collective unconscious of the smarter planet

A really good primer on what RESTful means —

Ryan: Machines don’t have a universal noun - that’s why they suck. Every programming language, database, or other kind of system has a different way of talking about nouns. That’s why the URL is so important. It let’s all of these systems tell each other about each other’s nouns.

…

Wife: What about verbs and pronouns and adjectives?

Ryan: Funny you asked because that’s another big aspect of REST. Well, verbs are anyway.

Wife: I was just joking.

Ryan: It was a funny joke but it’s actually not a joke at all. Verbs are important. There’s a powerful concept in programming and CS theory calledpolymorphism. That’s a geeky way of saying that different nouns can have the same verb applied to them.

Wife: I don’t get it.

Ryan: Well.. Look at the coffee table. What are the nouns? Cup, tray, newspaper, remote. Now, what are some things you can do to all of these things?

Wife: I don’t get it…

Ryan: You can get them, right? You can pick them up. You can knock them over. You can burn them. You can apply those same exact verbs to any of the objects sitting there.

Wife: Okay… so?

Ryan: Well, that’s important. What if instead of me being able to say to you, “get the cup,” and “get the newspaper,” and “get the remote”; what if instead we needed to come up with different verbs for each of the nouns? I couldn’t use the word “get” universally, but instead had to think up a new word for each verb/noun combination.

Wife: Wow! That’s weird.

Ryan: Yes, it is. Our brains are somehow smart enough to know that the same verbs can be applied to many different nouns. Some verbs are more specific than others and apply only to a small set of nouns. For instance, I can’t drive a cup and I can’t drink a car. But some verbs are almost universal like GET, PUT, and DELETE.

Wife: You can’t DELETE a cup.

Ryan: Well, okay, but you can throw it away. That was another joke, right?

More from O’Grady.

ARM Will Emerge as a Server Player

Whether they will ultimately emerge as a credible mainstream alternative remains to be seen, but ARM is indeed emerging as a server player. Though virtually all of them discuss it privately, HP (via Calexda) this year became the first major systems player to publicly detail plans for ARM servers – perhaps banking on the fact that the upcoming A15 processor is more server friendly,

Intel is predictably skeptical of ARM’s viability in its core markets, with CEO Paul Otellini bluntly dismissive: “It ain’t gonna work.” And while it certainly hasn’t proven to work thus far, and there are real architectural and software issues to address, the power profile continues to pique the interest of server manufacturers and customers alike. Even marginal power savings mean real dollars at scale.

I count this as a hit…

The NoSQL Marketplace Will Experience Consolidation

The merger of CouchOne and Membase into CouchBase in February provided some evidence that the long anticipated wave of consolidation in this space was beginning, but the balance of the year provided little evidence to support this aside from the acceleration of a few individual players such as MongoDB [coverage]. I remain convinced that the marketplace will be unable to sustain the current volume of would be commercial entities, but from our conversations with both those in a position to potentially impact consolidation and those interested in partnering with various NoSQL players, it is clear that consolidation will depend on clearer winners and losers to proceed. This should occur in 2012.

I’ll count this as a push in light of the CouchBase merger which subtracted one player but otherwise saw very few exits.

NoSQL Will Look More Like Pro-SQL

The implicit rejection of the Structured Query Language in the NoSQL term is ironic in light of the fact that a variety of projects are now adding similar features. Continuing in the proud tradition of Hive and Pig, which provide query language interfaces to Hadoop, DataStax announced CQL in June while CouchBase and SQLite announced UnQL in July [coverage].

Whether we’ll see a unified interface or a variety of engine-specific implementations as Alex Popescu would prefer remains to be seen, but query languages will be coming to the majority of NoSQL stores one way or another.

I count this as a hit.

