"Microsoft must stop polluting the downstream with patent encumbrances.  Period.  Full stop."

- Matt Assay (Microsoft's dilemma: The importance of the downstream)

Open Source Testing is a great resource that lists most of the open source tools available to testers.  The site is run by Mark Aberdour and has been around since 2003.

Mark's contributions to the testing and open source communities have been very valuable.

Well... he just stepped it up a notch by posting details of his new Community Donations Program:

"during 2007 Open Source Testing has begun to generate fairly regular revenue. It has always been my aim, should the site become commercially viable, to put some profits back into the open source community. I will be aiming to make bi-monthly donations (funds providing) to open source testing projects and open source organisations of my own choosing. The donations will not be earth shattering, but whether they cover hosting and hardware costs, contractor costs, publicity, trips to events or just some extra motivation, they will certainly make a difference."

Great work Mark!

The Free Software Foundation just released the final version of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AFDL).  This license covers software that is hosted on a computer network (SaaS - Software as a Service).  The regular GNU GPL only covers software distribution, so you are able to run modified GPL code on a network server without releasing your modified source code.  The GNU AFDL prohibits this and ensures source code for hosted software is made available.

from FSF:

"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software overa network to receive the source for that program."

It will be interesting to see which projects adopt this license and what its effects will be.  I can imagine that commercial companies would be very hesitant to use AFDL code.

The FSF just posted this:

A Quick Guide to GPLv3

A very nice high level overview of the current GPL and what it means.

There are lots of resources available online to learn about Free and Open Source Software.

If you want to understand the essence and ideals of this movement, a great start would be to read the following 4 books. After reading these, you will have a good grasp of the history and philosophy of freedom in the technology world.

• Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (full text online)
• Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (full text online)
• Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (full text online)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

"Open Source"

In the words of Inigo Montoya [The Princess Bride]:  "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means, what you think it means."

A few months back, Radview Software announced that they are releasing an open source version of WebLOAD, their web performance and load testing tool.  I was very excited about this and thought it was a fantastic move that would have a big impact in the test tool market.  I am a performance engineer and a huge Free/Open Source Software advocate, so I love to see companies in the space that interests me most come around to embrace openness.

In their press release, Radview stated:

"WebLOAD Open Source, licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) version 2, is based on WebLOAD, the company's flagship product that is already deployed at 1,600 sites. Immediately available for free download and use, WebLOAD is a commercial-grade open source project with more than 250 engineering years of product development."

Ok cool.. they used the GPL and opened up the whole shebang.  Wow, this company actually "gets it"... right?

Umm.. not quite.

If you look through the source code that is available for WebLOAD Open Source, you will notice that only code for a small subset of the product is available.  In actuality, WebLOAD Open Source is a partially proprietary tool which is marketed as Open Source Software.  The software has significant limitations in functionality and scalability.  The source code which needs to be modified to remove these restrictions is not distributed.  So what we are left with is a crippled version of the tool.

In a recent post to the WebLOAD OS Forum, someone asked to see the source code for "proxynator", which is the recording feature in WebLOAD.

The response from the Forum Admin (Amir Shoval, a Radview employee) was this:

"Currently the source code for the proxynator is not available as part of the open source code of WebLOAD."

This is in direct contradiction to what their website states:

"WebLOAD Open Source introduces a unified script authoring environment for recording, editing and debugging."

When further probed about this, he stated the following:

WebLOAD Open Source is dual licensed:
  1. the WebLOAD Load Engine is totally open sourced and hence is licensed under the GPL
  2. but the complete WebLOAD is still licensed under a proprietary license, which grants free usage in WebLOAD Open Source.

wait.. wait.. WHAT?
I thought the press release said "licensed under the GNU Public License", and "WebLOAD Open Source is a fully functional, commercial-grade performance testing product"?  Nowhere on their website or marketing materials to they talk about this dual licensing and limited availability of source code.

