Thingamablog is a cross-platform GPL blogging application that lets you create, update, and maintain multiple blogs from the client side. Thingamablog even acts as its own FTP client when you’re ready to publish or update your blog with new content. The software is easy enough for beginners to use, but sophisticated enough that veteran bloggers will appreciate it too.

The application is packaged for quick download (less than 4MB for the most recent stable version 1.0.6) either in a Windows self-extracting installer, a Linux RPM, a generic ZIP format, or in source code format. A beta version, 1.1 v6, is also available. Download your preferred package, extract it, and install it according to the requirements of your operating system. You’ll also need to have Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2 installed locally, since Thingamablog is coded in Java.

Right from the start, I was pleased and surprised at how mature and easy to use this application is, even the beta version. To create a new blog, click File -> New Weblog. An interactive wizard guides you through the steps. First, you enter the relative path on the server where the files should be uploaded. For my Web host, it is /public_html/directory_name. Make sure you give your Thingamablog its own separate directory, but don’t worry about manually creating it on the server, since Thingamablog creates your blog’s directory automatically during the file upload.

Click to enlarge Next, enter the URL of your blog, which is simply the URL assigned to you by your host, with the Thingamablog directory name appended. The application creates subdirectories for archives and images on its own. One small nitpick is that the program doesn’t name the front page of the blog index.html by default, but instead dubs it blog.html, which unnecessarily lengthens the URL. I fixed this easily by clicking on Configure Weblog -> Front Page and replacing “blog.html” with “index.html,” then re-uploading the blog.

The wizard next asks for is the blog’s title and description, categories, and site authors (and in the beta version there is an option to post via email). You can then select from several included themes, and configure the application to upload the blog files to the remote host.

Thingamablog has a limited set of features that most blog owners expect, such as the ability to generate RSS feeds, the ability to create and maintain multiple blogs, and automatically ping your choice of blog aggregators. It doesn’t include any special bells and whistles for automatic search engine optimization, and unlike WordPress it cannot use plugins, but if you’re fairly adept with HTML it is simple enough to add your own keyword and content tags.

Click to enlarge The only deficiency in Thingamablog that could potentially be a dealbreaker is that it doesn’t allow your site visitors to leave comments. Since Thingamablog is a client-side application, the files on the server aren’t writable. One solution is to use a free commenting service like HaloScan. The only other option would be to recode it to allow commenting on the server side, a feature that Bob Tantlinger, the original developer, hasn’t added, probably since it would change the basic client-side nature of Thingamablog. Not every blogger wants or needs to allow discussion; for such bloggers, not having a comment option, which keeps away a lot of would-be spammers, could be a benefit.

The most recent beta version of Thingamablog was released in December, and there’s quite a bit of activity at the project’s discussion forum. Bob says a 2.0 version of Thingamablog is lurking somewhere in the future, but even now, this application could become one of your favorite blogging platforms.

DPCI, a technology consulting firm based in New York City, specializes in providing custom content management solutions. DPCI uses open source software and recommends it to clients who need powerful, flexible content management solutions, but face budget challenges in a belt-tightening economy. President and founder Joe Bachana says he discovered the merits of building a business on open source first through personal experience.

It was as a satisfied consumer of the Drupal content management system that Bachana first realized the business success potential of moving away from proprietary licensing structures. “When we made a decision to do more interactivity on our Web site, we determined that it made the most sense for us to implement a content management system on an open source platform.” Bachana began hiring what he calls “open source gurus,” and he found their enthusiasm for community-based development contagious. “They evangelized within the company about the merits of open source. Having some new people in this environment, which had always been traditionally Microsoft-based development, well, they were sort of getting people excited about what could happen.”

It didn’t take Bachana long to connect the benefits of open source content management, such as drastically reduced capital requirements and greater flexibility, to meeting the needs of his clients. “I get really excited about solving business challenges,” he says, calling consulting a “buffet lifestyle. You get to solve challenges in lots of different businesses. We found a number of our customers didn’t have the budget to purchase licensed products. In university settings, or museum associations, or even more recently media companies, there’s been some issues around decelerating of their revenues. They just couldn’t afford [proprietary]. For us it was a logical next step to offer those customers open source.”

Bachana says DPCI also began getting requests from clients specifically for open source solutions. “They asked us to go out and recommend platforms in the open source world that we could help them implement and customize. When we first started nine years ago, we were either building custom solutions from scratch, or we were implementing proprietary solutions from big-name companies.”

Moving to open source inside and outside the company has benefited DPCI in more ways than one. “Rapid deployment,” Bachana says, is the biggest benefit. “Not only within the framework of Drupal, but other open source modules and components that we can integrate. And we work in a LAMP environment, so it is quick for us to implement new functionality that we want internally.”

Using open source software also benefits DPCI from a business strategy perspective. “One of the drawbacks of consultancies is that there are typically a lot of solo practitioners that can’t do the bigger projects. We use a team approach, and by matching this with open source, we think it gives us a strategic advantage, because the team can implement changes very quickly [for] our customers. That’s been a terrific benefit for us.”

