It has been more than a few years since Red Hat acquired
the gifted development team and assets behind Red Hat Directory Server and Red Hat Certificate System. Early in that relationship, Red Hat stated its intent to make the projects open source, with the Fedora Directory Server an early output of that work.
Adding to the experience of opening and running Fedora Directory Server and the new freeIPA initiative, the Dogtag team has licensed the entire certificate system as open source. Bob Lord announced it in his post:
… I’m extremely happy to announce the release of the Certificate System source code to the world.
This isn’t a “Lite” or demo version of the technology, but the entire source code repository, the one we use to build the Red Hat branded version of the product. It’s the real deal.
Our main wiki page will be here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_Main_PageIf you want to pull and build from source, start here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_BuildingIf you’re just interested in grabbing a pre-built binary, start here:
http://pki-svn.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/PKI_Install_Guide(More …)
If you are going to be at the April 2008 RSA Conference in San Francisco, Anil Saldhana invites anyone to stop by the Red Hat booth to chat about IPA, PKI, open source, etc.
In anticipation of the 2.0 release for JBoss AOP, Flavia Rainone has posted a two-part tutorial on a new feature of the 2.0 release, typed advices. This tutorial assumes familiarity with aspect oriented programming and JBoss AOP. The latest version of JBoss AOP is 2.0.0.CR4 (links to download are available at the bottom of the JBoss AOP project pages.)
Typed Advices Tutorial - Part 1
As we get closer and closer to our 2.0.0.GA release, I found it would be interesting to post a tutorial on typed advices, one of the new features of the next GA release.
The tutorial, targeted to users already familiar with the basics of JBoss AOP, will be split into parts. The plan is to post a new part every Monday. Enjoy!
The release announcement has a full list of resolved issues that includes the bugs fixed and feature enhancements fulfilled.
Thanks to Mark Proctor for this view inside of a JBoss developer support ticket for Drools.
I thought I would share with our readers a thread from our priority support system. It’s an interesting thread as it covers some complex constraint problems in good detail, which I think most rules users might find interesting, and it also demonstrates the level of support we provide to our priority customers. This conversation is printed “as is” with only the user and customer names removed.
Ironically, it’s not always easy to get a view into these type of interactions. Red Hat Knowledgebase has what might be called distilled results of customer interactions. Yet development support is different: there is a greater value in the conversation, and thus a greater value to other knowledge seekers. How much value?
Where knowledge is freely shared, everyone gains. Sure, there is an obvious bump for Drools, but all users of this open source software get value when we show each other how to better use it. We seek answers in various forums because another person may have encountered a similar situation. Contributing to that knowledge stream helps it become more useful to all contributors and users, who are us. Why not have a developer support ticket work as an extension of an open collaboration methodology?
The next time you need an answer, maybe it is available from a knowledgebase, via web search, or on the JBoss forums. If not, having developer support is one option, and perhaps the answers you receive might be useful to others in the community. If you write about it, drop me a message or tag it in del.icio.us (dev.fu feed) with the tag “for:dev.fu“.
From Marshall Culpepper’s blog post:
You can see the release notes for this release on our JIRA page here:
http://jira.jboss.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10020…
You can get 2.0.1.GA by following our download guide here:
Matt Asay posted about an interview with JBoss middleware division GM Craig Muzilla, praising Craig for understanding why open source is not only a great software strategy but also a revolutionary business strategy. One of the comments to the article caught my attention:
“JBoss’ success has about 5% to do with the fact that it is open source, and 90% that it is good software, approximately.”
Thanks to the poster for his praise of JBoss software, but his comments exemplify a misunderstanding across various open communities. We can all agree that making a software project open source does not magically make the binaries better. The open source methodology combined with an open source license do get the advantage of several effects, which are key to the success of JBoss and other similar projects.
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Thomas Fitzsimmons updated the Fedora 9 release notes source pages to reflect that Fedora 9 would ship with OpenJDK 6 instead of the IcedTea implementation of OpenJDK 7. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) is due to release in May 2008.
OpenJDK Replaces IcedTea
The OpenJDK 6 packages (java-1.6.0-openjdk*) replace their IcedTea counterparts (java-1.7.0-icedtea*). The Fedora 8 IcedTea package tracks the unstable OpenJDK 7 branch whereas java-1.6.0-openjdk tracks the stable OpenJDK 6 branch. The decision to have OpenJDK 6 replace IcedTea was made for several reasons:
- Sun has replaced most of the encumbrances for which IcedTea was providing replacements.
- OpenJDK contributes ~99% of the code in the java-1.6.0-openjdk package.
- IcedTea’s mandate is to merge as much as possible with OpenJDK, so the differences between IcedTea and OpenJDK should diminish over time.
- OpenJDK 6 is a stable branch, whereas OpenJDK 7 is unstable and not expected to ship a stable release until 2009.
- Sun has licensed the OpenJDK trademark for use in Fedora.
- Shipping both OpenJDK 6 and IcedTea would have been confusing and would have added size to the distribution.
IcedTea continues to provide autotools support, a portable interpreter for ppc and ppc64 support, plugin support, Web Start support and patches to integrate OpenJDK into Fedora. The IcedTea sources are included in the java-1.6.0-openjdk SRPM.
OpenJDK 6 is not Java compatible. Work is underway to certify it as such.
How do open source tools break out from the pack when it comes to solving real problems for real developers? The answer is in the open source development model and how a subscription and support model comes from that. One gives you a chance to participate in the spectrum of observer/user to contributor, the other lets you benefit from the collective fruits of everyone’s labor in a product that can make your CIO and IT managers happy for many supported years.
To illustrate, let’s discuss a bit about JBoss Drools. Being a more recent introduction into the stable of JBoss.org projects, with the first beta posted on jboss.org in March of 2006, Drools is a project that is producing code at the leading edge of rules engines. At the same time, it is managed as a stable product you can get a subscription to. This makes it easy for turning your skunkworks idea into the next-generation deployment. You can use it as part of a JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployment, or in any Jave EE middleware platform. Once the business logic is in the rules, they are reusable across your SOA. Useful for your business users and technical developers.
To learn more about Drools, take a look at the good technical content in the Drools team blog. There is documentation and you might want to try a quick start approach. We’ve got some good audio and video content from JBoss World about Drools, which is somewhere in the queue of post-production to-do-land. I’ll post about it as soon as it is ready.