Now, if we look at the End User License Agreement (EULA) that applies to WebLOAD Open Source, it gets worse:

2. License Restrictions. This License does not permit you or any third party to:
(i) modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble (except to the extent that this restriction is expressly prohibited by law) or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of all or any portion of the Software;
(ii) modify, translate or create derivative works of all or any portion of the Software;
(iii) copy the Software (other than a single copy solely for back-up or archival purposes);
(iv) rent, lease, sell, offer to sell, distribute, or otherwise transfer rights to the Software;

OK... so we have an "open source" product that is actually dual licensed, where a large portion of the toolset is proprietary.  And furthermore, by accepting the EULA, you give up all of your rights that were granted under the GPL.  Huh?

So... to reiterate, WebLOAD Open Source is *not* open source.  A subset of it is open source: the [crippled] load engine.  Contrary to what their press release and website says, it contains proprietary components that are released in binary form with no source code.  It is rather disappointing to see a company jump on the bandwagon of open source without respecting the freedom that is supposed to come with it.

In conclusion: Is WebLOAD Open Source currently Open Source?  No
Will WebLOAD Open Source actually become Open Source?  Well.. that's up to Radview

Hey, I'm all for Freedom.  I applaud Radview for any of the code they released under the GPL.  But lets be fair, if you want to call your product open source and reap any benefits that come along with that... you gotta walk the walk.

(Pylot is the open source web performance/load test tool that I am developing)

When a test run is finished, a report is automatically generated to summarize the test results. It includes various statistics and graphs on response times and throughput from the run. A sample of the results report can be seen here:

http://www.pylot.org/samples/results/results.html

Pylot also writes results to CSV files so you can import them into your favorite spreadsheet to crunch numbers, generate statistics, and create graphs. I have been working

I have also been working on the GUI. Here is the latest:

http://www.pylot.org/samples/ui/pylot_ui_screenshot_2007_08_20.png

---

Related:

• PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source)
• PyLT - Dev Update #1 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #2 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #3 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• Pylot - Dev Update #4 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool (New Name and Defining Test Cases)
• Pylot - Dev Update #5 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Graphs With MatPlotlib)

(via Matt Asay)

I found this pretty interesting.

Lines Of Code (LOC) in some popular Open Source code bases:

• Linux Kernel: 6 million
• Sun Java Development Kit: 6.5 million
• Sun StarOffice: 9 million
• Eclipse: 17 million

Microsoft launched a new site which is intended to be the "gateway for information about open source engagements and activities across Microsoft."

From the FAQ:

"What is the Microsoft position on intellectual property (IP) and open source?

Intellectual property (IP) serves a vital role in maintaining a healthy cycle of innovation in the IT industry. IP concepts—including copyright, trademark, patent, or public domain—are useful for developers to define terms of use that enable their project or business to thrive, regardless of what development model they choose."

Sorry, but patents do *not* "serve a vital role in maintaining a healthy cycle of innovation in the IT industry".  Restricting ideas actually does the exact opposite.

So... I'm glad to see Microsoft taking steps towards Free software, but as of now they still don't really "get it".

It's Official...

From the FSF press release:

"On Friday, June 29, at 12 noon (EDT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3.  Please join us in celebration as we bring to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world's most popular free software license."

GPLv3 has been a long time coming.  This is a big moment in Free Software.

Michael Tiemann (President of the Open Source Initiative):

"When is the OSI going to stand up to companies who are flagrantly abusing the term 'open source'?"
The answer is:  starting today.

Read more:  Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up?

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

(PyLT is the web performance/load test tool that I am developing)

A quick update on PyLT development...

This week I rewrote the GUI using wxPython.  It still needs a *lot* of work, but here is what it's starting to look like:

Related:
PyLT - Dev Update #1 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source)

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

A quick update on PyLT development...

I have a working version of the guts of my tool (the multi-threaded load generator).  I have now started working on the user interface.  My initial idea was to use Tk for the GUI Toolkit.  I started developing a minimal GUI and quickly realized I need a Toolkit more powerful than Tk.

