10 August, 2007

The next big thing!

No, I don't talk about Web 3.0 or a successor for Spring and JEE, not even about the upcoming Cocoon 2.2 release. It's only about the next Cocoon GetTogether which will take place for the first time in Rome this year as it has recently been announced. It will last from October 3rd to 5th with a two-day hackathon and one day conference as usual.

For those who don't know it a short history. Starting in 2002 for the first three years it was held in the beautiful town of Ghent (Belgium) by the Outerthought guys as an occasion to meet each other (developers and users!). With around 100 € it has always been a rather cheap event. The American spare ribs of a local restaurant (somebody knows the name or a link?) became most famous and a tradition at the Cocoon GT.

In 2005 the Cocoon GT moved to Amsterdam organized by the Hippo team. Amsterdam is a wonderful city as well, more night life and sights, but was therefore more expensive, especially the hotels. And the spare ribs were not half as good as the one in Ghent. We came back to Amsterdam in the last year though.

And now it's Rome and the Sourcesense team. Again it's a very interesting town where it is worth to leave the laptops once in a while. I have been there already - 11 years ago ... it would be time to visit Rome again. But not this year, since I won't make it to the Cocoon GT. For the time being I'm in the US and would spend my holidays to visit the interesting places here.

For anybody who is interested in Cocoon or uses it I can only recommend the Cocoon GT. It has always been very interesting and enlightening. You can meet the developers and get deep-inside views or get your hands dirty when working on your first bug during the famous bug hunt.

For a few impressions also take a look at the pictures.

07 August, 2007

1,000th post

Nothing that really matters to the general public I guess. But I made my 1,000th post yesterday in the Spring forums. At the moment it's the community I'm most active in after I worked with Spring on my last two major projects.

The first project was a major refactoring. The web application was mainly separated into a web tier based on Apache Cocoon and a business tier without a container or distinct architecture. I introduced Spring for the dependency injection in the business tier and replaced the home-grown transaction framework with a JTA-based solution. Besides the database we access a Corba server and the file system transactionally so we need distributed transactions and two-phase commits. I wrote an XAResource/ JCA implementation for Apache Commons Transaction. Unfortunately I can't release this stuff as open-source but have to reimplement it when the time allows it. I use Jencks which integrates the Apache Geronimo transaction and connection management, so I don't need a full-blown JEE server, but I can use Spring and Apache Tomcat.

The second project was a portal. Starting from scratch was really nice. I could reuse my JTA/ JCA stuff and added JMS to the picture. As portal server Liferay 4.1.2 was chosen - and I learned to hate it quite fast. So many issues especially (but not only) with IBM DB2. Lately I switched to 4.3.0 - and I am quite happy with it. They have improved tremendously and now I can also recommend it. For the portlets I used Spring Portlet MVC which was really new at that time and had still the one or the other issue. But in contrary to Liferay (this improved a lot as well) and especially Hibernate (that's a topic on its own) I really got help from the community and issues got fixed really fast. That's when it makes fun to live on the bleeding edge and is not only frustrating.

Getting more and more used to the different parts of Spring I also started to share my knowledge. First it have been the custom scopes (which I used in both projects) and proxying (mostly for declarative transactions), later I added Spring MVC in general, Spring Portlet MVC in particular and the PropertyEditors to the picture. And so that's what I focus mainly on in the Spring forums.

Actually my home community is Apache Cocoon. That's were I started in end of 2000 and I became a committer in mid 2003. Unfortunately, by not working really with Cocoon for the last two years I lost more or less track of its development. I still try to bring me in from time to time though (as lately by propagating PropertyEditors as in Spring ;-) ). I'd like to work more again in this community again in the future, especially with the forthcoming next version 2.2.

04 August, 2007

Killing Music

Do you remember "Copy kills music"? That was a campaign of the German department of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), an umbrella organization "representing the recording industry". In 1999 the campaign tried to prove with a ludicrous reasoning that copying kills music. What they actually meant and even said so in the text is that it endangers the earnings of the recording industry. The consequences read as dramatic as follows: The recording industry will no longer be able to finance risky projects off the mainstream and so the musical landscape will become desolate.

