at every millisecond of latency your application experiences so you can get every ounce of  performance out of your application.

How are the integrations with Roo and Spring going? The demo at Google I/O showed a very fast path to building applications with Roo and GWT, but most developers have already had bad run-ins with automatically generated code. Is this pairing able to keep generated code comprehensible, sane and, most importantly, editable?
The integration has been moving along at a very fast pace. Since our initial announcement at Google I/O, both teams have managed to ship two milestone releases, and are looking forward to a final release very soon. Spring is a very popular server-side framework greatly respected within the Java community. And while there are various front-end technologies that you can use in conjunction with Spring, we believe that the integration between Spring Roo and GWT will help unlock the power of Ajax, enabling developers to easily create web apps rather than web sites.

Spring Roo offers a very fast way to get started building applications that we think some developers will like. Spring makes it possible to manage your application’s dependencies in a sane manner. Spring Roo strikes a careful balance of code generation and developer customisation. Developers can get apps up and running within no time, swap out data sources, reconfigure  entities, and update views and controllers. The generated code is completely readable and understandable and customisable. This makes it easy to customise your app without losing the benefits Spring Roo offers. And just like with GWT, Spring Roo has no runtime overhead. All generation and optimisations are made during development.

There was a lot of initial controversy over Google’s claims that it would be able to extend patent and copyright protections to users of WebM. We know that some of the initial policies were revised. Can you give us a quick explanation of how Google’s plans for WebM IP protections changed after public scrutiny?
The small change that we made to the WebM open source licence was done to address a few issues in the way the patent clause was first written. The way it was originally written, the patent termination clause was subtly incompatible with GPLv3 and GPLv2. These two licences are very important to us and to the future of WebM. So, we simply updated the patent grant language to make it fully compatible with these and other important open source licences.
You can read in more depth about these changes on our blog.

Will Microsoft ever support WebM in IE?
Microsoft announced in May that IE9 will support the WebM format when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows. You can read more on their blog.

Since the WebM announcement at Google I/O, how has the open source portion of the WebM project been progressing? Is the community contributing meaningful code yet?
We are very happy with the progress of the WebM project. Since launch, there have been several valuable contributions to quality and performance. In addition, many companies have announced their support of the codec, including Mozilla, Oracle and Skype. You can
read in more depth about key contributions on our blog here.

You may also like: Google Talk #1 -  Linux User & Developer sat down with with Fred Sauer, developer advocate, Google App Engine

See what else featured in Linux User & Developer 91…

This article originally appeared in issue 91 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Google is one of the few companies in the world that has gone from being a noun to a verb. Along the way, the company has also gathered a reputation as a hotbed for the development of interesting tools and projects, such as Google’s free cloud hosting service, App Engine, and its Java-to-JavaScript web framework, Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

We tracked down some of the biggest brains at Google and posed them some tough questions about how their projects will evolve and change to accommodate the ever-shifting tides of development. In the first part of this two part series Linux User & Developer gets up close and personal with Fred Sauer, developer advocate, Google App Engine…

How is the collaboration between VMware and Google going?
I think it’s going really well. We have our initial release out the door. The teams are working closely together on co-ordinating the work. I work with App Engine and GWT, and it’s exciting to see the integrations come together. The leverage Java gives us… I think back five to ten years ago about what my Java development experience was like and I am so much happier now.

What about App Engine makes developing and deploying Java so much easier?
There’s a few factors. One of them is the principle we started with. We want to adhere to open standards wherever we can, whenever it makes sense. With App Engine and Python, there weren’t as many relevant standards, so we used Django, and we did the best that the environment allowed.

When we started working on App Engine for Java, we had a lot of standards we could take advantage of. There’s a long running history of building Java applications in the cloud, so we leveraged the skill sets of Java developers. In May we announced App Engine for business, and we started communicating the fact that we’re there for enterprise developers. In the enterprise space, Java is by far one of the most popular languages. Every person I know who does development in the enterprise writes code in Java.

Is Java in trouble now that Oracle is in control of the language?
It’s difficult for me to predict the future of the language. As a developer and as builders of development tools and platforms we’re very practical, and today Java provides enormous leverage and benefits. It’s simply the best tool we have today given the strengths that exist.

If developers today did not already know a language, and we could come up with the perfect language, we would come up with, perhaps, a very different set of languages and tools. But that is not a realistic constraint. Developers know Java and Python. With tools like Eclipse, developers know that there is an ecosystem around that. When you take all the great things about Java, like static typing, that provides tremendous leverage in the tooling side to prevent bugs to catch bugs. Java is a wonderful environment, because of the tooling.