Open Source of Non-Strategic Infrastructure Assets Will Increase

From Twitter open sourcing the Storm assets it acquired via the BackType transaction to the New York Stock Exchange’s donation of OpenMAMA to the Linux Foundation, it is increasingly clear even to traditional parties that the release of non-strategic code as open source has multiple benefits. GitHub’s Tom Preston-Werner’s list of same is difficult to improve upon:

• “Open sourcing code is great advertising for you and your company.”
• “If your code is popular enough…you will have created a force multiplier that helps you get more work done faster and cheaper. “
• “When you open source useful code, you attract talent.”
• “If you’re hiring, the best technical interview possible is the one you don’t have to do because the candidate is already kicking ass on one of your open source projects.”
• “Dedication to open source code is an amazingly effective way to retain that talent.”
• “[Assuming code will be open sourced] leads to effortless modularization.”
• “By getting code out in the public we can drastically reduce duplication of effort.”
• “It’s the right thing to do.”

It may or may not be beneficial to open source core strategic assets, as VMware did with Cloud Foundry, but it is increasingly hard to justify protecting those that are purely tactical in nature. The benefits in many if not most cases will outweigh the costs, which is why we’re seeing an increase in contributions to open source projects.

The data from the annual Eclipse surveys is one example of this. If we examine the percentage of organizations that contribute back to open source versus those that do not from 2007 to 2011, it is clear that comfort levels with open source generally are rising.

I count this as a hit.

This is old - but really brilliant. And still very relevant. Probably even more so today. Thanks to RedMonk for linking to it in the preceding post.

A recent Goldman Sachs survey of CIOs indicates that these executives do not plan to spend much money on cloud computing in the coming year. Indeed, most of their stated plans involve reducing the amount of consulting services and hardware that they are buying. I’m certain the predictions are accurate, and this scenario will lead to even more rapid growth in cloud computing. And the CIO will be the last to know.

How does this work? If Goldman has correctly measured the intentions of the CIOs, then they will not be spending money on cloud computing. Instead it will be the business units that they are supposed to serve that will be spending the money because the service level of the IT department will not meet their needs. Recall the reduction in consultants and service personnel? When a fixed income group at an investment banking house needs to stand up 50 servers to run a set of Monte Carlo simulations to test a hypothesis, the over-stressed IT department response is going to be “we’ll get to that request after we fill the 25 that are in line ahead of it. It will probably be next quarter.”

The “swoosh” sound you just heard is the developer of the simulation code swiping his credit card to set up his Amazon Web Services account. Three days later, he has 100 systems standing up on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud pumping back the information he needs to help his traders make money. The credit card bill is only about $5000 per month – much cheaper than the IT chargeback for similar capability. The head of fixed income hears about the profits due to the extra simulation capacity, and the developer gets a promotion and is encouraged to spin up another 100 to 200 machines to get even more aggressive with the strategy. Relative to the millions in profit, the cost is peanuts and the IT department just can’t respond to these type requests anyway. The CIO is the last to know.

It always happens this way with new technology. As the leader of North America sales for Red Hat in 2002, I remember calling on the CIO of a company in the financial services industry that processed millions of transactions daily in support of the equities market. I sat in his office while he explained to me that his operation was mission critical – the markets depend on this operation. He would never consider using Linux and open source. “Why don’t we take a tour of the datacenter,” he asked. I was game, so I replied “Sure.”

As we walked the floor, I noticed several machine consoles indicating they were attached to Red Hat Linux 7.1 servers. Here is the conversation that ensued:

Billy: What’s this?

CIO: Huh? I don’t know. Steve, what’s this all about?

Steve the Admin: Yeah, we’re running Red Hat Linux for most of our network services.

CIO: What do you mean?

Steve the Admin: You know, Apache, BIND, SendMail, a few transaction servers and log crunchers mixed in here and there.

CIO: How many of these are we running in this datacenter?

Steve the Admin: About 25% of the machines, I would guess. About 800 servers in total.

Billy: Why don’t we go back to your office and have another conversation about how much value you are getting out of Linux and open source and how Red Hat can help you.

The CIO is always the last to know about new technology. The head of engineering brought UNIX into the enterprise for CAD/CAM and analysis applications, and the CIO was the last to know. Department managers brought in PCs and Windows for personal productivity and desktop publishing, and the CIO was the last to know. System administrators brought in Linux for network services, and the CIO was the last to know. The sales force brought in salesforce.com and introduced the enterprise to SaaS, and the CIO was the last to know. Developers in the business units will use cloud computing, and the CIO will be the last to know.

