In this interview, we chat with Jason van Zyl about the Apache Maven project. Maven is designed for build automation. Unlike well known predecessors such as MAKE, Maven uses a project object model (POM) to describe the software being built.

• Building limitations into Maven that enhance consistency and efficiency
• Encouraging a paradigm shift in place of incremental change with new tools
• Fostering collaboration, even among competing organizations
• Avoiding the temptation of trying to fill every role at a young company
• Bridging the gap between various programming languages with future versions of Maven

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In this interview, we chat with Damien Katz, founder of Apache CouchDB. 
CouchDB is a schema-less distributed document-oriented database that can be
queried over HTTP using a RESTful JSON API.

• Meeting the challenges associated with building a database and storage engine
• Contrasting document-oriented databases with relational ones
• Trade-offs relative to working with relational databases
• Smoothing the paradigm shift to schema-less and document-oriented databases
• The role of CouchApp and the Couchio company in the world of CouchDB

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OSCON is just around the corner, and in this conversation, we chat with true open-sourcer Edd Dumbill – co-chair of the conference and hacker behind the scenes.

• Determining what content to feature at OSCON
• Transitions in the open source community as a whole
• Business-strategy considerations associated with open source
• Selecting participants to present at OSCON
• Interrelationships between NoSQL, cloud, and mobile shape the future
• The role of OSCON in the larger sphere of technology

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Video streaming has grown way beyond YouTube and Hulu. Today, broadcasters such as ABC, NBC, and the Comedy Channel are streaming full shows straight to viewers. Netflix is living up to it’s name, and Amazon offers a huge library of movies on-demand. And open-source has moved well beyond the infrastructure layer, with open source video platforms like Kaltura.  In this interview, we chat with Shay David, co-founder of Kaltura.

The rise of video as a key form of web content

The open source projects and business model behind Kaltura

The role of the cloud in the future of video editing

Key vectors for the spread of video content on the web

Solving the format-selection and openness problems of web video

What the future holds for IP-based video

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Replay Solutions makes innovative solutions the help developers troubleshoot and
debug appliciatons. Basically, it lets you record interactions that are
happening in product, play them back in the lab, and figure out what's going on. 
In this interview, we chat with Jonathan Linxu, CEO of Replay Solutions.

The genesis of ReplayDIRECTOR: recording and playback for software

Managing the architectural complexity of simulating multi-level applications

Implementing the test and debug environment, and the results that follow

Handling the economic pressures of being a startup, especially in a down economy

The value of open source in an entrepreneurial setting

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In this interview, we chat with Andy Chou, the chief architect at Coverity, a
company that produces proprietary software analysis products.  In addition,
Coverity has been scanning over 300 open source projects, resulting in more than
11,000 defects that have been fixed by the open source community.

Defining the role of static analysis in the software industry

Targeting static analysis where it can have the most benefit

Interacting with the open source community

The role of automated defect analysis in commercial software development

Areas for future study and development

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Open source has evolved beyond simple infrastructure and is steadilly working
it's way up the stack.  A prime example is Jaspersoft, which supports the
worlds most popular open source business intelligence software.  In this
interview we chat with Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO.

• Breadth of open source business intelligence offerings from Jaspersoft
• The rise of information as the key asset owned by many businesses
• The role of the open source model in Jaspersoft’s success
• Transition in business intelligence toward smaller companies and less expensive solutions
• The role of cloud computing in the future of business and government
• How the business intelligence layer fits into the larger cloud computing model

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Clearly, PHP is one of the most important open-source technologies on the
planet.  In this interview, we talk with Zeev Suraski, CTO of Zend (twitter) and
co-creator of PHP about where PHP has come from, and where it's heading.

• The development of the Zend Framework and Zend the company
• On the rise in popularity and the lasting success of PHP
• The history and future of PHP adoption and innovation
• The evolution of the relationship between PHP and Microsoft
• The future of cloud computing as it intersects with PHP

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In this interview, Mihir talks about how he built a company to bring buisiness
process and IT automation down from the expensive enterprise sphere, and out to
the every-man.  Along the way, Mihir shares thoughts on open source and
proprietary development approaches. 

• Re-inventing the field of business-process automation
• Applying business-process automation principles to software testing
• Creating software-testing routines that are resilient when application code changes
• The nature of innovation in proprietary and open source approaches
• Positive and negative impacts of a down economy on software transitions

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WaveMaker is gaining prominence, and showing up in the Gartner Magic Quadrants,
to simplify cloud development.  In this interview, we chat with WaveMaker
CEO Chris Keene.

• Deciding on the open source approach to development and choosing a license
• Simplifying the creation of multi-tiered applications for the cloud
• Fitting WaveMaker into the broader open source and proprietary ecosystem
• Engaging with the community and deciding what goes into the paid edition
• On the importance of community managers, and how to choose a good one

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Testing a web site against multiple browsers has been a long-time challenge of
Web development.  In this interview, Jason Huggins, CTO of Sauce Labs,
explains how the Selenium project makes multi-browser testing much faster.