My original justification for using Tkinter (from blog comments):

"I will probably eventually move to a richer toolkit (like wxPython) if I take this thing far. For right now, Tk works. It comes distributed with core python, it's super fast and light, it's easy to use, and I know it pretty well. Though it looks like crap and is limited in many ways."

As of today I am rewriting the GUI with wxPython, which uses the wxWidgets Toolkit.  This should give me the ability to create a rich cross-platform UI for my tool.

[For posterity] Here is what the original prototype of the Tk UI looked like:

R.I.P. Tk... Hello wxWidgets

Related:
PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source) 

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

I have started development on a new web performance/load testing tool.  It is targeted at testing Web Services.

Here is some Q&A with myself:

---

You know you are reinventing the wheel, right?

Yes, I know.  There are already open source web load testing tools available (OpenSTA, JMeter, Grinder, WebLOAD, etc).  I have used all of these as well as proprietary tools for years.  I am a performance engineer and I feel like I need a tool set that I am intimately familiar with.  I need the ability to easily alter and tweak the tool at will.  I don't have the time, budget, or patience enough to wait on vendors when I need something.  I also want a tool that is fun to hack and adapt.  For this, I need to understand the code base deeply.

What language are you using?

Python.  The initial GUI uses Tk, but this may be changed down the road. I use Python's threading module for concurrency. If this doesn't scale well enough, I will be exploring other models of concurrency (perhaps generator based coroutines).

Why do you think you can write a tool like this?

I have worked in performance testing for nearly 10 years.  I have written many tools that work with various protocols to do distributed load generation and testing.  Creating a simple HTTP load generator is sort of my Hello World 2.0 for each language I try (I have written these from scratch in Python, Perl, Java, and C#).  This tool takes that basic concept and organizes it into a robust application.

Will it be Free and Open Source?

Of course!  Licensed under GNU GPL.

---

For an early look, check out the source repository at:  http://pylt.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

More details to come.

-Corey

One cool thing about developing Open Source software is seeing where people end up using your software. I have seen my WebInject test tool show up in various places for various uses.

The most recent example of this come from op5 AB:

"op5 is a leading product developer of systems and network monitoring and management software. Our aim is to give our customers an increased and measurable availability to the IT system – both in terms of quality and quantity. Our products are op5 Monitor, op5 Statistics and op5 LogServer."

op5 Monitor (Linux Open Source Awards: Best Open Source Application 2006) is their network and application monitoring solution:

"op5 Monitor is a system that monitors the whole network. op5 Monitor is unique in its flexibility and it can monitor all net connected components from servers, routers and printers to individual processors, for example mail services, web servers and virus programmes. All these functions are handled by a web – browser. The system can handle a net with a several thousand units."

Carl Ekman wrote a nice paper explaining how to use WebInject as an intelligent agent/plugin for use in web application monitoring:
WebInject and op5 Monitor - Setting up advanced website monitoring with WebInject (PDF)

The paper serves a nice example and tutorial for using WebInject as a monitoring plugin (It can be used in a similar fashion with Nagios also):

"Most op5 Monitor users have detailed monitoring of all inhouse applications and servers, but sometimes not even that is enough. What if something unforeseen happens that makes dynamically generated content spout jibberish to thousands of visitors without you even knowing about it?

With WebInject you can monitor the actual content of the web pages, and you can perform simulated user actions such as logging in and checking an account balance. If a search string is not present, an error message occurs or a link is broken, you can get an alert with a customized, descriptive message."

InfoWorld article:

Three open source Web service testing tools get high marks

Rick Grehan of InfoWorld reviewed 3 popular open source tools for testing web services.  Rick is a contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.  One of the tools he reviewed was WebInject (which I wrote).

"In this roundup, I examined three tools that purport to verify that your Web services do what they are supposed to do, that they resist graceless failure, and (in some cases) that they conduct themselves with efficiency. The tools are soapUI, TestMaker, and WebInject. All are open source, and are available for free download and incorporation into your next Web services project."

My tool (WebInject) scored pretty well in the comparison.

