tecosystems - Latest Comments

Re: Why a Developer Laptop?

Simon Phipps — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:01:03 -0000

Re: Why a Developer Laptop?

Dan Nugent — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:13:05 -0000

I recently found out about rvm and pythonbrew for Ruby and Python respectively. Both those tools *handily* manage the version/package management story for each language. If I ever have the chance to build a real project using either language, they're going to be the first thing I install. If everyone *was* using these tools where they're available, environment replication would be a *lot* easier. Though still not quite perfect.

Of course, there are also whole system approaches like NixOS and its package manager. But the end result is that we have to abandon a lot of the standard System V file organization setups that we've been using for 30 to 40 years because they're just not declarative enough. Chef and Puppet aren't good enough for this purpose, unfortunately, because they interpret the entire system as an installation and it's just not practical to have a developer switch everything around on their system every time they switch projects.

Re: Why a Developer Laptop?

Sylvain Carle — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:47:32 -0000

I went to look at the specs to see if I could seriously consider this laptop... but on the page to order it (http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1... there seems to be no options to use Linux instead of Windows. Sounds like a missed opportunity in the developer market.

Edit: Duh, I should have just followed the links in the post... so Ubuntu is the core OS of project Sputnik but it is not available currently from Dell (directly).

Re: On APIs and Copyright

reneemjones — Sat, 05 May 2012 15:02:06 -0000

"The non-trivial challenge is balancing the individual good versus the public good."

There is no problem. Copyrights are bad. Always. Telling authors or musicians or programmers that they should expect to sit back and be paid for one hundred years for something they did a long time ago is nonsense. If I want to get paid this week, I have to work this week. It should be the same for everybody.

Re: Speed is a Feature

Andyrachman777 — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 03:45:18 -0000

i have task for usability server operating system ....but i dont uderstand about questioner model, and what must i ask in my questioner...can you help me about it...
the questioner about :
1. Learnability
2. Operability
3. Understandability
all about SERVER OPERATING SYSTEM (LINUX, WINDOWS 2008 and NETWARE)

thanks alot....
Andy Rachman
andyrachman777@yahoo.com

Re: Vocus Mail = Spam Mail

bob — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:07:27 -0000

I block them...blacklist them...let clients use a gmail account with them.

Re: On the Decline of the GPL

Michael Collins — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:37:28 -0000

For the record, the only occurrence of the word "dying" - until I just typed it - is in your comment. Steven never said the GPL was dying. He didn't even imply that it was. Rather, he simply stated that the market share it enjoyed was unsustainably high and has been whittled away by more than a few permissive licenses.

Perhaps the entire post can be summed up in two key sentences that occur back-to-back:
"The GPL is an enormously important mechanism, as we’ve asserted since at least 2005. It simply could not expect to be the only mechanism, indefinitely."

That does not sound like the author is saying that the GPL is "dying."

-MSC

Re: The Open Source Implications of the CloudStack Announcement

Mathew Lodge — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:02:44 -0000

I rather suspect that Citrix was looking for a badge of respectability for CloudStack, and found it in becoming an officially "blessed" Apache project. And some of their customers had problems with GPL, so it simply suited them best to switch to Apache. In their shoes, I'd do the same. QED.

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Jesse Robbins — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:41:49 -0000

Hey Stephen, quick update... Opscode just announced that as of March 2012:

* Chef has been downloaded over 800,000 since 2010!
* Our community grew to over 13,000 registered users
* Over 400 community cookbooks for everything from Apache to Zabbix.
* Over 600 individuals developers and 100 organizations are contributors to Open Source Chef!

(See the full announcement here: http://www.opscode.com/blog/20...

Re: Eucalyptus Doubles Down on its Amazon Bet

Donnie Berkholz — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:00:20 -0000

This raises a lot of interesting questions about PaaS's built upon Amazon-compat and non-compat stacks.

Re: What Boundary and DTrace Have in Common

John — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:13:23 -0000

Something like next gen strace+tcpdump?

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Walter Heck — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:11:39 -0000

Just for the record, puppet has it's own apt repo's as well, which are often more up to date then the debian ones :)

To the author: great article, interesting statistics!

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Luke Kanies — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:37:19 -0000

(I'm the founder of Puppet and CEO of Puppet Labs, so I'm clearly biased.)

Note that Puppet is built for sysadmins, not for developers, and most of the github stats are developer-oriented. I'm not surprised to find more parity there, but those developer stats are a small portion of the actual community, and the Debian stats are representative of the wider community. Given how many platforms Puppet runs on relative to Chef, and Chef runs best on Debian and Ubuntu, if Puppet has this much more adoption in those platforms, imagine what it's like on the platforms Chef doesn't support well, like Red Hat and OS X.

More useful stats would be to look at things like the user community, where Puppet has 3800 people on our mailing list and Chef has 770. This is a direct reflection of involvement, rather than the indirect github stats.