The good news is that CIOs know where their bread is buttered, and eventually supporting the business units becomes the top priority. In this case, I would guess that all of that spending that Goldman noted as being earmarked for virtualization will pave the path for a hybrid approach to cloud computing. The enterprise IT function will begin to model the services that they provide after Amazon, with hypervisor virtualization as the basis of the compute capacity. Then, with a single, corporate architecture for cloud computing, applications will be able to scale seamlessly across the internal cloud infrastructure and also out into the external clouds when necessary for extra capacity. In this scenario, everyone gets what they want, and the CIO is a hero for reducing the fixed costs and operating budget associated with data center capacity. Being the last to know isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

RedMonk - and Stephen O’Grady specifically - is on a roll with the enlightening posts. Today they discuss the forces that are reshaping the enterprise procurement process. Nothing particularly surprising, but a very succinct, well-put argument about the consumerization of IT.

Traditionally, industry analyst firms have been oriented around top down adoption patterns. CIOs and other IT decision makers comprise both the research subjects and purchasing audience for the majority of firms in this industry, large and small. Which was logical given traditional procurement patterns. When hardware, software and services are available only at high prices, command and control is an appropriate management structure. Attempting to scale the decision making process for big ticket items across a large body of middle managers is not likely to yield acceptable outcomes.

An approach that makes sense in one context, however, may be misapplied in another.

The technology purchasing landscape today looks very different than it did even five years ago. Where once CIOs might reasonably expect to have the clearest understanding of what technologies are leveraged within their own organizations, today they are, as Billy Marshall put it, “the last to know.” This pattern manifests itself every day within the majority of businesses. Not because CIOs are failing, but because of trends that have fundamentally and likely permanently disrupted their ability to centralize the technology adoption process.

The four trends we see as most important in driving this are arranged here in rough chronological order.

Open Source

In the late nineties, startups and enterprises alike were effecitvely beholden to commercial suppliers for the majority of their software needs. Because each piece of the requisite software infrastructure had to be licensed, the capital expenses associated with new initiatives was high. This represented a barrier to entry, and thus a brake on innovation.

With the popularization of open source software, developers from enterprises and startups alike were able to operate independently. For the first time, the actual software practitioners were free to choose their own software rather than having it selected for them and subsequently imposed upon them by upper levels of management. Even in situations where the ultimate production infrastructure targets remained commercially licensed software, open source software like Linux and MySQL allowed for prototyping and rapid development without the attendant costs, both financial and in procurement latency.

This was the first major shift affecting procurement, and perhaps the most profound. None of the infrastructure we take for granted today – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc – were originally adopted from the top down. Their adoption was, instead, a fait accompli. CIOs – the last to know – gradually became aware that increasingly significant portions of their infrastructure, unbeknownst to them, were running on free and open source software. The inevitable demand for production support options for this software is what fueled, in time, the valuations of MySQL, Red Hat and others.

Bring Your Own Device

In October, Apple CEO Tim Cook asserted that 92% of the Fortune 500 were “testing or deploying iPad in the course of less than 18 months,” which may help explain why the iPad revenue stream by itself would place within the top third of that group. The interesting thing about this is that the majority of businesses appear uncertain about precisely why they’re deploying tablets: “Most participants, 51 percent, indicated that they did not have a clearly articulated strategy.”

The answer, in most cases, is that there isn’t one. iPad adoption, much like the penetration of iPhones and Android handsets is being driven by users who simply want the device. Faced with a choice between users – chief executive officers among them – who will employ their own devices for work purposes with or without the permission of IT, many businesses are compelled to support the platforms even without concrete business justifications for them.

The consumerization of the enterprise is decentralizing the process of technology selection, but its importance may lie rather in design. Like all products, technology is designed and built to be sold to a specific buyer. For enterprise products, historically, the actual user has been a secondary concern; the buyer – typically centralized IT – was the priority. Consumer technology companies like Apple, however, are designed for a user. What they give up in IT friendly features they more than make up for in usability and the ability to delight.