---

From the article:

WebInject

WebInject is a super-lightweight testing tool that can automate the testing of both Web services and Web applications. In fact, WebInject's ability to test XML/SOAP Web services appears to be a recent addition to the tool, as earlier versions could not readily handle the SOAP protocol.

Written in Perl, WebInject is primarily a command-line tool, though its author provides a thin Perl/Tk user interface that at least simplifies the execution of tests for those unwilling to spend too much time at the command prompt. If you're not familiar with Perl, don't panic. WebInject is built so that you can construct your tests without having to touch so much as a byte of Perl code.

WebInject is really an execution and reporting engine. Unlike the other tools, it has no IDE-style user interface, so tests must be written in an editor outside of the WebInject UI. This gives WebInject a less professional feel, but doesn't hamper the tool. I envision users of WebInject having directories filled with text files of various test “templates.” To add a new test case, the user just pops open his or her favorite editor, does some cutting, some pasting, and a bit of tweaking to alter the template to fit the specific circumstance, and ba-ding!, you've got a new test case.

...

In essence, a WebInject “project” is nothing more than an XML file filled with a set of elements strung one after the other. WebInject's simple structure lets you build tests with amazing rapidity. You must, however, have a moderately good understanding of the mechanics of SOAP protocols as well as a tool that lets you generate and capture HTTP/SOAP requests and responses. You'll need the requests to build the POST body and the responses so that you can create proper “verifypositive” and “verifynegative” regular expressions to check for success or failure. I used the Web Service Toolkit add-on for Eclipse to grab requests and responses for WebInject; once I had gotten the hang of it, I fell easily into the groove of building test cases.

---

Criteria	Score	Weight
Documentation	8	20%
Features	8	20%
Scalability	8	20%
Ease-of-use	8	15%
Portability	9	15%
Value	9	10%

Review Score:
Very Good 8.3

Cost:
Free download - open source

Platforms
Any platform that runs Perl or has a Perl interpreter installed

Bottom Line:
Much less feature-rich than the other tools, the lightweight WebInject nonetheless bolts out of the starting gate. If you need testing that will be off the ground and flying in minutes, reach for WebInject. On the other hand, it has far fewer capabilities than the other two products in this test, and unless you want to hack the Perl code, WebInject's feature set is pretty much what you install.

---

visit www.webInject.org
for more of my tools, visit: www.goldb.org

Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems) posted an excellent article describing Sun's stark choice of how to re-invent itself.  They stepped towards Free software and embraced Open Source.  Microsoft is taking a much different stance.  They are asserting patent claims over many pieces of the GNU/Linux system.

Jonathan gives some great advice in his Free Advice for the Litigious:

"No amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."

Can you hear us *now*?

I saw this message from Linus on the LKLM and I thought it was well stated.  I love the way Linus runs the crazy bazaar of Linux Kernel development.  He stays true to technical merit and essentially bases all of his decisions on this.  (though sometimes this is in conflict with the ethics of Free Software).

Linus Torvalds from the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"One of the most motivating things there *is* in open source is "personal pride".

It's a really good thing, and it means that if somebody shows that your code is flawed in some way (by, for example, making a patch that people claim gets better behaviour or numbers), any *good* programmer that actually cares about his code will obviously suddenly be very motivated to out-do the out-doer!

Does this mean that there will be tension and rivalry? Hell yes. But that's kind of the point. Life is a game, and if you aren't in it to win, what the heck are you still doing here?

As long as it's reasonably civil (I'm not personally a huge believer in being too polite or "politically correct", so I think the "reasonably" is more important than the "civil" part!), and as long as the end result is judged on TECHNICAL MERIT, it's all good.

We don't want to play politics. But encouraging peoples competitive feelings? Oh, yes."

OK, this is huge news: www.webload.org

The commercial performance/load test tool market is dominated by large proprietary commercial vendors (HP/Mercury, Borland/Segue, etc). Radview has a nice product called WebLOAD that competes in the space.