• The creation of the Selenium web-testing tool
• The Sauce Labs startup around Selenium to run testing on cloud systems
• Automated web testing with Selenium
• Taking Selenium beyond testing into software documentation and marketing
• The revenue and business models of Sauce Labs
• The maturation of Selenium beyond predecessors and into the emerging cloud ecosystem

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In this interview, we talk with Eliot Horowitz, founder of 10gen, which is the
company that created MongoDB.  What's MongoDB? Well, it's an open source,
document oriented, schema free database designed for massive scale and
performance. If that got your attention, then I invite you to read on…

• The evolution of various data models in databases
• Advantages of object-oriented databases in terms of horizontal scaling
• Handling issues when columns are added or deleted between application versions
• Suitability of MongoDB for the cloud
• OS support and usage with MongoDB
• The company (10gen) wrapped around MongoDB
• Community involvement in the development of MongoDB

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DotNetNuke is an extremely successful open source project that targets the
Windows platform and .NET Framework.  In this interview, we talk with Shaun
Walker about bringing DotNetNuke forward from its humble beginnings as a .NET
sample project, to the premier open source content management system for
Windows.

• The beginnings of DotNetNuke and engaging with Microsoft on open source
• Open source development paradigms interacting with proprietary software
• Seeking venture capital and monetizing DotNetNuke
• Response by the community to creating a commercial version
• Overcoming the pressures of a down economy
• Future directions: cloud platforms and improved distribution channels

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It’s not exaggeration to say that Ian Clarke takes on some of the hardest problems in computing. Ian invented Freenet, and open-source network that remained uncracked, and is today contemplating Swarm, which has ambitions goals about moving computing closer to distributed data. But Ian isn’t just a geek’s geek. In this interview, he throws in some thoughts about the business side of software development too.

• The origins of Freenet and anonymous peer-to-peer architecture
• On the mathematics behind “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”
• Observations about optimal strategies for managing an open source community
• The Swarm project’s approach to distributed data
• Implementing fork/join and related concepts in distributed systems
• Relative beneits of open source and proprietary approaches to development
• Incorporating open source into an overall business strategy

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Eucalyptus is an open-source project that gives you the Amazon cloud API for
non-Amazon clouds.  In this interview, we chat with Rich Wolski, CTO of
Eucalyptus Systems, about the project and the company.

• Eucalyptus as a technology-neutral abstraction layer for cloud computing
• Enabling utility pricing models for compute resources
• Toward the ability to mix and match platform services with infrastructure services
• Open source significance and strategy in Eucalyptus
• The evolving role of community in the Eucalyptus project
• Real-world implementations and usage scenarios

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Cloudera has built a business around the open-source Hadoop project, and in this
interview, we chat with Cloudera CTO and cofounder Amr Awadallah about all
things Hadoop.

• Background on Hadoop and its origins
• Implementing support for MapReduce to handle distributed data
• Suitability of Hadoop for cloud computing
• The relationship between Cloudera’s Hadoop version and the Apache version
• Cloudera’s business and monetization model around Hadoop
• Licensing models as they apply to Cloudera and Hadoop

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We had the chance to interview James Vasile, an attorney with the Software
Freedom Law Center (SFLC).  Now people often think of the SFLC as the
group that “goes after” people who violate the GPL, and that’s certainly the aspect that the press focuses on, but James points out that enforcement is a very
small percentage of what they do.  More interesting were James insights
into how businesses learn that their secret sauce has very little to do with
locking up the code. And if you’re looking for more, James maintains his own blog at hackervisions.org

• The role of the Software Freedom Law Center in the world of free software
• Fostering voluntary compliance with the GPL
• Handling violations without putting people on the defensive
• How communities protect themselves with self-regulation
• Negotiating the urge for proprietary “secret sauce” in the marketplace
• Niche markets where open source has not had much impact

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If you look at any list of open source content management systems, you'll find
Joomla right in top.  In this interview, we talk with Louis Landry, who
started as the
principal architect of Joomla 1.5 and the Joomla Framework and today acts
as the development coordinator.  If you're interested in where Joomla's at,
and where it's going, read on…

• Joomla and its relationship to website owners
• The difficulty of creating success metrics for free software
• The relationship between the core Joomla environment and extensions
• Cloud computing and platform independence
• Transitioning the web to new platforms and the semantic web
• The future of rich applications in a web browser

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If anyone knows Linux kernel driver development, it's Greg Kroah-Hartman, who's
been working deep in Linux for over a decade.  In this interview, Greg
talks about how the Linux project has accommodated the accelerating rate of
change for the kernel, and offers some insight on where Linux is headed.

• How development on the Linux kernel has changed in the past several years
• Drawing in the larger community with the Linux Driver Project
• The breadth of uses for and contributors to the kernel
• The future trajectory of Linux, including functional balance with hardware
• Overcoming the challenges of maintaining universal hardware device support
• The range of change and growth in the kernel

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The cloud providers are splitting into a few camps.  On one side, you have
companies like Amazon that offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and Google
who offers platform as a service (PaaS).  PaaS offers rapid development,
and no server administration, but it locks you into a specific provider. 
Enter Engine Yard, a company that's enhancing Ruby on Rails to run on on top of
arbitrary IaaS.  In this interview Ezra Zygmuntowicz paints the picture.

• Defining platform as a service and the creation of Engine Yard
• Advancing cloud computing beyond buzzwords
• Opening cloud computing as a simple, provider-agnostic framework
• Operating system and programming language flexibility
• Providing flexible scalability of data stores
• Paradigm shifts created by cloud computing, including admin roles and rapid start-ups

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