The Bring Your Own Device trend, therefore, may well improve user productivity by driving devices designed to be used rather than managed into organizations, from the bottom up.

Software as a Service

Software as a Service is a classic case study in timing with respect to market acceptance. Not many remember today that the model actually failed the first time around, when its practitioners were known as Application Service Providers. Pyschologically, few enterprises were prepared for either the idea of renting software or externalizing critical data like that stored in customer relationship management systems. By the midpoint in the last decade, however, these concepts were sufficiently commonplace to see Salesforce.com a publicly traded company with a valuation north of a billion dollars.

Consumer markets, meanwhile, had adapted much more quickly. Hotmail debuted in 1996, Yahoo Mail the year after and Gmail dropped in 2004.

Some of those same consumer services were pressed into service by enterprise workers, in fact; it was once common for Exchange users to forward all of their email to Gmail due to the disparity in storage limits between typical Exchange implementations and Google’s webmail product.

This pattern has played out repeatedly over the years, from webmail to CRM to project management software to website hosting to online helpdesks. All were adopted from the bottom up. By making applications available to anyone with a browser, often at low or no cost, SaaS has surged up through the ranks of enterprises. The inexorable nature of the model is reflected by the growth of providers large (Salesforce.com) and small (37signals).

Cloud

The single most important feature of the cloud has nothing, or at least very little, to do with technology. It is, rather, the pay as you go economic model. As Flip Kromer puts it, “EC2 means anyone with a $10 bill can rent a 10-machine cluster with 1TB of distributed storage for 8 hours.”

What this means in practical terms is that for the first time, hardware procurement is democratized. From an accessibility and availability standpoint, cloud is the hardware equivalent of open source software. Where open source allowed developers to bypass traditional procurement channels by making quality infrastructure and development software freely available, so does the cloud allow the growing class of devops technologists to leave the world of high latency hardware procurement – where same day server provisioning is a feature – behind. Armed with nothing more than a credit card, instances can be spun up and ready for use in ninety seconds.

Cloud is the final piece of the bottom up puzzle. Open source software and to a lesser extent SaaS allowed for the decentralization of enterprise technology development, but at some point hardware would become necessary which was the insertion point for IT. With public clouds, it is possible for the first time to entirely bypass the traditional gatekeepers.

The Net

It should be evident that traditional procurement and purchasing is not dead, just increasingly bypassed by a more efficient process. Also, that a great many enterprises continue to function largely as they always have: top down. More important than the question of whether this model is sustainable in the face of the trends above is whether it should be.

Before lamenting the fact that the above forces are disrupting and destabilizing your enterprise IT, consider that that may be a net gain. If the primary drivers of BYOD, Cloud, Open Source, and SaaS include ease of use, lower costs, frictionless availability, and speed of provisioning, are these trends worth opposing? Particularly since efforts to do so will, in all probability, fail?

Or are they instead assets to be strategically leveraged? There is little debate that businesses that move the most quickly have a competitive advantage. It’s not clear how businesses that prohibit the same tools that enable this will benefit.

Either way, bottom up adoption is here to stay: use it or lose.

A sprawling blog post from Stephen O’Grady at RedMonk. He looks at the software industry’s transition from closed to open models of distribution, and then jumps into the current state of the “data industry” (my term). He contends that the companies that are pioneering data collection and distribution as a business model are hampered by a lack of standardized licensing in the same way that early pioneers in  open source software development were hampered. Well worth a read.

It should be clear at this point that commercial valuations of software assets by both practitioners and public markets is in decline. This model of ours, once controversial, is now self-evident. We examined the public markets aspect in detail in May; little has changed since.

Of PwC’s Global Software Top 20 – the top twenty firms globally as measured by software based revenue – the youngest is 22 years old, and the median age of the top ten is 35 years. It has been over twenty years, in other words, since the software industry produced a business to rank in the Top 20. If we remove the artificially narrow lens of revenue from software sales, however, the picture looks very different. The technology industry has produced entities that would place within the top five; they just aren’t in the business of selling software.

