Being Cellfish : Open source

Podcast about System Center Cross Platform

cellfish — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:32:00 GMT

Here is a recent podcast where they talk about System Center Cross Platform and what it can do for you. They also talk about the inter-op part and open source.

System Center OpsMgr X-Plat Providers source code available

cellfish — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:07:00 GMT

So today we published some of the code for the cross platform implementation as open source. It's the code that implements the providers getting all the things needed for monitoring Solaris, Linux, AIX, HPUX etc. The fact that we were going to release this code as open source has been communicated for a long time but I think it kind of got lost in the whole cross platform message since it is kind of rare that Microsoft releases code as open source. Especially code for products and not just examples and frameworks.

System Center Cross Platform and Open Source

cellfish — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:30:00 GMT

Some news about System Center Cross Platform extensions. It will be in the box with the next release of System Center but the biggest news I think is that not only the open source taken into the product will be open source. The code used to discover and monitor parts of the UNIX operating systems such as processors, disks and network adapters will also be open source. That's something I wouldn't have bet on a few years ago.

Why open source doesn't do it for me

cellfish — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:37:00 GMT

An alternative title could have been "why unsponsored open source never work" but since sponsored open source sometimes don't work very well either, I didn't want to exclude sponsored open source from this post.

Over the years I've had to work with a number of open source projects. Both sponsored and unsponsored. With sponsored I mean a project where there is a company driving the development and making sure the project progresses and produce good results. An unsponsored project is when a number of volunteers drive the development of the project. I guess most open source projects are unsponsored as in there is no company making business decisions on what features to support.

And that is usually where everything goes wrong in my humble opinion. Because there are is no business involved the most advanced features and the most complex bugs almost never get fixed because if you're developing in your spare time you will concentrate on the fun stuff, not the boring obscure bugs someone has filed. And this is the experience I have from several projects (where wxWidgets and geeklog are is just two examples). A well documented and used-by-many open source projects usually covers about 99% of my needs. And I've often chosen the open source because it really adds value and is easy to use. But always, always there is this last percent it does not cover.

And this is when I run into trouble because the last percent of functionality I need, and that isn't in there, I discover quite late and there is no way I can defend the decision to change the decision so I'm stuck with what I got. And now I have to start working around the missing functionality or I have to rethink my solution so that I do not need that last percent of functionality. Neither option is very appealing to me since both include a lot of work and the reason for using the open source in the first place is to save me some time.

OK so now we all hopefully agree that almost all open source projects have missing functionality (or bugs) that you need fixed in order to continue working. So why don't I just fix the things I need in the open source and contribute it back to the open source community? Well first of all I have contributed fixes to various open source communities. I'm glad to do that whenever possible but most of the time I'm unable to do that. The reason I'm unable to contribute back is that it would take me more time to understand how the open source project works internally than it takes me to work around the problem. Remember that I typically use open source in order to reduce how much I have to work. So when I have to work around some missing functionality, I want to do it as quickly as possible. And most open source projects I've been in contact with have been pretty hard to get familiar with when I start looking at internal stuff of the project. A nice clean, well documented interface sometimes covers something that takes lots of time to understand.

Preemptive comment: So how much open source does Microsoft use internally? Well I don't know. Each use of open source in each project have to be cleared by lawyers and since that takes time I guess developers at Microsoft tend to not use open source very much.

Selenium the test tool

cellfish — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:39:00 GMT

I almost forgot that before the BDD/DDD presentation, there was a presentation about Selenium. I didn't forget it because it was a bad presentation but because the following presentation was so good...

I've never had any good experiences with tools for automatic testing but I must confess that Selenium looks nice. At least if you want to add regression tests to an existing GUI. And it is a web based GUI. So if those two fact apply to you, you should take a look at Selenium I think.

Selenium is good at recording actions and create test code. And it creates test code for unit tests frameworks such as NUnit and a whole bunch of other languages such as Python, Java, Ruby, PHP and more. However there seems to be some stability problems at the moment. According to the presenter (I have not found a link to verify this); Google have more than 51000 selenium tests in their projects. 96% of the tests run with no problem, 2% have problems due to confirmed bugs in Selenium and the last 2% are tests failing where the reason is unclear (Selenium vs the code tested).

This is a common problem I see when I work with open source. Open source applications are typically quite useful and easy to use 99% of the time. But I always tend to end up needing the last percent which is never implemented or have bugs. And the reason for this is usually that no one have bothered to implement the last tricky advanced feature I end up needing. You probably wanna know why I do not sit down and implement that feature and contribute it back to the open source community. Well that is a whole other topic and I will write about that it the near future.