Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: James Reinders – Intel

In this video interview at OSCON 2007 we talked to James Reinders – The Chief Evangelist for Intel’s Software Products Division.

We’ll talked to him about the following:

 

 James Role at Intel [0:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Some of the Software Products produced by Intel [1:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 How Intel integrates the community into the process of Q/A, etc [1:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 How does the development model differ when Intel builds a product for the open source community [1:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Intel's announcement at OSCON 2007 about a new open source release [2:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Impacts of Open Sourcing Threading Building Blocks [1:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 What are some rationales for not Open Sourcing a project? [3:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Parallelism and Open Source / Closed Source [2:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Building applications for Closed Source vs. Open Source ecosystems [1:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 VTune and the Development Process for it. [3:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Q/A Process Around VTune [2:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Full Interview [15:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Ryan Waite

Ryan Waite

In this interview, we talk with Ryan Waite, Group Program Manager for High-Performance Computing at Microsoft.  We talk about:

• Microsoft’s entry into the High Performance Computing area.
• Microsoft’s support of the open source Message Passing Interface (MPI).
• MPI has become bloated, and there’s no usability data (like there is with Microsoft Office) to indicate what should be deprecated.
• At Microsoft, select customers help shape the features for the next product release.
• Microsoft has always focused on ease of use, simplified administration, and uncomplicated setup. HPC is no different.
• Instrumentation helps find reliability issues. If partners are affecting reliability (with unstable drivers, for example) certification helps raise the bar.
• Parallel programming is now the only way to do more computation in the same amount of time. Processors just are getting faster like they used to.
• It’s easier for open source to be incremental. Proprietary software has to make radical changes.
• Hard drives + overnight shipping = really high bandwidth.

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Whatever your particular bent on the iPhone it’s hard to argue it’s success in terms of initial customer satisfaction and sales numbers from studies that have been generated and then placed for all to see. And even when you consider the tech media’s typical bent for jumping on the next “shiny” thing and touting it the bringer of world peace, the ender of world hunger, and the final unifying force that brings together IT and users, it has to be noticed that there has been rarely a product launch with so few outwardly negative reviews.

I think a great deal of this positive reaction is from Apple nailing the so called “peak experience” (to borrow a phrase from Danese Cooper) with the iPhone.

Again this isn’t about whether the iPhone supports Exchange, or whether a given developer has access to the underlying API’s, but simply whether or not it hits the peak experience for users and stays there after opening the box.

I’ve been living in the tech space and trying out a ton of new hardware and software daily for the better part of 15 years now and rarely have I seen such a unity of review feedback.

When consumers (not IT, not Graphic Artists, not Developers, but USERS) ask for computing power they are rarely asking for it for it just for the sake of it. Most consumers don’t get their neighbors excited by telling them about the new Dual Core or Mobile Processor they bought but about what they can “do” with it. And more and more they are trying to get to a “peak experience” right out of the box where the product just works and keeps on working at that peak experience level post initial blush with the product.

This is important because I think we are going to hit a watershed sometime very soon where users simply demand a peak computing experience all the time. Not in terms of raw power, not in terms of breadth of capabilities, but simply in that in gets the job done with a high degree of fidelity and speed and does so every time.

The old jokes about if cars were built like computers, etc. will simply fall on ears that cease to hear the humor in the jokes anymore.

I think most technology revolutions get a generation or maybe two to work the kinks out. Trains for the first few generations could run at the pace of horse and people would still ride them. Planes could fly into the clouds and not be seen or heard from again, and Ships could set out to see and never been seen again. But after a while the kinks were worked out so that Ships made it to port, planes made a safe landing, and trains got up to speed (pardon the pun).

The model used for developing software is a fundamental part of the process of getting to the level of peak experiences and hence peak experiences make a good subject for our efforts.

So what do the readers of this blog think? Can either OpenSource products or Microsoft really hit the peak experience bar consistently and over time?

Which software development model eventually gets to the peak experience faster and keeps us there?

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In our recent conversation with Danese Cooper, she brought up how open source is sometimes used as a market disrupter. If I understood her correctly, there are times where competitors are locked in fierce competition with each other. At some point, one of the organizations changes the game by open-sourcing their product, effectively kicking the legs out from under the competition. Why would customers pay vast sums for a “proprietary” product, when there’s an open-source one that’s “free”?

Just perusing the list of some high-profile open-source projects, it seems that the company that’s winning the battle for market share typically has little incentive to open-source. The looser in the game can open-source a project as a form of asymmetric warfare, lobbing the holy hand grenade, as it were, into that market. The trick is to not blow yourself up in the process. Consider the following:

Firefox – Reading some history, it looks like Netscape wanted to use open-source as a market disruptor to compete against IE. However, Netscape was never willing to let go of the reigns and really cede control. That control was wrest from their hands with Firefox (originally Mozilla Firebird). Firefox has disrupted the market, and gotten Microsoft dust off their browser and start working on it again.