Firms that make money with software rather than from software are outperforming their counterparts in recent years; compare the respective valuations of Google, Red Hat and VMware.

Generationally, attitudes towards software are shifting, as evidenced by Werner’s comment above, and the release as open source of assets like Cassandra, FlockDB, Hadoop, Hip Hop, Hive, Jekyll, Nginx, Pig, Resque, Storm, Thrift and so on. Entrepreneurs and public markets alike are turning their attention away from software sales and towards data oriented revenue models in search of outsized returns. There is and will continue to be an enormous market for software, but real growth is increasingly coming from areas other than software sales and service. This is true even for those currently in the business of selling code; for Sonatype and many other startups, data is increasingly the product.

As obvious as this is to most industry participants, however, the Age of Data remains hobbled by its lack of a free market.

In the early days of commercial open source consumption, the exploding number of so-called vanity licenses – those that were non-standard and vendor specific – and a general lack of understanding of their legal implications inhibited the market for open source, relegating it in many settings to unacknowledged, behind the scenes usage. Gradually, however, license proliferation was curbed and licenses generally began to coalesce around permissive (Apache, BSD, MIT, etc) or file (EPL, MPL, etc) / project (AGPL, GPL, etc) style reciprocal licenses. The net impact of which was increased adoption, because the previous uncertainty necessarily implied risk which in turn throttled adoption.

Which is essentially where the data market is today. Everybody understands that data has value; there is little consensus on how, where and via what mechanisms it should be distributed, licensed and sold. Startups like Buzzdata, Datamarket, Factual and Infochimps cannot by themselves make a market, and with rare exceptions like Microsoft with the data section of its Windows Azure Marketplace, large providers tend to be heavily risk averse with respect to the liabilities posed by data.

Absent a market with well understood licensing and distribution mechanisms, each data negotiation – whether the subject is attribution, exclusivity, license, price or all of the above – is a one off. Without substantial financial incentives, such as the potential returns IBM might see from its vertical Watson applications, few have the patience or resources to pursue datasets individually. We’ve experienced this firsthand, in fact; as we’ve looked for data sources to incorporate into RedMonk Analytics, conversations around licensing have been very uneven…

Market efficiency is a function of volume; the more participants, the better an understanding we have of an asset’s worth. With limited mainstream market participation in the business of data, opinions of the value of a given asset tend to be asymmetrical. Put more simply, when we ask what a given dataset is worth, the only correct answer at present is: we just don’t know.

All of which helps explain why Infochimps and others startups targeting the data marketplace opportunity are not as visible as their significance suggests they should be.

For all of the current inefficiency in data procurement, however, it is a temporary condition. Apart from the fact that history tells us risk assessment and licensing are solvable problems, the financial incentives are sufficient to guarantee progress if not complete solutions. Consider the case of Watson. IBM has historically avoided data collection due to legal concerns, but imagine the liabilities of the first diagnostic miscalculation. What will happen, in other words, when Watson commits the healthcare equivalent of “What is Toronto?” while assisting in the diagnosis of a patient? For IBM, the answer is clearly that the potential rewards more than offset the theoretical risk. Enough so, at least, to justify massive investments in development and marketing.

Life may be marginally easier for those that capture their own data, but this will by no means diminish the appetite for more. Google generates sufficient data to be able to predict the flu better than the CDC, but still felt obligated to license Twitter’s data. A relationship that ended, notably, because of a license termination. No matter how valuable an internal dataset might be, it will be more valuable still when recombined, remixed and correlated against complementary external data; see, for example, FlightCaster.

With respect to opening the throttle for data marketplaces, escalating demand virtually guarantees the supply. The real questions are who will play a meaningful role in reducing the friction, and when. Because the attendant opportunities are large indeed.

IBM has just contributed a widely used messaging protocol, MQTT, to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source license. The hope is that MQTT will do for the internet of things what HTML did for the Internet.

