RSS guru and popular blogger
Niall
Kennedy sure didn't last long at Microsoft. The former Technorati star had
been hired into Microsoft's Live group just as the Ray Ozzian buzz had hit its
apex, only to depart six months later to strike out on his own. Kennedy expected
to set up shop in an oasis of free-thinking development in Microsoft's Live
division. Instead, he found his team stuck on the tarmac, frozen while projects
like Vista, Longhorn and Office 2007 took months to line up for takeoff.
There may not be much love lost between Kennedy and the Redmond software giant,
which could explain the contretemps between Kennedy and the folks at Microsoft's
Team RSS Blog. On Monday, Team RSS published
a blog entry displaying a linked photo Kennedy had taken of Microsoft's
Dean Hachamovitch. The problem was, Microsoft had neither asked permission nor
provided attribution for the displayed photograph. So to make a (rather forceful)
point, Kennedy swapped out the image of Hachamovitch on his server and replaced it with a doctored, pornographic
image bearing the same file name. Not just any pornographic image, mind you.
This was a barely covered shot of the infamous Goatse graphic. No surprise,
the Team RSS folks quickly hauled down the offending image and offered a public
mea culpa for using Kennedy's work without permission. Kennedy offers his account
here.
On the one hand, I have to hand it to Kennedy for "going nuclear"
on a classic case of IP abuse. Microsoft, after all, is the company that has
championed things like pervasive DRM and Windows Genuine Advantage, and has
subjected countless businesses to stress-inducing license audits -- all in the
name of IP protection. On the other hand, that graphic -- even censored as it
was -- is beyond disturbing. It's the visual equivalent of a WMD.
What do you think? Did Kennedy go a JPEG too far? Or did Microsoft earn a thermonuclear
bitch slap for stealing someone else's property? You tell me.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/06/20062 comments
It seems not all that long ago that Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie
turned a lot of heads with his demo of Live Clipboard last March. The technology
was cool, to be sure. Ozzie's Web-based "clipboard" would let people
grab bits and parts of other sites and aggregate them on the Web. What's most
important is that this stuff was wide open, based on open standards and unattached
to the Windows monopoly.
Suddenly, the company known best for producing antitrust lawsuits and threatening
to "cut off the oxygen supply" of choice competitors (cough, Netscape,
cough) was getting that mashup religion. This summer, we heard talk of an honest-to-goodness
Live development
platform, expected sometime around the new year. Yet now, on December's doorstep,
there's been remarkably little buzz about these
once-exciting developments.
So what happened to the brave new world? Did Ray Ozzie get too busy in his
new role to foment an open software movement? Has Craig Mundie won a battle
to close the open source
barn doors at Microsoft? Or is some of this stuff just...delayed? Microsoft
isn't talking in full sentences about all this stuff yet, as our contributing
news editor Stuart Johnston found out. Stuart's piece on Live Clipboard, Live
development and the Web is coming in our December issue, and will offer some
insight into what really could be holding up Ozzie's mashup movement. And it's
bigger than Mundie.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Microsoft has what it takes to live in
peace with the powers of open source? Do you trust Microsoft when it untethers
copyright restrictions on technologies like SenderID or Virtual Hard Disk format?
Let me know at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/29/20060 comments
In the course of putting together the launch issue of Redmond Developer News, I ran across an interesting blog, which we highlight in our
DevScope section in the front of the magazine. It's called An App a Day (
www.anappaday.com ),
and it essentially recounts one .NET developer's personal challenge
to write a software application a day, every day, for a month. Thirty
days later, Dana Hanna emerged, blinking, from his self-imposed coding
exile with a passel of applications and a fresh mastery of C#. He
also found himself with a pretty engaged audience of fellow coders
who watched Hanna's project with interest.
The effort started as a lark. "When it started
I was being goofy, wearing a Jedi robe on a webcam, showing
up to code whenever ... I never imagined that it would net this much
attention."
Hanna today is busy lining up his next efforts,
including a second run at An App a Day. A separate effort,
called An App a Week, will bring in third party coders to help improve
some of the original 30 applications, as well as to create new applications.
You can find both at www.TheSoftwareJedi.com.
Have you ever taken a coding idea to extremes?
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/20060 comments
There are programming legends, and then there
are
programming legends. Dan Bricklin certainly belongs to the second group. I got a chance to speak with the 'father of the spreadsheet' a few weeks back for a story appearing in the November
issue of Redmond Developer News. Back in the 1979, Bricklin's VisiCalc
erupted onto the computing scene, emerging as the first 'killer app' of the personal computing age -- you can check out the history of VisiCalc at
Bricklin's
site . To this day, VisiCalc remains the benchmark against which
other killer apps must be judged.
So when our conversation turned to open source
software, we wondered: Has the open source community produced its
own killer app? Bricklin was quick to respond, singling out the Apache
Web server and Linux operating system. But he extends the argument
a bit when he says: "The Internet itself turned out to be one
(a killer app for open source). The Internet needed open source to
get there because a lot of the basis for the Internet comes from
open source components. This is how we realized it was valuable."
What's really interesting is that Bricklin thinks
Microsoft might finally appreciate the value of open
source software. He says Ray Ozzie has been pushing hard against
the lock-em-down forces of Craig Mundie in Redmond. The recent extension
of the Microsoft
Open Specification Promise program certainly bodes well. The
software colossus has loosed the strings on a host of
code, including once-protected bits like SenderID email authentication.
As for Bricklin, he's plenty busy running a boutique
outfit called Software Garden. His current project is
a spreadsheet-inspired Web authoring tool,
called
wikiCalc , that lets groups of people create and maintain Web
pages using fast and proven wiki editing approaches. [
Read
the Q&A]
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/20060 comments