Bachana says the challenge in open source is putting all the pieces together. “The market is not fully mature,” he says. “There are pieces to the puzzle that we’d like to see, like customer relationship management, accounting — all the different pieces you’d see in managing a business. There’s still a lot of satellite initiatives that haven’t converged yet. The disconnect is that there’s no one entity or group or central place where people are thinking about how all the pieces snap together. I’d like to see that happen, but we’re not big enough to effectuate that. We can snap the pieces for our own benefit and for our customer, but that still isn’t doing justice to the whole world. If there was some kind of roadmap, you’d see a lot more companies buying into the open source vision, in the same manner that they’re buying into Oracle or Microsoft.”

Bachana recommends starting your company’s open source journey at the Web level. “There’s plenty of resources out there where you can get information on the different platforms available. Implement Web servers first. Hire a couple of really great developers that know the LAMP environment and task them with getting a roadmap for the back office using open source. If you start that way, you could map all your needs to readily available open source solutions out there. But it starts with getting at least one person who is a technologist that could support them in the back office.”

I wrote a special report for SDTimes on open source development methodologies. They’ve published it as a special report, both at the Web site and in their print edition. (PDF)

Bodog.com is a casino, sport-betting emporium, and online poker palace. The site gets busy; during football season it takes almost 200,000 bets per week, while the virtual poker tables can handle up to 5,000 bettors at a time. Bodog started out using WebLogic and Versant on Solaris, but ran into problems when a bug repeatedly took servers down at critical junctures. Vendors didn’t offer much help, but a switch to Linux and JBoss brought Bodog some much-needed relief in the form of more reliable uptime and scaling capacity.

Bodog CTO Carl Schmidt calls it a “fantastic story.” In late 2001, the company was going through the “dot-com craze.” Hits were racking up, and Bodog was trying to figure out how to scale to the increased traffic. But Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), a Sun product, started bringing everything to a halt whenever usage spiked. “Every time we ran into a peak load, our system stopped responding,” Schmidt says. “All the application servers would stop serving requests. It turned out to be a bug in EJB that was replicating over and over.”

With limited resources, Schmidt needed help from Versant and WebLogic. “We didn’t have catastrophic load testing but we knew there was a problem. We went to the vendors.” The bug could have been either in Versant’s or WebLogic’s object-oriented database, but neither company was willing to track it down; instead, each pointed the finger of blame at the other. “We needed them to work together,” Schmidt says. That wasn’t going to happen, so Schmidt and his team went for the other option: they decompiled the code themselves. “We found the bug and fixed it,” he says. “And life went on.” But that was the beginning of the end for proprietary code at Bodog.com. “We looked at that situation and went, ‘wow’. [The vendors'] whole ad campaign is that they’re supposed to offer you this great support, but we were hampered by it.”

Schmidt started shopping for an open source solution. “We felt that if we were going to have to fix bugs ourselves, we sure would like to have access to the source.” He looked at Java Open Application Server (JOnAS) and Enhydra before settling on JBoss. “They seemed to have the most momentum.” So Schmidt began taking down the three Sun application servers, gradually replacing them with generic hardware running Red Hat Linux Enterprise, Apache, and JBoss, as well as IBM’s DB2 relational database product. “We used to use the stock Red Hat 9, but we’ve found that it’s been worth it springing for the enterprise stuff.” Regarding the use of the proprietary DB2, he says, “I wanted to go with an open source database, but at the time I didn’t feel MySQL was quite ready. Today is a different story.”

Schmidt says the migration was relatively straightforward, with a team of six developers that completed a change from WebLogic to JBoss and from an object-oriented database environment to a relational database structure in about eight months. The new infrastructure has grown along with the site, which now sits on 14 Web servers and a 30-CPU application server cluster.

“What’s ended up happening is that we’ve taken what we would have spent on licensing and invested it in JBoss development training,” Schmidt says. “That’s translated into higher developer productivity on e-commerce, which is the lifeblood of Bodog.com.”

One of the things Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik loses sleep over is the digital divide, especially when it comes to children. He wanted to do something about the disparity in the availability of computing resources and skills between social classes, so he set aside corporate funds to create Red Hat High, a week-long technology summer camp for eighth- and ninth-grade students.

The goal of Red Hat High is to use free software to introduce disadvantaged kids to technology they might not otherwise be able to afford, encouraging them to pursue further education and career opportunities. Red Hat High bundles free software alternatives to expensive proprietary applications on a Fedora live CD that campers can take with them to use on any computer. The program has been in “beta” for two years, according to Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat’s director of community development. “The first two years have been good,” he says. “Lots of happy kids and happy parents.” He calls it a successful trial, but one that must “scale up” in order to continue to be successful. “We’re not in the business of doing small things at Red Hat.”