Andy Stanford-Clark lives on the Isle of Wight, just off the southern coast of the United Kingdom. He commutes several times per week via ferry to his job  as an engineer at IBM’s Hursley software lab. Frustrated that he would sometimes arrive at the island’s ferry terminal in the morning only to find that weather conditions had slowed or halted ferry traffic, Stanford-Clark invented a method for alerting ferry riders when the transport system had shut down or there were delays. It involves tracking the location of ferries via GPS sensors and sending out alerts via a Twitter account. At the heart of the system is a messaging protocol called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short.

MQTT is not easily digested by non-techies, but know this: it has the potential of doing for the Internet of Things what the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) did for the Internet that connects people. It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device.

Today marks a new departure for the protocol. Its creators, IBM and Italy’s Eurotech, are contributing the software to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source software license. The goal is to turn MQTT into a pervasive, cross-industry standard that will accelerate the transmission of information not just between machines but from businesses to businesses and from businesses to consumers–as in the Isle of Wight ferry application. “The goal is to get people to come together around this protocol and use it to connect all sorts of device and systems–so we can share information more easily,” says Andy Piper, a software researcher at the Hursley lab who is involved in the strategy for messaging technologies.

The protocol was created in 1999 by Stanford-Clark and colleagues at IBM and Eurotech, a leading supplier of embedded technologies. Since then, it has been used by companies and whole industries to improve communications between machines–for instance, messaging between sensors on a remote pipeline and server  computers that monitor the status of the pipes and the flow of material through them.

But now it’s clear that MQTT could do so much more. It could be a key enabler of the effort to make the human-made systems of the world work better by deploying trillions of sensing devices, connecting them via networks and using analytics to mine insights from the data so people can make better decisions.”We can’t make the most intelligent decisions unless we can connect to the instrumented world. That’s where MQTT fits in. It’s the the connection between the sensor chips and the network,” says Piper.

Innovative companies are already finding important uses for the protocol. Facebook, for instance, uses it as the basis for its new Facebook Messenger application, making it possible for people to reliably send instant messages and conduct online chats with one friend or several. The protocol is especially useful when people are communicating via smart phones–where connectivity can be an issue.  “We were able to achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds,” Lucy Zhang, one of the Facebook Messenger architects, wrote in an Aug. 12 blog post.

The connection with the Eclipse Foundation augurs well for the future of MQTT. Eclipse oversees a set of open source projects, software tools and frameworks that are used by millions of developers to help build applications. In addition, IBM and Eurotech hope to greatly expand the use of MQTT by getting it adopted as an international standard by a technology standards body.

In the meantime, it’s possible to configure sensor-based systems so they can take advantage of MQTT even though it’s not installed in the sensors themselves. Piper did just that with a pet project of his own–a weather station that he has installed in his backyard. The data from the sensors is transmitted to a server in his home via an RF connection. From there he shares it with with friends at work, the world via Twitter, and the open “Weather Underground” community, using MQTT as the protocol. Sometimes making a smarter planet starts in your own back yard.

The Economist explores the connection between Christianity and open-source hacker culture.

“THE kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” Jesus said of little children. But computer hackers might give the kids some competition, according to Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest. In an article published earlier this year in La Civiltà Cattolica, a fortnightly magazine backed by the Vatican, entitled “Hacker ethics and Christian vision”, he did not merely praise hackers, but held up their approach to life as in some ways divine. Mr Spadaro argued that hacking is a form of participation in God’s work of creation. (He uses the word hacking in its traditional, noble sense within computing circles, to refer to building or tinkering with code, rather than breaking into websites. Such nefarious activities are instead known as “malicious hacking” or “cracking”.)

Mr Spadaro says he became interested in the subject when he noticed that hackers and students of hacker culture used “the language of theological value” when writing about creativity and coding, so he decided to examine the idea more deeply. The hacker ethic forged on America’s west coast in the 1970s and 1980s was playful, open to sharing, and ready to challenge models of proprietary control, competition and even private property. Hackers were the origin of the “open source” movement which creates and distributes software that is free in two senses: it costs nothing and its underlying code can be modified by anyone to fit their needs. “In a world devoted to the logic of profit,” wrote Mr Spadaro, hackers and Christians have “much to give each other” as they promote a more positive vision of work, sharing and creativity.

