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Excellent legal piece explaining the options and methods of how software programs use licensed and copyrighted third party libraries through an API. Finally, some clear thinking about Google Android and the Oracle Java Law Suit.
excerpt: Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. As long as the new developer didn't actually copy code from the original libraries, the new libraries are not infringing. It does not infringe on the copyright of a piece of software to create a new piece of software that works the same way; copyright protects the actual expression (lines of code) but not the functionality of a program. The functionality of a program is protected by patent, or not at all.
In the Oracle/Google case, no one is arguing that code libraries themselves are not copyrightable. Of course they are and this is why the Google/Oracle dispute has no bearing on the enforceability of the GPL. Instead, the argument is about whether the method of using a code library, the APIs, is subject to a copyright that is independent of the copyright of the code itself. If the argument that APIs are not copyrightable prevails, programs that are created by statically-linking GPL'd code libraries will still be considered derivative works of the code libraries and will still have to be released under the GPL.
Though irrelevant to the enforceability of the GPL, the Oracle/Google dispute is still interesting. Oracle is claiming that Google, by creating compatible, replacement code libraries that are "called" in the same way as Oracle's code libraries (that is, using the same APIs), infringed

Excellent Hadoop/Hive explanation.  Hat tip to Matt Asay for the link.  I eft a comment on Matt's blog questioning the consequences of the Oracle vs. Google Android lawsuit, and the possible enforcement of the Java API copyright claim against Hadoop/Hive.  Based on this explanation of Hadoop/Hive, i'm wondering if Oracle is making a move to claim the entire era of Big Data Cloud Computing?  To understand why, it's first necessary to read Matt the Hadoople's explanation.   kill shot excerpt: "You've built your Hadoop job, and have successfully processed the data. You've generated some structured output, and that resides on HDFS. Naturally you want to run some reports, so you load your data into a MySQL or an Oracle database. Problem is, the data is large. In fact it's so large that when you try to run a query against the table you've just created, your database begins to cry. If you listen to its sobs, you'll probably hear "I was built to process Megabytes, maybe Gigabytes of data. Not Terabytes. Not Perabytes. That's not my job. I was built in the 80's and 90's, back when floppy drives were used. Just leave me alone". "This is where Hive comes to the rescue. Hive lets you run an SQL statement against structured data stored on HDFS. When you issue an SQL query, it parses it, and translates it into a Java Map/Reduce job, which is then executed on your data. Although Hive does some optimizations, in general it just goes record by record against all your data. This means that it's relatively slow - a typical Hive query takes 5 or 10 minutes to complete, depending on how much data you have. However, that's what makes it effective. Unlike a relational database, you don't waste time on query optimization, adding indexes, etc. Instead, what keeps the processing time down is the fact that the query is run on all machines in your Hadoop cluster, and the scalability is taken care of for you." "Hive is extremely useful in data-warehousing kind of scenarios. You would

Microsoft announces a new plan, "Microsoft Dynamics", to accelerate the transition to replace their traditional / conventional software systems with cloud-ready infrastructure. Dynamics also serves as a migration guide, providing "seamless integration" of services from old IT to new Cloud. Competitors mentioned include SalesForce.com, SAP and Oracle. Lots of focus on integrating CRM into the full line of business applications. This is somewhat similar to the Visual Productivity challenge of integrating gMail into a working productivity system based on the Google Apps platform. Embedding the full range of Visual Web Communications into productivity apps and services is the key at all levels. One thing to consider in this article is that the only Cloud - Productivity - Business systems contenders are SalesForce, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Google Apps isn't mentioned. Nor is Amazon, RackSpace or VMware. Apple, Cisco, HP and Facebook are also left out.

Bingo!  Took five years, but finally someone gets it: excerpt:  Great question. After 10 years, OpenOffice hasn't had much traction in the enterprise - supported by under 10% of firms, and today it's facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning OpenOffice for the web, desktop and mobile - a first. But barriers to OpenOffice and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include: Third-party integration requirements. Some applications only work with Office. For example, one financial services firm I spoke with was forced to retain Office because its employees needed to work with Fiserv, a proprietary data center that is very Microsoft centric. "What was working pretty well was karate chopped." Another firm rolled out OpenOffice.org to 7,00 users and had to revert back 5,00 of them when they discovered one of the main apps they work with only supported Microsoft. User acceptance. Many firms say that they can overcome pretty much all of the technical issues but face challenges around user acceptance. One firm I spoke with went so far as to "customize" their OpenOffice solution with a Microsoft logo and told employees it was a version of Office. The implementation went smoothly. Others have said that they have met resistance from business users who didn't want Office taken off their desktop. Other strategies include providing OpenOffice to only new employees and to transition through attrition. But this can cause compatibility issues. Lack of seamless interoperability with Office. Just like third-party apps may only work with Office, many collaborative activities force use of particular versions of Office. Today's Web-based and OpenOffice solutions do not provide seamless round tripping between Office and their applications. Corel, with its

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

Über technologist Michael Hickens writes about the recent Cisco announcement that they intend on competing with Google, Zoho and MOSS in the cloud collaboration space. I left a lengthy comment on this page, trying to come to grips with the meaning of this challenge. I titled my comment, "Cisco Office? Maybe they should consider Feng Office-in-the-Cloud". Good luck Conrado. Go get them. Interestingly, Jason Harrop and i met Ms. Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. She was kind enough to refer me directly to David Knight, the technology director of Cisco's WebEX Conferencing initiative. Alex is quoted in a CNet article at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise into a reassuring presence, particularly for veteran IT administrators struggling to balance their in-house infrastructures against the cost-savings and potential efficiencies of cloud computing.

Must read interview. Marc Andreessen explains his five big ideas, taking us from the beginning of the Web, into the Cloud and beyond. Great stuff! ... (1) 1992 - Everyone Will Have the Web ... (2) 1995 - The Browser will the Operating System ... (3) 1999 - Web business will live in the Cloud ... (4) 2004 - Everything will be Social ... (5) 2009 - Software will Eat the World excerpt: Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use-not only text or media but processing power too-will be located remotely. People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application. Once you start thinking in terms of networks, it just doesn't make much sense to prefer local apps, with downloadable, installable code that needs to be constantly updated.

"We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity."
Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Andreessen: That's the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we're not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that's why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That's why there are still Xbox games on discs. That's why everything isn't in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.

Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.

Andreessen: We knew that you would need some pro

Good Chart comparing four types of Data Stores: Key-Value, Tabular/Columnar, Document Store, Relational excerpt: The bottleneck is no longer around performance or the cost of computing - it's about quickly getting the information to thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of nodes trying to act as one computer delivering a service. Google and IBM both have written about the data center as a computer, and Facebook says it thinks of adding hardware at the rack level rather than at the server level. But the current means of storing and accessing data have not made this leap from a single server to a rack - let alone an entire data center. As programmers attempt this leap, they face several difficulties, which include working with existing software and programming languages and figuring out what problems and bottlenecks the new services built on these monolithic computer platforms will encounter. Plus, the IT world doesn't all move at once, which means plenty of jobs and workloads will continue with the old way of doing things - that is, relational databases such as Oracle's offerings and the open source MySQL, which Oracle now has a stake in thanks to its purchase of Sun. The result is not a steady movement to non-relational databases or other methods of storing data, but a back-and-forth as programmers and businesses figure out what kind of architecture they need and what problems they want to solve. For a closer look at the issue and a bunch of charts detailing how the landscape is currently laid out, analyst Matt Sarrel, has penned a report over at GigaOM Pro (sub. req'd.) on the NoSQL movement called "NoSQL Databases - Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility."