How Software is Built

Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Jamie Thingelstad

In this interview we talk with Jamie Thingelstad - CTO of the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network. In specific, we talk about:

• Open and closed-source technology stacks at WSJ
• The technology evaluation process
• Intersections between open source and commercial entities
• Security considerations with open and closed platforms
• The value and liability of owning code

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Marc Frons

In this second interview with Marc Frons, CTO for the New York Times digital operations, we discuss the Times use of open source in their infrastructure. In specific, we talk about:

• WordPress and blogging at the New York Times
• New York Times investment in open source
• Licensing issues and corporate citizenship
• How they address open-source application support and evolution
• The role of content management systems
• The future of corporate investment in open source

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Mark Osborne

• Challenges unique to building developer tools
• Changes to how Microsoft is now building its developer tools
• Using "Feature Crews" to build product
• Predictability, efficiency, and agility in software development
• Preventing "corner cutting" in development
• Defining and enforcing quality gates
• 600 features, and no single development methodology
• Managing dependencies

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In this interview, we talk to Scott Densmore about Microsoft’s CodePlex and the Patterns & Practice’s work on the Enterprise Library Version 4:

• Forking the Enterprise Library
• How Microsoft product teams are using the CodePlex repository for open-source code.
• How CodePlex is different from SourceForge
• Favorite CodePlex projects
• How CodePlex itself is community driven

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: David Campbell

In this interview with David Campbell we talked to him about:

• How the development methodology of SQL Server has changed.
• How the changes affect the ability of customers to give feedback.
• How virtualization makes it easier for users to test-drive SQL Server.
• As products and open-source projects grow, the developers have to realize that they are not the target user.
• David’s belief that the best product doesn’t necessarily have the most knobs.
• Building a community around a closed-source product like SQL Server.

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In this interview, we talk with Doug Look, who’s a strategic designer for Autodesk Labs. The labs are interesting because they’ve built a strong, engaged, community around closed-source software. In this interview, we specifically cover:

· Using an online “Lab” to engage the community in closed-source development.

· Does open-source tackle interdisciplinary problems well?

· What does an interdisciplinary team in action look like?

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The OSI has approved the two Microsoft software licenses, the Microsoft Reciprocal License, and the Microsoft Public License.  This makes all the code on Microsoft’s CodePlex site (Microsoft’s equivalent of SourceForge) official open-source software, as much of it is licensed under the Microsoft Public License (formerly the Microsoft Permissive License).  It also means that things like Microsoft’s Ajax Control Toolkit is open-source (with the inherent ability to fork, etc.)

There’s a good article on LinuxWorld about the security debate between open-source and Windows. My first question is, does it need to be a debate? In this day and age, isn’t it easy enough to quantify vulnerabilities?

If you are looking for subjective opinion, I recommend looking through the interviews we’ve done here. At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan-boy, the Microsoft interviews (in my opinion) demonstrate a company where secure coding is “in the water”. Code goes through threat modeling, risky function calls have simply been banned, code goes through automated and human inspection, and vulnerabilities that do slip through feedback into the process to determine how to prevent them in the future.

I simply don’t get the same feeling from the open-source people we’ve talked to. When we’ve brought the subject up, the response is almost universally “many eyeballs,” and faith (without data) that “many eyeballs” is effective.

Am I completely off base? Do things like the Linux kernel and Apache go through rigorous security reviews? Is there proof that “many eyeballs” in open source is at least as good as something like the Security Development Lifecycle in Microsoft? If you’re in a position to know, let’s chat!

According to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft will make the source for the upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 available under the Microsoft Reference License. This isn’t an open-source license (i.e. you couldn’t fork the code), but it is still a “good thing” in that developers can learn from the source and have an improved debugging experience with the ability to step-into the framework code.

Update: It seems that this isn’t seen as happy news by all. There’s an article on eWeek that’s just too irrational and frothing to pass up, claiming that this is all a ploy by Microsoft to kill Mono. As Microsoft is officially supporting Novell’s efforts in porting Silverlight to Linux (on top of Mono), the evidence would indicate that Microsoft is doing this to support .NET developers, and not as some clever conspiracy to kill off Mono.

A while back, we did an in-depth interview with Michael Howard about Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle, which has been one of our most popular interviews to date.  It seems there’s a lot of interest in pulling back the covers and looking at how Microsoft is approaching building secure code. 

ComputerWorld just did an interview with Microsoft’s Scott Charney, which provides more insight into their efforts to produce secure products.

Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell

Interviewee:Michael Tiemann - RedHat / President of OSI

In this video interview at OSCON 2007 we talked to Michael Tiemann - VP of Open Source for RedHat and President of the OSI.

We’ll talked to him about the following:

 

 How does a Distro get built... [3:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Differences between Fedora Core and RedHat Enterprise Linux [2:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Working with multiple distros. [3:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 What is mainline Linux? [1:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Making changes to the kernel - some stories... [4:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The Christmas buying season and Open Source... [2:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The right to fork and Open Source. [3:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Source Code and the OSI [2:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 What makes something Open Source from the OSI's perspective [6:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Unpacking the Engineering process at RedHat [4:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 How does RedHat's engineering process and the five year horizon. [2:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Entire Interview (WMV) [37:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Entire Interview (MP4) [37:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Robert Bray

In this interview with Bob, Architect for Geospatial Products at Autodesk, we asked him about:

• Introduction of open source within Autodesk
• Role of project steering committees
• Decision to create an open source product
• Open source impact on closed source product
• Developer and engineer adjustments to open source process
• Differences between feature design in open and closed source
• Test and documentation for Autodesk open source
• Community contribution to open source projects
• Business reasons for creating open source products

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart , Richard Bowler

Interviewee: Matt Gibbs

In this interview with Matt, we asked him about:

• Approaching open and closed source SDL
• Development challenges for UI Framework and Services team
• Handling security within feature development
• Incorporating SDL into ASP.NET
• Launching multiple distributions with open source
• Testing against multiple operating systems
• Testing cycle for features
• Managing bug fixes and feature stability
• Following a development cycle
• Microsoft philosophy on product development

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart

Interviewee: Rod Johnson

In this interview with Rod, CEO of Interface 21 and founder of the Spring framework, we asked him about:

• Development methodology of Spring framework
• Contributors to Spring
• Selection of code and features for the Spring framework
• Ways in which developers support open source
• Open source development cycle
• Importance of technical support
• Code aggregation in open source development
• Choosing open or closed source within small businesses

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Ganeti (how do you pronounce that?) has launched.  This is virtual server management for Xen.  I’m looking forward to checking it out.  The announcement is here, and the project page is here.

Our visit to OSCON last week exposed the rift between Web 2.0 (a.k.a Software as a Service) and open source. There’s an excellent roundup here. It’s short reading and hits the high points well.

Effectively, Web 2.0 lets you reap all the benefits of free and open source software (FOSS), without advancing FOSS. Smart people currently sit on both sides of the issue, but for the foreseeable future, the “SaaS loophole” will remain.

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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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.

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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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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