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 Monday, February 18, 2008
How Feasible Is a Non-GPL ODF Implementation
We had reason to delve into the ODF spec recently. Speficially we were looking at the Blinking Text feature in ODF (no comparable feature in OOXML so well discussed in our OOXML vs ODF shit fight here in New Zealand).
The ODF spec certainly provides details that this feature exists, it doesn't however tell us what it actually does. Sure it makes text blink, but there isn't a whole lot more detail beyond that. We specifically wanted to know how long to blink for. In the end we used a stop watch to time it... we think it's 2.5 seconds on and 1 second off.... at least in OpenOffice it is. But without looking at the OpenOffice source code we can't be sure. And of course, strictly, reverse engineering OpenOffice doesn't make one standards complaint.
But it got me thinking about how easy (or hard) it would actually be to build a good, interoperable, implementation of ODF. If I had to resort to my stopwatch for blinking text what else might I have to reverse engineer? Brian Jones provides a start to the list of application defined bits here. Now I'm guessing that OpenOffice interoperability is sort of the thing to measure ones self against in the ODF space (i.e. the presumption being that just implementing the ODF spec without any of the application specific extensions is not sufficient).
So reverse engineering by observation of behaviour isn't too risky from a legal view point. I can watch how long the text blinks on and off for pretty easily and I'm not likely to find myself encumbered by licences. But, what if there is application defined functionality that cannot be reverse engineered through observation? The obvious solution would be to dive into the source code- but, at that point we might find ourselves caught by the GPL license.
So what's one to do?
I haven't really thought about this situation in a lot of detail so consider this post a starter for discussion rather than a conclusion that you can't do a good interoperable implementation of ODF without being caught by the GPL.
What do others think?
|Monday, February 18, 2008 12:06:04 AM UTC||
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Friday, January 25, 2008
MIXing it up in the year 2008
So it's only 6 weeks to MIX08 and I'm really looking forward to getting there.
We (Intergen) will be announcing an Open Source (nice BSD licence not nasty GPL!) Silverlight application while we're up at MIX. Can't say much more about it yet except to say taht it shows that you can do some pretty heavy lifting in Silverlight.
I'm looking forward to what should be a new major release of Silverlight and some other exciting announcements.
Most of all this year I'm looking forward to hitting mainly Business Decision Maker sessions at MIX.
These are the hidden gems of the MIX conference for me. I've got enough hookups within Microsoft to be across most of the technology stuff before it's announced this broadly, but, the BDM sessions at MIX offer great value for me and particularly in the ideas that I can bring back to New Zealand to discuss with my customers and colleagues.
If you're heading over to MIX from New Zealand or Aus I look forward to catching up with you...\
I think the early birds finish end of Jan @ http://www.visitmix.com
Mix06|Friday, January 25, 2008 10:07:45 PM UTC||
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Monday, December 10, 2007
We're all going on a summer holiday.... well kinda
JB, Darryl and myself are doing a big road trip around New Zeaand in February showing off some of the great new bits that are shipping this year.
We're going to build and deploy a full blown application live on stage. And we're not talking about some basic console application here... this thing is going to be as mission ready as we can do in two hours! In particular it's going to be hosted across a pair of clustered virtual servers- it's basically the sort of setup that we'd be happy to pick up and drop into the Intergen Data Center.
Some of the things we'll be showing off...
- Live mapping
- AJAX Enabled WCF calls
- Virtualization with Windows Server 2008
- IIS7
- Powershell Scripting for data center and VM administration
- ADO.NET Entities
- Spatial Queries with SQL 2008
- Mirroring with SQL 2008
... and a whole lot of other cool things.
I don't want to give the game away yet and tell you what we're building, but, I'll give you a clue.....
You'll be able to keep an eye on where the three Amigos are going Mountain Biking and Whitewater Kayaking and Rafting and Skydiving and things as we make our way around the country.
.NET|Monday, December 10, 2007 11:04:28 PM UTC||
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Sunday, November 04, 2007 Thursday, November 01, 2007
IIS Log Analyzer - OOXML Sample
Thought I'd chunk a quick note up here about a cool sample we built recently.
It shows off using .NET to put together Office Open XML documents (ECMA 376).
It can pull odwn your IIS log files and process these into things like spreadsheets.
It shows just how easy it is to build up office documents as XML.
http://www.codeplex.com/IISAnalyzer
.NET|Thursday, November 01, 2007 10:40:42 PM UTC||
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Why you should have redundant connections.... (May contain gloating)
No I love living in Wellington. We have TelstraClear Cable for 10MB internet and we have Citylink which both prod buttock.
On the weekend Citylink fell over..... Ouch!
TAB & Metservice were completely knocked offline, TradeMe & Stuff had over 25% of customers unable to reach them.
The TAB’s punters couldn’t use the website for the whole day leading up to the game – that’s got to drive those customers away from that business channel.
“The MetService's weather website went down for six hours as a result of the CityLink failure…"CityLink went down and our backup link was overloaded by other similarly affected companies."
(http://www.stuff.co.nz/4229049a28.html)
In contrast, Intergen customers were completely unaffected* thanks to our multiple physical connections to the interweb (Citylink & a dedicated fibre link directly to AT&T).
*Of course if the customer relied on Citylink for their Internet they'd have issues.
Intergen|Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:26:00 PM UTC||
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007 Tuesday, October 02, 2007
New Toys: Acoustic Energy Aego M
So I saw these speakers @ Sim Lim Square last year when I was in Singapore.
I really wanted them and tried and tried to bargain with the guy but to no avail. I've not seen them anywhere else since.
So this week in Singapore I got a pair. They were S$369, so just over $300 kiwi. They sound amazing, spanking the pants of Bose but at a fraction of the price.
Really looking foreward to getting them home and lugged into my MediaCenter.... just gotta make sure I've got a good enough soundcard.
http://www.acoustic-energy.co.uk/Product_range/Aego_series/Aego_M.asp
If you are looking for someting for your PC or iPOD you can't go past these.
Toy Box|Tuesday, October 02, 2007 7:21:11 AM UTC||
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Medrecruit Makes The Cable Car Challenge Top 9
One of my companies, MedRecruit, has made it into the top 9 of the Wellington Cable Car Challenge.
This is great news and really exciting for our team. I'm flying out to South Africa that evening, but, will be seeing if I can change my flights to let me present in the morning with Sam Hazledine, the MD of MedRecruit.
If you know any Doctors send them our way. medRecruit is a new(ish) New Zealand company working hard at looking after doctors and helping them to live the lifestyle they deserve.
Business Building|Tuesday, October 02, 2007 2:26:47 AM UTC||
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