Small note at the end of the news on TV: EMI sells its music unprotected via iTunes!

End of last century I’d been working in the DRM business and we sold actually some music - well not much actually. The content holder provided little interesting content and the DRM software you had to install was secure, but an overkill. I still think that most buys came from within the company (BMG) or its competitors. You had been tied to a media-player which was even worse than the Windows one - you get the idea: Very unsatisfying user experience.

Fast-forward 8 years. DRM is facing even more resistance. As the open-source movement gained much more momentum and virtually all DRM relies on closed source portions with sometimes hefty certification procedures for the final product - DRM is closing out Linux user and also developers which use open languages like Java where such software will never have a good chance to be integrated.

As it seems now that the idiotic notion that all people who buy electronic media are actually assisting in theft/piracy has been overcome; open platforms will prosper even more. Let’s face it. 90% of the computer user do nothing else than surfing and consuming media with their computer. The half of remaining 10% do this at least half of the time. Freely usable media open this large reservoir of users for free software. And as these user don’t want anything more than just what bthey are doing now, they don’t need Vista Premium Home Media Standard edition (Which version of Vista do YOU need?). Some light-weight OS on whatever sufficiently recent CPU will do. Some cross-platform software (written in Java or etleast running on the JVM) gives all what Joe Homeuser needs. And that software will be there when playing media with non-proprietary software is not only a challenging game for free-software evangelists.

Finally this could give Java on the Desktop the thrust it needs to (finally) take off. The improvements of Swing layed ground to compete with other UIs. I am curious what we will see in the next year or two.

BTW: I actually can see some good uses of DRM. Perhaps I’d been a bit indoctrinated back than (we used to make the brain-washed Intertrust-zombie in the office). What about have a documentation expire when the new version of a software is deployed and been redirected to the new documentation? Sending a message in a secured envelope where you can control where it gets forwarded to? None of these needs an unbreakable system, as it should simply help the user of media to use it correctly. When you don’t need certified hardware and software you can never secure the use perfectly, but some open DRM solution could provide the benefits without the hassle.

Triggered by a blog I looked at an article by Richard Stallmann

Well, I finally I got his point and now I am sure that I have to disagree with open-sourcing Java.

First, the article. Stallman speaks about free software. I didn’t put “free” in quotes, but I set it in italics to emphasize that it is a term. Search Wikipedia for what a term is. Stallmann’s term is not the “free” in “free beer” or “free thought”, it is the “free” from Free-Software-Foundation (the guys who brought to you the GPL). The FSF “free” is a label that declares the compliance with some principles which are more or less arbitrary - I like to compre it with the DOGMA-manifesto in films, interesting, but - as they knew themselves - a dogma, not something that ca can universal truth. Read the rest of this entry »

Apache’s stuff became a classic - especially in the Java-universe. Lot of nice stuff found even its way into Sun’s JVM (BCEL, Xerces), but what about the rest?
Commons is beginning to get on my nerves now. We have - as many people - problem with the memory-leaks and caused by commons-logging, now I stumbled into something in HttpClient/Axis which sets finally some red lights on Apache stuff.
It feels for me that Apache becomes a J#. Perhaps a little bit harsh, but since I also have to keep code-compatability with J# I know what I am talking about when I say that it feels the same.
Apache gave us nice things like their licensing-scheme, the Apache server and many reference implementations of JSRs. But Apache is in the end nothing but a brand. Sometimes it seems that more or less weak ideas try get promoted by the blessing of an Apache-branding.

A quite prominent round (see link) came up with a list of the 40 most important principles of Enterprise application architecture. As Marinescu I found the least valued principles the most interesting:

1) Use Model Driven Architecture.
2) Determine all your requirements upfront.
and a three way tie between:
3) Use EJBs.
4) Prefer web based UI’s.
5) Prefer open source projects.

Why it came out like this? - Don’t know, perhaps we all resigned viewing the staggering complexity of nowdays systems and perhaps we are a little bit disappointed about the promises of technology and their shortening lifecycle (which is sometimes even too short for a single project).

Well non of the above explains why Web based UI got bashed. I must admit that I never really liked them. Neither from user nor from developer side.

As user I like to use Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. As DB-setup is not my main vocation, I liked its simple, but rather complete interface. With 10g this tool got replaced by a WebUI. Even simpler - but by far less powerful. Precious space on my desktop gets lost by opening multiple sessions to get the same view I had with the former Java App.

As developer I see the promise of thin-client fading. The more comfort we put to these UIs the more client-side code we are about to create. Sometime even duplicating functions from the server side, because the server-langauge is not available on th client. And even the killer-argument that you don’t hav to think about deployments is not true anymore. Where we had to beat ourselves with different client-platforms, the problem is now simply replayced by browser-versions and brands that tend to get as different as Windows & Unix used to be. Add the problems with corporate firewalls and all enthusiasm for web-stuff goes down the toilet.