jlewis's blog

Bruce Perens has a great new article over at Datamation yesterday entitled "How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?" I spend a fair amount of time working with projects and companies on their open source initiatives and on how they should manage them. Bruce has done an excellent job boiling down a lot of the decisions about licensing to a few simple choices.

The Nielsen Norman Group has released the 3rd edition of their study on the Usability of Intranet Portals. The analysis is based on 48 actual portal case studies and focuses on what works in real deployments. The 343 page report itself is well worth reading, and there are some nice highlights posted in the Executive Summary and in Jakob Nielsen's column about the study.

The "Break It Down" blog recently had an entry called "Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java?" that uses a series of Google Trends queries to try to gauge the relative popularity of various web development frameworks.

I tend to dabble in a lot of different technologies (in case you hadn't noticed). One of the issues this creates is that I will frequently be away from something long enough that I don't have all the syntax fully memorized anymore and I spend time looking up reference documentation or old code samples to work on something new.

From the Desire2Learn Patent-Information Blog:

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.

For all you Spring developers out there that are as addicted to cool Eclipse plugins as I am, SpringSource (formerly Interface21 -- the company that employs most of the core Spring Framework development team) has released the first Beta of the SpringSource Tools Suite (STS).

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has published a great paper called "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects".

JBoss has released a first beta of their next generation portlet container that fully implements the Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286) specification. In an interesting move for JBoss, they have built it to be reusable in applications other than JBoss Portal and have made it available as a portlet development/test platform bundled with either JBoss App Server or with Tomcat.

According to Peter Knoop, Sakai Project Coordinator, the final release of Sakai 2.5 is now planned for 18 February 2008. This is after a much more rigorous set of betas and release candidates than Sakai has ever tested before. So far, JIRA indicates there are 328 new enhancements or features and 1,230 bugs have been found and fixed.

Campus Technology published a nice article today called "It’s ‘Open’ Season". Our CEO, John Blakley, is quoted extensively in the article. I think the author, John Moore, did a nice job of capturing some of our messaging around how the value proposition of open source goes way beyond just eliminating the licensing fees and has a lot more to do with empowering the customer to be in control of their enterprise applications.