Posts by andypiper

Sydney Opera House to devs: build our app for peanuts, wear patent pain

Hackday Manifesto

This sucks.

Read http://hackdaymanifesto.com/ - particularly the Intellectual Property section and those around it in the Atmosphere and Attitude section - and realise that some people run hackathons for good reasons (fun and learning) not exploitation.

Oh, and if you agree with the manifesto, feel free to sign it :-)

Red Hat parachutes into crowded PaaS market

Lock-in?

"a tradeoff, which is that PaaS's are more proprietary than IaaS's and represent a greater commitment to any one company's solution, and therefore pose a great opportunity for PaaS companies to lock-in developers."

I would agree that some PaaS solutions represent lock-in - but I would say that it typically is those which tie deeply into the IaaS. Specific examples are AWS (with Beanstalk, etc as the scaling element of a PaaS) and Google App Engine. In both cases the vendors want you to use more and more of their cloud APIs and that makes it very hard to make your applications portable.

An Open PaaS like Cloud Foundry (which you strangely don't mention in this article) is aimed exactly at stopping you from being locked in either from an app perspective, or from the IaaS or OS - and that's unlike Red Hat, Azure, etc. Cloud Foundry can be run across different infrastructures (vSphere, AWS and OpenStack currently - more to come) and requires no code modifications to the majority of well-written cloud aware apps. You're also not limited to running with a specific OS underneath your app.

Facebook Messenger tech to glue 50bn-strong Internet of Stuff

Re: Embedded with what? ARM processes in thermostats?

There's an extension to the protocol (MQTT-S) which runs over UDP and connectionless networks.

this is not a "Facebook protocol"

Hi, I'm a committer on the Eclipse Paho Open Source project which delivers MQTT clients, I previously worked at IBM with the creator of the protocol, and I run the MQTT community site.

It's true that Facebook chose to use MQTT for their Messenger and mobile apps, but the protocol itself dates from 1999 (see http://mqtt.org/faq) and has been in wide use for years. So the headline here is a misrepresentation.

The protocol has been published royalty-free for many years, there are many Open Source implementations, and it is now with OASIS for broader, open standardisation so that no one organisation will control it.

If you are interested in learning more head over to http://mqtt.org/get-involved :-)