As of this morning, Radview announced they have released WebLOAD OS, an open source version of WebLOAD. It is full-on GPL licensed (no fake open source). I already browsed their source tree. They have a Subversion repository.. code is in C and C++,

The Open Source performance/load test tool market doesn't offer many choices. Currently the most popular tools are JMeter and OpenSTA. 

This will be exciting. I wonder how well Radview will deal with the community on this. Though if it's not good, GNU GPL certainly allows forking :)

more to come...

I posted some pics of the latest OLPC prototypes a few weeks ago.  Well... I got to see them 2 weeks in a row; so here are some more pics of the machine up close.

... Seems the whole "hand crank" idea is gone.  There is now a pullchord on the external power supply with a 10:1 ratio (1 minute of pulling = 10 mins of computing) for manually recharging power... The keyboard is tiny and soft feeling.  The screen is small but is very viewable in direct light without backlighting (which is probably the #1 power drain on laptops).

OLPC rocks!

Me geeking out:

Old school meets new school...
Gerald J. Sussman (yes, the MIT Scheme guy) playing with the latest OLPC prototype:

Closeups:

.. these machines run a scaled down version of Fedora Linux that is loaded with Python applications.

-Corey

RMS has been on the "GNU/Linux" naming convention rant for years; urging people to give the GNU Project and the legions of contributors credit they deserve.  Afterall, the bulk of Free Software OS userland is made of GNU contributions.

One might think that a company like Sun Microsystems wouldn't grok this concept, since most GNU/Linux distributions themselves don't.

However, some folks at Sun definitely get it:

Tim Bray - Director of Web Technologies (talking about Ian Murdoch joining Sun):

"As of this weekend Ian wasn’t even on the payroll yet and was already in in a peppy little email debate over when to say “Linux” and when to say “GNU” and when to say both."

Simon Phipps - Chief Open Source Officer:

"the combination of the GNU operating system pioneered by Richard Stallman with the inclusive development delivered around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds has brought a new life and energy to the extended family tree of Unix. The popularity of GNU/Linux bears testament to the vision and skill Stallman and Torvalds exhibit."

The Perl Foundation won't be involved in Google Summer of Code 2007.

Bill Odom:

"The short version: We submitted an application to be a mentoring organization, but we weren't accepted."

However, even without the Perl community represented, the list of mentoring organizations and projects is really good!

I have used Nagios for several years, and it has served me well as an open source distributed monitoring system.

I just read about Zabbix, and I'm posting here so I won't forget to check it out.  Zabbix is GPL (v2) licensed and looks interesting.  I will post more once I get a chance to play with it.

In his article: "Joe Barr rips proprietary software vendor a new one", Joe does exactly what the title states  :)

His article was a response to an earlier piece by Roger Greene (CEO of Ipswitch), where Roger says some very confused/uninformed things about Open Source software.

One thing Joe didn't rip was this excerpt from Roger Greene:

"The open source community claims bugs can be fixed faster for open source software than commercial software because hundreds, if not thousands, of people are looking at the code daily and can help with fixes. [ ... ] Even when those individuals generously offer their time for free, can you really afford to wait for one to agree with you on the urgency of action if your network is down?"

Huh?

That is a very odd and misleading way to look at it.  Open Source gives you the ability to modify the code yourself.  You don't have to wait for anyone.  You can hire a freelance developer or consultancy to fix it on the spot.  If you find a problem in a proprietary vendor's software, can you do the same?

No.. proprietary software puts you at the mercy of your vendor.

I just stumbled across the PLEAC Project (Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook).

Project Description:

"Following the great Perl Cookbook (by Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington, published by O'Reilly; you can freely browse an excerpt of the book here) which presents a suite of common programming problems solved in the Perl language, this project aims to gather fans of programming, in order to implement the solutions in other programming languages."

There is sample code in many popular languages.  The Python examples are really good.  They would serve as an excellent primer for someone moving from Perl to Python, or as a general Python reference with cookbook-style examples.