Java right now is the right answer. As long as it is the right answer, we will continue to build tools for it. When the practical world changes around us, whatever the flavour of the decade becomes, that’s where we will be working. At Google, we care about the end-user. That’s embedded in our mission statement with GWT, where we’re trying to build no-compromise applications. The user comes first, but the developer is always second.

The App Engine deployment model is very different from other cloud models. Why is that?
It is a very different model. It was a very conscious choice on our part to make it that model. We looked at how external developers deploy, and it’s much too difficult to deploy applications to the cloud. When you look across many different projects and you look at creating a database server, configuring log files, having rolling restarts and pushing out binary code, these are all things most projects could do with the same kind of code and instructions. But these pieces get reinvented with every project.

What’s valuable for developers is building the application logic. With App Engine, we had a very clear goal of making it extremely easy to deploy applications. We asked ‘what’s the absolute minimum a developer should have to do to get an application up and running?’ If you go to an App Engine administration console, what you won’t find is probably more interesting than what you do find. You won’t find any knobs or dials for the number of servers you want to run. The more data you put into App Engine, the more distributed that data becomes. The more requests that come in, the more servers we have running. When those requests die off, we re-provision those servers for other users.

It’s a one-button deployment. Our plug-in uploads the code. If you come back six months later, your application is still serving. If on some Tuesday morning you get very popular, we’ll simply spin up more servers. We think that’s the way it should work.

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This article originally appeared in issue 90 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

LU&D: Facebook and Twitter can’t be ignored… Can they?

EP: I use and like both services; I think they’re important for the web ecosystem. However, I think that the true benefits of social software – social networks like Facebook, social messaging like Twitter – are going to come when federation is easy to use and widespread. I see no reason that Facebook and Twitter can’t participate in that future federation. After all, don’t we all have friends with @aol.com email addresses?

LU&D: You were one of the pioneers of the distributed model for social sites. Did you always have in mind building towards something more than a collection of microblogging sites, in terms of functionality?

EP: I did not. It was only while talking with developers of other social networking tools – proprietary and open source – that I realised that the essence of social networking software is distributing activity updates to an opt-in group. Since that’s what StatusNet does very well, we decided to test out using it for similar ‘microcasting’ applications: social music, social photo sharing, bug tracking systems. We think we’re onto something. There are going to be some tough parts, like distributed private messaging. But I believe we’ll get there.

LU&D: Identi.ca/StatusNet has great features, like context view and groups, not seen in Twitter – why haven’t users noticed this?

EP: One of the most important principles for online communities is Metcalfe’s Law. It says that the value of a communications network to each participant goes up with the square of the number of participants. As we hear it from end users, “I use ‘X’ because all my friends are there.”

The upshot of Metcalfe’s Law for federated communications systems is threefold. First, it makes the prospect very attractive for small, isolated systems; value goes up dramatically for their users if the networks federate. Second, it makes larger systems resistant initially to federation; there’s no incentive for them to join, and the downsides (lack of control over the network, incentive for users to invite their friends to join) are higher, relatively. Third, it means that as federation picks up pace, the larger ‘network of networks’ gains momentum, and eventually even the very large networks need to join.

Consider email, for example. Early on, the drive for distributed internet email came from small ISPs, universities, corporate internets. Large consumer systems like CompuServe and AOL didn’t allow sending internet email. Only after the number of people with internet email addresses was much, much greater than the number of AOL subscribers did that company eventually open up to SMTP. I think we’ll see similar adoption curves for distributed social networking.

LU&D: How do we get users to care about who owns their data?

EP: I think that’s a really difficult sell. It’s boring and pedantic. Compared against the fun that social networking services provide, talking about privacy issues is really a downer. Who wants to worry about obscure marketing issues when there are friends-of-a-friend to send flirty private messages to?

It’s much more likely that change comes from another direction. There are entities that simply cannot accept turning over their data and online presence to a third party: governments, political parties, corporations. As these organisations become more engaged with social networking, and want to get more engaged with each other, they’ll insist on a federated approach that gives them full control of their data and presence.

This interview appeared as part of Linux User & Developer’s feature Social Networking: The good, the bad & the ugly.

Want to know what else featured in issue 90 of the UK’s leading pro-level Linux magazine? Click here.