OpenOffice – This proprietary code, originally owned by StarDivison, was acquired by Sun in 1999, and open-sourced in 2000.

For the past decade, Microsoft has owned the majority of the “Office” market share, and it would be pretty hard to dislodge Microsoft with yet another proprietary office suite. However, OpenOffice has gained a strong position in certain niches, which include government agencies, foreign and domestic. The leading features are Open Document Format (ODF), and “good enough” compatibility with Microsoft Office. ODF makes that claim that your data, your documents, are never at the mercy of a proprietary software vendor. It remains to be seen if OpenOffice ultimately dislodges Microsoft Office, but I think it’s safe to say the market leader is paying attention.

It plays out in smaller verticals on a regular basis. If you’re not winning in a red ocean, consider the doomsday maneuver, and prepare to live large in the post apocalyptic market you’ve created.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Jay Pipes

Jay Pipes

In this interview, we speak with Jay Pipes North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL.

We talk about:

• How MySQL Community and Enterprise servers are nothing like RedHat Fedora and RHEL.
• The nuances of MySQL licensing.
• It’s built mostly like traditional software, with 120 developers on staff at MySQL.
• But that’s changing, the worklog system has been opened to the community and they’re starting to take contributions.
• For that to happen, MySQL has to become more modular and support plug-ins.
• MySQL supports so many platforms through a portability layer, which was a lot of work initially, but now it’s pretty well baked.
• Bugs = Gold.
• The tenets of MySQL: performance, reliability, and ease of use.
• It’s easier for proprietary software to make money, it’s easier for open-source to get work done.
• And finally, how to get involved.

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Just walking through reading it but here is a interesting study by the University of Victoria on code review processes in Open Source Projects.

http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Rigby2006TR.pdf

Some of the research questions are:

What types of review does a project use?

Why are patches rejected?

Who performs the review?

When are reviews performed?

How long do reviews take to perform?

Etc.

There is a ton of interesting data in the study from a breakdown of the Linux “Pyramid of Trust” method, two reviewer model that Mozilla uses to the voting model used by Apache.

Well worth the read.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell
Interviewee: Patrick Hogan

Patrick Hogan

In this interview, we spoke with Patrick Hogan about open source at NASA. Patrick has been managing NASA open source projects since 2002, incubating competitive technologies to deliver scientific content. The goal has been to engineer open source solutions that leverage open data standards for sustainable technologies that can be extended in both open and proprietary ways. Several successful projects have come out of this program, including a virtual scanning electron microscope, software that allows the blind to aurally visualize mathematical equations, and the very successful NASA World Wind, a fully navigable 3D geospatial data visualization platform.

In this interview, Patrick talks about:

• The NASA World Wind open-source project
• Preventing a strong fork
• Spec’ing features on an open-source project   
• World Wind extensibility, even for non-programmers
• Not everything the government writes is open-source and/or public domain
• You add value on open source, not in open source

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, Richard Bowler, and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Marc Miller

In this interview, we spoke with Marc Miller about his views on the current state of open source software.  Marc works for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and in January, Marc took on a role as the open source software evangelist in the AMD Developer Outreach organization enabling Linux kernel and application developers to develop optimized code using both AMD and 3rd party tools and resources. In his role as a software Alliance Manager for AMD 2001-2006, Mr. Miller played a significant role in developing a Linux marketing strategy with a focus on integration of AMD technology with software tools developed by the open source community and industry partners. Throughout his career at AMD, Marc has been a key contact for open source developers wishing to work with AMD, and has been an open source ambassador for AMD, helping to coordinate outbound and inbound communication between AMD and Linux developers.

In this interview Marc talks about:

• Challenges that open source companies have when competing with proprietary software
• Advantages of open source
• Choice also has disadvantages
• Is open-source anti-capitalism?
• The PR value of being open-source
• Open-source is less idealistic and more pragmatic today
• The future is blending open-source and proprietary software

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An interesting study can be found here.

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Both Scott and I will be at OSCON 2007 in Portland and we would be more than happy to meet up with folks. We’ll doing a variety of Q/A focused meetings as well as some video interviews while we are there and we’re happy to schedule more with folks who are interested.

If you’re interested in participating or just connecting up over a cup of coffee email me at seancampbell@technologyevangelism.com

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell, and Richard Bowler
Interviewee: Phil Costa

Phil Costa

In this interview, Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell, and Richard Bowler interview Phil Costa who is the Director of Product Management for Flex and ColdFusion at Adobe, with responsibility for product definition and strategy of the Flex product line. Prior to joining the Flex team, he was product manager at both Macromedia and Allaire and led XML and Internet middleware research at Giga Information Group. Phil has a Master’s degree in English from Boston University and an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College.

In this interview, Phil talks about Adobe’s decision to open-source the Flex SDK. In specific, Phil talked about:

• Background on the Adobe Flex SDK
• Why open-source the Flex SDK
• Risks in open-sourcing the Flex SDK
• Why the MPL license was chosen
• Advantages in open-sourcing the Flex SDK
• The risks of people forking the build

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