It is hosted at SourceForge and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

Wow. I just read something interesting about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in Guido's PyCon writeup:

"The software is far from finished.  An early version of the GUI and window manager are available, and a few small demo applications: chat, video, two games, and a web browser, and that's about it!  The plan is to write all applications in Python (except for the web browser), and a "view source" button should show the Python source for the currently running application.  In the tradition of Smalltalk (Alan Kay is on the OLPC board, and has endorsed the project's use of Python) the user should be able to edit any part of a "live" application and see the effects of the change immediately in the application's behavior."

So... they are going to be running a GNU/Linux OS (a stripped down version of Fedora), with essentially all applications in Python.

This is very cool on many levels. It is the ultimate endorsement of Python.  It also makes me think about the future...  If OLPC is successful, a few years down the road we might be looking at several million young new Open Source/Python hackers.  Nice!

IronPython is the Python implementation that runs on the .NET platform... originally created by Jim Hugginin, but later backed (overtaken?) by Microsoft.

Microsoft's ambivalence towards Free software is a bit hard to follow sometimes and it really makes me question their entire approach to the software community  (wait.. have I ever *not* questioned that? :).

As a Python advocate and *nix geek trying to make my way working in a .NET shop, I am really excited about IronPython.  I was also initially impressed with Microsoft's embracement of the Python community and toe dipping into Open Source.  But then I hear Microsoft will not take patches from non-Microsoft developers and will not bundle IronPython with other applications which have certain Free licenses(LGPL, BSD). To me, this is really a shame. That is not how you approach a community.

Well... at least somebody has stepped up and is maintaining IronPython Community Edition (IPCE).

props.

So check out IPCE and the FePy Project!

I posted a lengthy entry to the "getting feedback on tools" thread going on at the toolsmith-guild group. 

The thread is discussing how to get feedback and participation going in test tools projects.  This experience report sheds some light on this, but more generally can be applied to getting your open source project noticed and used.  I thought other open source developers might find this useful.

Here is my post:

---

Hi.. new to the list.

I have some experience in this area I want to comment on:

I had a specific need for a tool to test web services a few years ago ('02-'03). I had been rolling my own tools in various languages for quite a while and had some stuff that I thought others might be interested in; so I setup a SourceForge project and released it in Jan'04. The tool is called WebInject. Not many people used it at first. I just kept adding features and releasing. I was scratching my own itches and using my tool internally at a company I was working for. Eventually I got a few bites and some people started to download it and try it out.

As of today, the project site has served over a quarter million pageviews and the tool has been downloaded over 30,000 times. I've had feedback from all corners of the world.

See the Download Stats

In the early days, *any* bug that was reported, I would dive into immediately.. I was turning around fixes and new releases in crazy time. This personal attention sparked a lot of lengthy email conversations where I was starting to get real feedback. It wasn't the case where I could just sit back and expect quality feedback. I really engaged the users and asked questions. Pretty soon I was getting more feedback than I could reasonably handle. Around this time I started getting some patches sent to me. This accelerated development as you start to get various ideas from other people. A few silly bugs were also cleaned up.. stuff I never would have caught on my own. Encouraging patches is huge.. once someone gets a piece of their own code into your code base, they have an intimate connection.

I was also contacted by someone writing a book that wanted to use my tool as an example. I was really excited about this and put in some serious time getting the tool cleaned up and more useful. I never saw a published copy, but apparently it exists (I saw the PDF drafts :) It was also mentioned in a few testing magazines and articles which was cool for me to see.

I don't maintain WebInject much any more. I think it is cool and useful, but it's a rats nest of Perl code that needs some serious love. There is some stuff that bothers me so much about it that I barely want to touch it sometimes :) I spend all my time on newer tools these days, but I still keep on top of it enough to facilitate others using it and posting patches/updates to it (though I haven't released in over a year I think). Oddly, it has become somewhat entrenched in monitoring systems. Most of the users lately seem to be people running Nagios (open source monitoring system) that need an intelligent web plugin/agent.

Some basic thoughts on open source tool adoption and getting feedback:

• A tool without documentation doesn't exist.. without quality documentation, don't even bother.. nobody will touch it.
  
