John "jbob" Bobowicz's Blog: Open Source Archives

In the past two months, we've seen Sun participate in The Apache Derby Project, an open source database written entirely in Java that IBM donated to Apache and now Jonathan recently announced Open Media Commons as an initiative that will develop royalty-free open standards for digital content.

No, you're not DReaMing

When Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the Progress Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit, last night with the Opening Remarks, I bet there were several people there that wished they were dreaming. This is because Jonathan shared his dream. He didn't just share any dream, he shared the Sun Labs project, "DReaM" (or DRM/ everywhere available) with the open source community under the OSI approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

He announced this last night as he unveiled the Open Media Commons initiative calling for an open source, royalty-free Internet standard to compensate rights-holders and stimulate innovation. Now THAT's the kind of dream I don't want to wake up from!

What's been contributed

Sun has launched Open Media Commons by donating the Sun Lab's DReaM project, licensed as open source with the CDDL License. It includes:

DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture implementing standardized interfaces and processes for the interoperability of DRM systems.
Java Stream Assembly: Launch pad for Video Delivery Servers using the Java Stream Assembly (JSR-158) API
Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Designed to serve standards compliant media (audio/video) streams over IP using open-standard protocols such as RTP and RTSP. SSS is compliant with 3GPP and ISMA specifications.

Who's rights are we managing?

I think this turns the tables on DRM is a couple of ways.

First, I think this is the first time I've heard anyone talk about the rights of the individual when they talk about Digital Rights Management. Jonathan describes "an age where individuals are creating and supplying the news as much as they are consuming it. Mobile phones play music and take pictures, high-quality video is delivered to almost any device on earth.." He rightly points out that in this day and age, it's not just big corporations that produce valuable digital content and therefore "we must not allow progress to be stifled by clumsy, self-defeating Internet tollgates in the form of a monolithic, closed digital rights management system."

Secondly, and specifically to DRM-OPERA - which is part of Sun's contribution to Open Media Commons, is the notion of user-based license provisioning as opposed to device-based licensing.

The java.net Fairness Board

Posted by jbob on June 17, 2004 at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nominations begin this Sunday for a seat on the java.net Fairness Board. Here is a description of the Fairness board and how the election process works.

What is the Fairness Board?

java.net's governance defines several Boards to help ensure the community runs smoothly and fairly. One of them is the java.net Fairness Board.

The java.net Fairness Board consists of three (3) members and provides oversight for critical java.net activities to ensure that java.net operates in a fair way and follows the java.net Guiding Principles. Their responsibility and authority includes:

Settle any dispute between members of java.net regarding the application of the Guiding Principles.
Review java.net processes and policies to make sure they are consistent with the Guiding Principles.
Review all changes to java.net Governance.
Manage an appeals process for members who dispute a decision made by the Community Manager.

One seat on the Fairness Board is appointed by Sun and is currently filled by Ron Goldman. The remaining two seats each have two year terms and are elected by the community. The terms of the elected seats are staggered so that only one of them is up for election each year. Rob Clark and Ken Arnold were invited to fill these seats when java.net launched last June.

As announced in a previous weblog, one of the two elected seats is up for election this year.

How will the election be run?

This is the first election on java.net and here is some important information on how it will run:

java.net Elections will follow this time line:
- Week 1: Election Announcement (Week of June 14)
- Week 2 & 3: Nomination Period (June 20 - July 3)
- Week 4: Candidates Announced (Week of July 5)
- Week 5: Election (July 11 - July 17)
Only java.net members can vote and be nominated. Any java.net member can be nominated and all java.net members are encouraged to vote.
A voting project has been created to facilitate all elections.
Nominations will be done by posting the name and java.net ID of the nominee to a specified forum in the voting project during the nomination period.
java.net Members will vote for candidates by emailing the name and java.net ID of a candidate to the vote mail list.
The candidate that receives the most votes during the Election period will be declared the winner.
Election results will be announced the week after the Election period has passed.

More information on the upcoming election can be found in the voting project. You can also learn more about the Fairness Board in our governance.

Visit our Voting on java.net page to understand more about voting.

Microsoft says we should pay for email. When was it ever free?
Posted by jbob on March 07, 2004 at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

In a March 4th article on cnn.com titled "Paying for E-Mail May Be Anti-Spam Tactic", Anick Jesdanun reported that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, among others, is proposing a per message charge on email messages in order to combat SPAM.
It appears that companies, like Microsoft, Hashcash, and Goodwill Systems, are more interested in making money off of the volume than in solving the problem. Score one for capitalism, zero for customer service.
It is dissapointing that the article's author did not point out that email is not free today. We pay for email one way or another. The dial-up or broadband services that we need to access our "free" Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts is not free. The monthly membership fees to AOL and MSN that include email in their service is notoriously not free.
Passing the cost of SPAM onto customers is a slap in the face and adds insult to injury. It is shortcomings in the mail systems that allow for SPAM to circulate. Fix the problem.
Here's a suggestion: If ISP's took some responsibility fo their mail servers, they could revoke accounts that generate spam and they could provide their customers with intelligent firewall capabilities for fighting spam. For example, allowing me the ability to control who can email me (like I can do with Instant Messenger). Some email systems and clients can do this. If I subscribe to a mail list, I would need to configure my account to let that through.
Read the article yourself and share your thoughts and conclusions in our community discussion.

The birth of an online community.
Posted by jbob on June 10, 2003 at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Obviously, every large project take a lot of time and effort and building java.net was no different. We spent months incubating the idea into reality and like all projects had our share of late nights and last minute twists and curves. It all finally culminated, after some last minute flurries, with a big bang of a launch

I am not going to pretend to know a lot about child birth but a long laborous process (not exactly 9 months) with a lot of ugency and pushing at the end.....sounds like giving birth to me.

So, I can safely say we gave birth to a healthy java technology collaboration site that we named "java.net" I don't know the exact weight of this baby, but being born on June 10th makes it a Gemini, I suppose. Not sure what that means. Gemini's are great communitcators so I guess that's a good sign for it to be born under.

Ironically, my wife, Lisa, and I are expecting our first child.....news that I'm making public for the first time here! So, it looks like I will be learning to raise a child and a community at the same time.

Any advice on either would is welcome!

-jbob

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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