Simon Phipps

Tim Bray and I hosted a discussion at JavaOne 2004 on the realities of open source development for subscribers to Sun's Inner Circle Newsletter - mainly CIO/CTO types from some of Sun's best customers, plus a few stragglers (an IBM employee or two for example). It was a small, select, friendly but alert audience, a pleasure to meet and an honor to present to. A guest asked a question that often crops up; 'Sun is giving so much source-code to open source (Project Looking Glass and Solaris the most recent announcements), how will it ever monetize these donations - how can you make money if you keep giving stuff away?' It's a good question. At its heart lies a misunderstanding about the nature of open source software, and once that's cleared up everything falls into place much more easily. The paradox - profiting from what is given away - is actually one many of us parti... (more)

i-Technology Viewpoint: "The Network is the Computer and...Open Source is its Soul" Says Simon Phipps

"I'm convinced that the reform that's needed is a root-and-branch reform of the very concept of the patent," contends Simon Phipps (pictured) in his most recent Webmink blog posting (http://www.webmink.net/minkblog.htm). Today's software patents, he believes, breach the social contract on which the concept of a patent is based. SYS-CON reprints the blog entry in full here with the permission of the author. Tim O'Reilly highlighted the Blackboard patent dispute yesterday, and has this comment: "It's a great example of someone using clear and ordinary language to illustrate just ho... (more)

Meaning, Not Markup

This article explores the paradox that sharing a common vocabulary can actually restrict the richness and nuances of a business paradigm. The Trend to Share Common Vocabularies One of the trends we find in the rapidly expanding world of XML is a desire to define unified vocabularies for expressing exchanged data. It seems obvious that the number of XML vocabularies used should be minimized, and, indeed, efforts to find agreement within various industries are laudable and to be encouraged. But these efforts may not always reduce the difficulty of exchanging information and might, p... (more)

A Snapshot of the Future

WBT is pleased to showcase some farseeing comments on the emerging new wireless Java world from our International Advisory Board member Simon Phipps, who filed the following article - wirelessly of course - from the MS Volendam (pictured here while berthed at Willemstad, Curacao), while happily sailing aboard as a keynote speaker on a so-called "Geek Cruise." We are fast moving to a world where the software platform is being supplanted by the service-driven network, where the desktop is being superseded by a "swarm" of software, devices, and networks, and where the number of con... (more)

It's About More Than Just the PlumbingThe Real Issues That Need to Be SolvedAre the Nontechnical Ones

I've described elsewhere the idea of "swarms" - spontaneously federating devices and software services connecting over networks. Some people are now describing this concept as "wireless Web services," extending the group of ideas now being called services-on-demand. As usual, the computer industry is keen to address the details of protocols and connections, but is leaving until later the real, people-centric issues that technologies can't solve. Possibilities Imagine the possibilities once we can have the services not only offered to us on demand via the nearest device but also h... (more)