Job offer

I am starting up a company that will produce an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. Over time it will also collect and integrate data from other sources. I’m looking for a person or persons to work as programmers on the website.

Job title: MediaWiki hacker

Essential skills that you will have:

* PHP
* MySQL
* Linux
* familiarity with wikis and Wikipedia

Desirable skills:

* ideally you are an experienced MediaWiki hacker who has written MediaWiki extensions
* Python
* experience contributing to open source projects
* experience as a website sysadmin, particularly running Ubuntu and Apache.

Pay: negotiable. Initially on a contract basis. Eventually I hope to offer a full-time job and stock options to a person or persons who is/are competent and efficient. This is your chance to get in at the start of what may be the next big thing. Ideally I’d like someone based in Edinburgh, if not that then in the UK, if not that then anywhere in the world.

If you are interested write to me at cabalamat@googlemail.com

Open source graphics drivers for ATI chips

One problem people using GNU/Linux systems often face is the non-availability of drivers for some hardware. This problem is made worse because some hardware companies want to keep the specs of their kits secret, which makes it harder to write open source drivers.

So the news that AMD will release the specs for their ATI graphics chips is especially welcome:

AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver.

OpenSolaris to challenge Linux, maybe

Sun says that their open source version of Solaris, OpenSolaris, will challenge Linux:

OpenSolaris will challenge Linux says Sun

Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java.

Sun intends to take the operating system into markets where it hasn’t traditionally been a force, such as desktop and embedded systems, according to Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun. The vendor is also keen to position OpenSolaris as a real alternative to Linux. “There’s an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,” said Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun.

Saying it’s so doesn’t make it true. I’ve been using Linux for years, and keep up to date on news of open source / free software, and I’ve not noticed any particular hype or excitement regarding Solaris.

If Sun had open sourced Solaris 10 years ago, this may have made a difference. But now? I doubt if anyone cares particularly. And even if it does become popular, Solaris is just a kernel; if I was running it I’d be running the same user-space applications that I do now, such as Firefox, KDE, etc.

In summary: Solaris is unlikely to become particularly popular among people now using Linux. And even if it does, it’s no big deal (and the fact that it’s not big deal — I can do the same things with Linux that I could with Solaris — is partly why Solaris won’t challenge Linux).

(Link from Slashdot)

SUNW is now JAVA

Sun Microsystems is changing its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, to reflect the importance of Sun’s Java programming language.

Sun’s boss, Jonathan Schwartz, explains it on his blog:

Because Java touches nearly everyone - everyone - who touches the internet. Hundreds of millions of users see Java, and its ubiquitous logo, every day. On PC’s, mobile phones, game consoles - you name it, wherever the network travels, the odds are good Java’s powering a portion of the experience.

What’s that distribution and awareness worth to us? It’s hard to say - brands, like employees, aren’t expenses, they’re investments. Measuring their value is more art than science. But there’s no doubt in my mind more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. There’s similarly no doubt they know Java more than nearly any other brand on the internet.

Not everyone is impressed as these comments on Schwartz’s blog show:

• In the minds of many people, Java == slow. With all the recent rebranding, the first thing we always have to do is to convince the customer that no, the desktop window manager is not written in Java, the directory server, etc. etc. is not interpreted and slow.

• What a TERRIBLE idea! When we used “Java” in the name of all our software products a few years ago, customers were confused and frankly just laughed at us– Java Desktop System was the prime offender, as it mostly uses no Java technology whatsoever.

As Russell Beattie puts it:

Java needs an overhaul

I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun’s ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL. I’m using Java less and less as time goes by, not more - the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, it’s going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.

In general Java is yesterday’s technology. As a user, Flash has supplanted Java in the browser, we’ve all seen that happen. On my Linux box, I use several C# applications and none that use the JVM (I used to use Azureus, but lately it’s been freaking out and crashing (!!) so I gave up on it). On my server I only use a LAMP stack and would never consider a Java server-side app.

I’d say that many of today’s current hot trends in programming are a direct result of a backlash *against* everything that Java has come to represent: Lengthy code and slow development being the first and foremost on the list. In Java you generally need hundreds of lines of code to do what modern scripting languages do in dozens (or less). The general up tick in interest in Ruby, Python and PHP during the 2000s all has its roots in programmers who had to work on one Java project too many, and were desperate to find something more efficient and less painful to use. You all know the story - less XML and cleaner, leaner code - and once you’ve experienced it, believe me, you won’t go back.

As someone who used to do a lot of Java programming and now does a lot of Python, I’ve got to agree.