Software Development News Redesigned

I have just completed a redesign of the Software Development News Web site, trying to give it an easier user interface. This Web site displays selected news from around the Web on software development topics like .NET, Java, PHP, C, XML, databases, open source, programming, Web services, agile software development, etc. If you know some interesting RSS stream that could be added to this portal, just let me know.

Orient Open Source Meets Occident

January 1, the France-based open-source consortium ObjectWeb merged with the Chinese IT institute OrientWare to create a new entity, called OW2. ObjectWeb was launched in 2002 as a joint project between INRIA, Bull and France Telecom, before evolving to a more global organisation. OrientWare was created in 2004 as a consortium of Chinese universities and software companies.

In September 2005, ObjectWeb and OrientWare signed an agreement by which they committed to share their code base and jointly develop open source middleware software. Among the main open source software solutions developed by OW2 you find Lomboz, Sync4j, eXo Platform, JOnAS, XWiki or Enhydra

This is good that organisations working in the open source area join their forces to produce improved solutions with a global perspective and a worldwide pool of talent. Some major open source projects (Eclipse, JBoss, PHP) have strong commercial companies backing them so I think that this is good to have an organisation with a different perspective involved in the open source world, maybe backing projects that have perhaps less visible commercial impacts.

News from the Worlds

Yesterday, I checked on the Web if there are some new interesting sources to get software development news and I found nothing. My usual sources are ComputerWorld and InfoWorld

Who Profits from Free Software?

Telelogic has just announced the release of Telelogic Modeler a free Unified Modeling Language (UML) design environment. This entry-level product will allow user with extended needs to migrate to other Telelogic's products in the same area. Telelogic Modeler is available for download at http://www.telelogic.com/modeling/modeler.

Facing the competition of free open source products, major editors like Microsoft or Oracle have followed the same strategy than Telelogic. They have created free versions of their software development tools. These products are "simplified" versions of the paying product, often minus specific features that are useful for large/complex projects or systems. They hope that people using the free version will one day have unsatisfied needs and that they will migrate to paying versions from the same editor. Time will tell if this strategy is right, but I think that it is facing major issues:

• The majority of people looking for a free software could not be the one that are more enthusiastic to get it from a commercial editor.
• Upgrading to a commercial version is not the only solution to get more performance. Open source tools are improving and there are companies interested to increase the power of the open source tools they support. Red Hat is doing this with JBoss in the Web server market. Another example is EnterpriseDB that is building an Oracle-compatible product based on PostgreSQL. In both cases companies are selling services and not software.
• According to the Pareto principle, 80% of the people should be satisfied with 20% of the features of the original product. Thus migration to a product offering more features could be limited, furthermore if this imply paying for it ;o)