Tuesday, December 10, 2002

KnowNow goes open source. Rohit Khare: I'm here at Supernova, listening to Jeremy Allaire talkin' 'bout a revolution: "Rich clients supporting new programming models, based on Web Services with real-time, persistent messages streaming between PCs and edge devices -- enabling two-way, even N-way, collaboration." As Apple once famously advertised: Welcome. Three years later, KnowNow's founding vision has become conventional enough wisdom that we're announcing mod_pubsub, a new open-source project to add decentralized event notification to the Web -- and, by the way, transform an ordinary Web browser into a rich client without installing any new software. Jeremy added, "The industry discussion of Web Services has been far too focused on back-end, app-to-app integration." Amen! There's huge potential in making the "last mile" all the way to the edge intelligent as well, not dumbed down into pixel-pushing languages like HTML and Flash. Mod_pubsub exposes a bit of this vision as well. It's an experiment on KnowNow's part to circulate lots of the prototype code we wrote in our first year, including not only instant messaging & presence, but even SOAP services to the desktop and XML content routing. It's a very flexible toolkit, though inherently performance-limited (it's a Perl CGI script). We expect experimentation will be good for the community and for KnowNow, Inc. Have at it! http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-pubsub [Werblog] KnowNow may claim pub-sub as their founding vision, but the concept's been around for quite awhile, even their concept of taking pub-sub to the network edges (anyone remember Apple's OpenDoc?). Regardless of who gets to claim the vision, I applaud KnowNow's release of the Apache module "mod-pubsub" and hope it sees rapid and substantial adoption. I know I'd like to see it in use on my employer's network... 10:51:09 PM

Analysts: Microsoft feels tug of Linux. The growing popularity of Linux may force the titan of proprietary software to support the open-source operating system, according to analysts. [CNET News.com] '...Microsoft "can't use...tactics that have been successful over the years, such as bundling or tying. They're just not going to work. It's a whole new world of competition, and Microsoft can't use the same tried-and-true methods. They're struggling with how to deal with it."' The biggest challenge for Microsoft in addressing the Linux threat is that, even if they could successfully destroy the commercial distributions (Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, etc.), they're unable to eliminate Linux itself. The codebase has too many contributors and there's no central economic attack that Microsoft can mount to destroy the global momentum behind it, as it has done successfully in the past when confronting commercial competitive threats. 10:34:52 PM

Ellison backs storage start-up. Shrugging off concerns that the storage market is too crowded, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison pledges $100 million to Pillar Data, which is aiming to launch its first products next year. [CNET News.com] Larry knows what more folks have yet to learn -- storage is where it's at, baby! As businesses and consumers create more digital content, and digitize more analog content, the bits and bytes ultimately come to rest somewhere, and that somewhere is mostly a magnetically recordable spinning metal platter (optical capacity and performance still pales in comparison to winchester-style HDDs). On that note, Seagate IPOs tomorrow. 10:22:27 PM

Intel conducts $5B in transactions via RosettaNet. Over 10 percent of supplier, customer transactions were through exchange standard [InfoWorld: Top News] And some people think Web Services are vaporware!! Of course, the devil is in the details, and there've been claims like this before, but Intel's actually positioned to make good on their boasting. They've been leading the charge in various "real world" XML applications, and have the infrastructure and skills to pull it all together. 10:08:43 PM

Matt Croydon posts from his WAP phone to his Radio weblog. [Scripting News] This is headed in the right direction...it's roughly the right model, but the implementation's too narrow. Still, it's more than I can pull off right now. Kudos! 9:56:50 PM