• If it takes someone more than 10 minutes to install, configure, run, and see the results from a simple test case.. nobody will use it. Once someone sees something work, it is tangible and they become engaged. I achieved this with my tool.. if you download and run it, you are presented with a GUI. Pressing "run" executes a preconfigured sample test case that hits my site. I wanted the most clueless of people to be able to immediately see a green "PASS", and say "hey, cool it actually did something". This satisfaction must come immediately or it will be abandoned. (unless of course you already have a user base that has made it past this hurdle and can encourage others to put in the effort to get it working)
  
• Make your tool easy to get. The online presence of your tool should allow someone to visit the website and immediately download it. I have seen tools released that take 5 levels of navigation before you get to the download options, or don't even have a website or project page somewhere.
  
• Announce your tools.. release early, release often.. who cares.. blog it, forum it, email it, digg it, usenet it, comment about it.. see if anyone has interest. Don't annoyingly spam it, bet let people know it exists. If you announce your tool once only, buried deep in a technical mailing list, don't expect people to come rushing.
  
• Encourage participation. Go out of your way to let people know that you encourage and appreciate feedback, bug reports, offers for collaboration, patches, etc.
  
• You need a forum or a mailing list with a web accessible archive. It has to be super simple to talk to you in public and let others see answers to questions and begin to participate on their own and to offer advice. Using a many-to-one scheme where you just tell people to email you isn't gonna work. It is too private.. people want to know what is going on and hear from each other and offer tips. I have had several thousand posts to my forums for this little tool.
  

- Corey Goldberg

---

Eben Moglen [2006]:

"This will be remembered in history as the summer that Mr. Gates retired and Mr. Stallman didn't"

Another excellent and inspiring speech by Moglen

.. where he reminds us of the inevitable, unavoidable, endgame:

"Software that can do everything, runs everywhere, needs no additional testing, just works, can do anything human beings want, and costs $0.00 per unit."

It eludes me why people don't seem to grasp this:

"Excluding people from ideas works wells only if you think of ideas as something only one person at a time has.

When you live in our world and you know that ideas are created by people cooperating, sharing, yelling, screaming, waving their arms and typing code at 2 in the morning; the 20 year old monopoly on the ownership of an idea is an abomination."

(but Eben, tell us how you *really* feel :)

(* I am not affiliated with Slim Devices.. this is just a fanboy post.)

I wanted to hook up something that would integrate my home PC (jacked full of glorious DRM-free MP3's) and my home audio system. I didn't want to go the full HTPC route, I am more of an audio guy and my immediate need is for an audio-only solution.

After browsing the various Media Servers, Sound Cards, External Components, and other music playing gizmos; I finally figured out the type of unit I was looking for and what it should do...

Here are my requirements:

• Must be able to play the MP3's stored on my computer
• Must have a cross platform client application (I use both Linux and Windows at home)
• Must have high quality analog and digital output that can connect to my receiver/amp
• Must have a remote with basic controls (volume, tuning, select, etc)
• Must be able to control it from my computer (change songs, playlists, etc)
• Must be able to stream Internet Radio (of some sort)
• No wires connected to my PC

Obviously some of these requirements became apparent when I read about the Squeezebox from Slim Devices.  It seems to do everything I need (and more), and isn't outrageously expensive ($299 retail).

So I ended up ordering one of these bad boys to play around with.  (of course I got the all black version)

OK.. but now the real reason I chose the Squeezebox... It is Open Source and has a developer community!

Well... it is sort of Open Source.  Its SlimServer software (the audio server software) is GPL licensed, so the Source Code is available to modify, hack, and contribute to.  But.. the device's firmware is proprietary and closed (boo).

The real kicker came when I realized that the SlimServer is written in Perl It is web based, and uses templated HTML/CSS.  Hmm.. I've written a Perl program or 2 [thousand] in my day... this could get interesting.  I already have SlimServer running from Source and I am making little tweaks to the interface to customize it for myself.  Hopefully someday I'll do something worth contributing back...  I love that I have the option.

... More to come once I actually get the Sqeezebox and hook it up..  I just ordered it last night.