He is not the only person to see an affinity between the open-source hacker ethos and Christianity. Catholic open-source advocates have founded a group called Elèutheros to encourage the church to endorse such software. Its manifesto refers to “strong ideal affinities between Christianity, the philosophy of free software, and the adoption of open formats and protocols”. Marco Fioretti, co-founder of the group, says open-source software teaches the “practical dimension of community and service to others that is already in the church message”. There are also legal motivations. Commercial software such as Microsoft Word is widely pirated in many parts of the world, by Catholics as well as others. Mr Fioretti advocates the use of open-source software instead, because he doesn’t want people “to violate a law without any real reason, just to open a church document”.

Although the Vatican has yet to encourage the faithful to live like hackers, it has praised the internet as “truly blessed” for its ability to connect people and share information. The pope has even joined Twitter. But praise has always been tempered by warnings. As early as 2002, for instance, the Vatican’s “Church and Internet” document cautioned that “there are no sacraments on the internet” and worried about the solipsistic appeal of technology. Moreover, hackers in particular have problematic traits from the perspective of the Catholic church, such as a distrust of authorities and scepticism toward received wisdom. And the idea of tweaking source materials to fit one’s needs doesn’t mesh well with the Catholic emphasis on authority and tradition.

Cathedrals and bazaars

Mr Spadaro recognises these tensions but finds them manageable. Not everyone agrees. Eric Raymond, author of a classic essay on open-source software, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, finds it hard to believe that some Christians want to canonise the hacker mindset. After being quoted in Mr Spadaro’s paper, Mr Raymond took to his own website to note that he had deliberately equated cathedrals with proprietary, closed-source software directed from above, by contrast with the more chaotic bazaar of equals which produces open-source code. “Cathedrals—vertical, centralising religious edifices imbued with a tradition of authoritarianism and ‘revealed truth’—are the polar opposite of the healthy, sceptical, anti-authoritarian nous at the heart of the hacker culture,” Mr Raymond declared. As for Mr Spadaro’s ideas, they possessed a “special, almost unique looniness”.

But Mr Spadaro is merely the latest to link coding with Christian attitudes towards creativity and sharing. Don Parris, a North Carolina pastor, wrote an article in Linux Journal in 2004 in which he argued that “proprietary software limits my ability to help my neighbour, one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith.” Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, an open-source programming language, said in an interview a decade ago that God expects humans to create—and to help others do so. Mr Wall said he saw his popular language as just such a prod to creation, saying, “In my little way, I’m sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.”

More recently Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and author of “What Technology Wants”, published last year, has argued that creation can go further in code. Whereas a novelist can craft a new world, coders can build worlds complete with artificial agents that exist and evolve outside the creator’s mind. Mr Kelly takes literally the words of his friend Stewart Brand, whose “Whole Earth Catalog” quipped, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Mr Kelly, a Christian, says the ability to create artificial life will come with great parental responsibility and suggests that artificial worlds will need to be imbued with moral value. “This causes a kind of revival of religion,” he says, “because religion has been thinking about this issue.”

From the outside, hacking computer code has largely been viewed as a technical discipline, not as a theologically rich vision of how to live. But some see a divine aspect to programming—at least when looking with the eye of faith.

Oracle and ope source… more on the continuing saga…

The Java* track at FOSDEM 2011 started off on the right foot by dealing with the state of the OpenJDK head on – both politically and technically – with a talk from Oracle’s Mark Reinhold. There were quite a few speakers at Java DevJam and lots of Java tech over the two days, but this talk was needed to start to clear the air, hindsight suggests.

Oracle has not had pleasant press on its “soft skills” recently, for example in its handling of OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, Hudson and the major festering issues and stagnation in the JDK such as with Apache/Harmony and TCK licences. There were some small signs in the last few days that maybe Oracle realises how unnecessarily clumsy it has been…

I came away from the talk fairly happy that Oracle is trying to DoTheRightThing^TM with Java and not lose the community goodwill that has been so hard-earned, and the JCP is going to be the primary technical forum for advancing Java.