In my opinion it's the recording industry itself or better said its major players that needs to be blamed. Which were the last 5 qualitative albums released by major players? Nobody needs to wonder at the decreasing earnings which is caused mostly by the copying as I admit. But in the meantime you have to pay around 16 to 18 € for any CD in Germany in a shop, Amazon is around 2 € cheaper. And they missed the move to the internet. If there would have a been a platform like iTunes right from the beginning I claim they would have not these problems nowadays. By the way, this is no call to copy music. Just to mention it: I have far more than 400 original audio CDs.

Now it was Elton John who said that the Internet destroys music. At least he refers to the creativity not the money. The internet is supposed to be preventing people from going out and being creative. This results in only 10 fantastic albums per year - while there have been 10 per week in the early 70s. Maybe it's only the taste in music that has changed a lot in the meantime? For sure I don't consider many of those fantastic albums as fantastic as Elton John does. Anyway, he wants to shut down the internet for 5 years and expects better music to arise! And:
Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.


In my humble opinion both the IFPI and Elton John just don't understand what the internet is about - but on completely different topics. Elton John asks the people to communicate since this results in creativity. I say there is no better communication platform than the internet. Face to face would be better of course but there is not somebody for every interest around.

The IFPI says the internet endangers the recording industry's earnings and so the jobs. I say I don't care. This does not mean I don't care about the affected people - it's simply from an economic point of view. Or in other words: Who cared about the gunsmiths when they got obsolete? Things just change. And yes, I consider the recording industry being obsolete in its current form. I don't need their talent scouts and their marketing for mainstream music. They should only focus on the production and distribution of the actual recordings. Then they would not need to care about copying and to lobby for more restrictive laws. They require to access the internet connection data which internet provider need to store for 6 months in the near future in Europe (for those that like the lengthy German words it's the so called Vorratsdatenspeicherung). Those data were targeted for anti-terrorism investigations and should now be misused for civil law cases. That means I have to relinquish my fundamental right for privacy for a purely monetary interest of another party. In my opinion not even the so called war against terrorism justifies those restrictions of the fundamental rights since their effectiveness is at least questionable. You might remember that the US authorities had actually very many data about the 9/11 terrorists but this could not prevent their attack. But I completely digress ...

Back to the internet killing music in concerns of creativity and earnings. There is already an example that belies both fears: open-source software development. Who claims there is no creativity involved makes him/herself ridiculous. And there are also a lot of successful companies which base their business around open-source development. The secret is that they add value to the simply copyable source code by providing services, training or more trivial things as discs and documentation.

I really can't see why music should be so different from software. So what can the music industry learn from open-source software? How will it look like in the future? Actually we just need to look back before the arising of a music industry. Probably the music itself will get less important from an economic point of view. It's the additional value that will matter in regards of money. People will still buy audio CDs as they do now despite the possibility of just downloading the music. The performances/concerts will also get more important.

First steps have already been done. Most famous example of a successful career started in the internet are for sure the Arctic Monkeys (though I don't like the music). Another band following this example is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (I really like it a lot). Furthermore the recording industry seems to recognize that any attempt to prevent copying is doomed to fail. (Don't consider Apple and EMI as benefactors, they made it for pure economical reasons.) I guess this change of view started with the huge disaster of Sony BMG's DRM based on a rootkit. Now only others need to follow and listen to their customers instead of fighting them.

I might conclude with a slightly modified version of the quote of Elton John:
Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the music industry.

But since I need them for getting my audio CDs I guess it's more appropriate to conclude with a quote of one of their managers named Irving Azoff. Unfortunately I found this quote only used by somebody else as conclusion of a preview of the music industry in 2010 and have no idea in which context Irving Azoff used it originallybut here it goes:
When all the changes are done there will be still music.


Update: Universal joined the party

The Univeral Music Group has announced to sell some of their music without DRM - at least for the time being. And Amazon followed short after EMI what I missed at that time.