And correlating the drop in Puppet usage with the gain in Chef usage doesn't make sense - Chef went from 50 installs to 200, but Puppet apparently dropped by 600. It seems highly unlikely that these changes are anything but coincidence, given the large multiples involved. E.g., we announced our commercial product right around the time this dip started, and we released it right around the time it ended. This is a far more likely cause for the change than any outside factor, especially in such a smaller community.

So, it looks to me like Chef is getting what they want (ruby developers) and we're getting what we want: Sysadmins managing large-scale infrastructure.

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Jesse Robbins — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:51:49 -0000

Stephen,

Great post! A few notes about the data:

The Debian data you include here is inaccurate for Chef because Debian & Ubuntu users install Chef via Opscode's own apt-get repository and/or via RubyGems.

RubyGems provides a wealth of public stats. The Chef Gem alone has been downloaded 678,891 times as of March 13, 2012.

(Puppet also has a Gem which has been downloaded 174,752 times, although they have many download options.)

No matter what tool people choose or how they get it... it is awesome to know we're helping so many sysadmins, engineers, and developers get awesome stuff done.

I'm proud to be a part of it.

-Jesse Robbins
Cofounder & Chief Community Officer
Opscode - Creators of Chef ;-)

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Matt Asay — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:16:11 -0000

I'd love to hear any confirming or contradictory evidence, and maybe particularly how prevalent people see Puppet and Chef being used in cloud deployments.

Re: Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

Matt Asay — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:15:13 -0000

I've heard it said that Puppet tends to be used by those with lots of machines already in place and in need of configuration management, whereas Chef tends to get used in greenfield opportunities. So Chef tends to get used by new school startups, while Puppet is used by enterprises with lots of systems. I don't have a huge personal data set to determine the veracity of this, but in my (admittedly slight) experience this distinction seems to hold.

Re: Infochimps and the Future of Data Marketplaces

@mrflip — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:38:41 -0000

I see the data platform serving to the data marketplace as Amazon's Kindle does to their eBook business. Amazon currently sells more e- than physical-books, yet countless prior efforts to build a winning eBook business had failed. Amazon won by making it transformatively easier to enjoy digital reading, which in turn powered their large and durable content market.

We had multiple conversations with companies who saw the value in diverse adjacent data -- who knew that their own data lacked the necessary explanatory variables -- but who basically said "we want that data, but don't have your stack; let's talk more once our internal capabilities improve". Once we've helped a company regain mastery over a terabyte-scale data flow of customer analytics, the value of say augmenting geolocations with implied demographics is clear.

The enterprise data marketplace that wins is the one that brings "the rest of the world into your data warehouse", but I'd always thought the enterprise connector would be a late-game piece. Instead, we're betting on it as the conduit that unlocks demand for data by the millions of rows.

Re: Infochimps and the Future of Data Marketplaces

Fadi Maali — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:13:26 -0000

Nice post. Let me put side-by-side a different take on this:
Edd Dumbill, On Oreilly Radar (
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/..., put the argument this way: "A principle of big data is that it's often easier to move your computation to the data, rather than the reverse. Because of this, we're seeing the increasing integration between cloud computing facilities and data markets: Microsoft's data market is tied to its Azure cloud, and Infochimps offers hosted compute facilities."
While the discussion here also makes sense, I personally tend to agree more with Edd.

Re: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: February 2012

Yavuz Ege Özcan — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:37:04 -0000

Java is growing because of Android, don't you think? Would that be hard to analyse?

Re: Infochimps and the Future of Data Marketplaces

Gordon Haff — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:09:43 -0000

I agree with your basic point but "timing" should IMO be taken to include the coming together of related and necessary pieces. For example, in the case of ASPs, I'd argue that the evolution of technologies like RESTful interfaces was one of the things that made more recent SaaS take off whereas ASPs mostly didn't.

Re: On the Decline of the GPL

austinhamman — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:43:30 -0000

http://www.rants.org/wp-conten...
just reminded me of this

Re: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: February 2012

elimisteve — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:21:47 -0000

Glad to see Go getting more popular! It's such an awesome language... Speed + simplicity + concurrency == Awesome.

Re: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: February 2012

elimisteve — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:20:45 -0000

"...on LinkedIn, the Java user group grew members faster than every other tracked programming language excepting C# and Java."

Java was most popular except for C# and... Java? I'm not sure what you mean.

Re: On the Decline of the GPL

Dan — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:40:27 -0000

I'm an anti-copyleft, pro-permissive, pro-public-domain person, but the idea that the GPL is dying seems rather ridiculous. GPL is the most popular open-source license and the copyleft makes sure that will never change.

Re: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: February 2012

Matt — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:33:26 -0000

That and vim.org/scripts/ is mirrored on GitHub.https://github.com/vim-scripts