Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

It seems like it’s open source buying season, with now Nokia buying Trolltech. I feel very happy for the Trolltech folks. We already talked about it, that Trolltech needed some fresh funding to change its business model.

Since my first EPOC apps on a then Nokia Communicator prototype phone back in 2000, I have never been a Symbian fan (Symbian’s SDK custom half-baked toolchain, the libraries solving C++ problems that should be left to the compiler, and most importantly, not running on Linux have always put me back from Symbian). Qt, is by far, the best UI toolkit, but Qt has not grown to its full potential because of it being GPL.

And, the question to me really is, will Nokia change the licensing of Qtopia? I certainly hope so, otherwise it will be really hard for mobile app developers to invest on this platform, especially in light of the competition from Symbian, .NET and Java platforms.

I set myself to write last night a simple PHP OpenID consumer for Yahoo’s! However, I have encountered the Oops message that most folks have also faced:

Ooops…
Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back later.

Anyhow, I think it’s really cool, both for users and for application providers, for a whole number of reasons:

• OpenID V2 has the notion of Directed Identity, which from a user’s perspective simply means not having to know that you are using OpenID (like it should be). In other words, it just works. A simple HTTP POST to yahoo.com and you are all set!
• There is no need anymore to go through hurdles of storing user information and mapping users, like you almost always had to do with OpenID. With OpenID V2 the consumer can query profile information from the OpenID provider. The user has the control to select from a number of profiles stored on the provider, and even pick what attributes in a given profile get shared with each consumer. The user is in control!

Really, this is really exciting, and makes me very proud of being a Yahoo! I’ll pick this test back once we go live by end of this month.

This is truly amazing. Sun and Oracle are set to buy all letters on the LAMP stack, with now Sun buying MySQL for 1 billion dollars (thanks Pascal for the ping). Maybe now Monty and David will start competing with Larry Ellison’s extravagant yacht department. Seriously, 1 billion dollars is a record price for any open source company. Will Oracle now finally buy RedHat to put pressure on SUN?

I am hoping to see the JAVA ticker symbol company improve MySQL support, and licensing, for Java. Since, honestly, right now it sucks so much that one would say the only viable RDBMS alternative for Linux and Java is Oracle (please don’t get me started with DB2).