Camp is in session for one week in July, on the campus of North Carolina State University. During the day, the 50 Red Hat High campers learn how to create audio and video files, design Web sites, and build 3-D animations using free software like Audacity and Blender. The evenings are reserved for field trips to bowling alleys and movies and other fun activities. DeKoenigsberg says, “We took them to the Digital Circus, a junior college level school for learning the same stuff they were learning at Red Hat High. One of the students at Digital Circus was showing them what he’s learned. ‘This is a wireframe,’ he said, and they said, ‘We learned all of that already.’ Then the professor comes in and says, ‘Let’s show you some stuff that you don’t know. Do any of you know what IK is?’ And they said, ‘Yes, that’s inverse kinematics.’” Free software gives the children the ability to learn the same techniques and skills that college-level students are learning, at a much lower cost, DeKoenigsberg says. Maya, the 3-D computer animation application that students at the Digital Circus use, can cost $7,000. Blender is free.

Now that DeKoenigsberg has two years of Red Hat High under his belt, he’s ready to take the program to the next level. “There’s some cost to holding a residential summer camp, and it doesn’t scale as well as we would like,” he says. Red Hat can provide all the financial backing necessary to translate the program into something that can serve the needs of more kids. “We would like to develop a strong affiliation with some entity that can house the kids,” DeKoenigsberg says. “We don’t run a residential summer camp as our core competency at Red Hat. But what we can do is gather a community of developers and users around open content for an important social purpose.”

DeKoenigsberg hopes that the education kids received at Red Hat High can be translated into something portable and scalable. “We putting together a deployable curriculum in a box, and making sure we have something that is turnkey.” The lessons have to be understandable and usable by the average junior high school teacher, so that more than just a handful of children each year benefit from the program. “If it’s only going to be 50 kids, it’s not worth doing,” DeKoenigsberg says. “It doesn’t make enough of an impact. The opportunity for free software to change the way kids learn is too big.” Along with the goal of making a teacher-friendly curriculum, DeKoenigsberg says it is important to get some real world feedback from actual teachers. “We are developing the curriculum in a wiki style, so that teachers can change it directly. After that, the next priority is internationalization.

DeKoenigsberg admits there are some real world challenges associated with providing kids with a free software alternative. One of those is the fact that just having a live CD is not enough for a student who doesn’t have access to a computer outside of school hours. And even for those who can use a computer at the library or elsewhere, saving files once they have been created can be a problem. At Red Hat High, each student had a scratch space on the network on which to save files. DeKoenigsberg says one of the possible future projects for the Red Hat High community is to bundle the files on a bootable, writable USB key. “The cost of that will become lower over time.”

As the senior community development manager, DeKoenigsberg is used to the idea of building a community around a cause. “People are deeply incented to spread the goodness of free software,” he says. “And the educational market is strategic to people who care about the advancement of free software. It’s strategic to the company for obvious reasons, and to the community for similar reasons.” He compares the philosophy behind Red Hat High to his company’s involvement with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “We have a very calculated social consciousness. OLPC is about getting that laptop into the hands of as many kids as possible. Red Hat High is about getting the understanding of what free software can do into the brains of as many kids as possible.”

When I was young, all the upwardly mobile families had an extra TV in the kitchen. When I became a wife and mother, I often thought it would be nice to be able to watch the news or a few games shows while cooking dinner, instead of just turning up the big set in the den and trying to hear over the kitchen clatter. I never got a TV for my kitchen–but these days, I don’t watch much Wheel of Fortune. Instead of channel surfing, I generally surf the Web. Now, thanks to a nifty new product from CMi Worldwide called the iCEBOX, I can browse and braise, surf and saute, all at the same time.No, the iCEBOX is not a retro refrigerator, despite its name–but it is cool. It is a countertop computer specifically designed for today’s kitchen, with a water-proof, grease-proof wireless keyboard and remote control. The remote lets you switch between TV, Internet, CD (music or video), and household monitor at the touch of a tiny button.

Step Aside, Galloping Gourmet
Each mode provides the “household CEO” with plenty of entertainment and functionality in the kitchen. The TV mode makes the iCEBOX a traditional set so you won’t miss a minute of your favorite shows–but to use it only as a television set would be a waste of its capabilities. For instance, a specially designed Internet portal lets you check your email via remote control and guides you to the most relevant culinary and other domestic delights. iCEBOX also functions as a music center: Just pop in your favorite music CDs, or view CMi’s special video CDs and become the next Galloping Gourmet as you follow the on-screen cooking action.

With all your newfound kitchen delights, don’t worry about losing touch with the rest of the household, because the iCEBOX also functions as a video monitor. Put a camera in the nursery or in the backyard and keep an eye on Junior–even if he’s not a baby anymore. Or stay a step ahead of door-to-door salesmen: Install the camera in a strategic location by your front door.

One Cool Box
The countertop model is sleek and space-age, similar in appearance to the new iMacs. It weighs a mere 16 pounds, with the CPU and monitor molded together out of high-impact ABS plastic. The screen is 9inches, somewhat small by normal surfing standards but just right for the kitchen. The unit comes with all the necessary connections for stereo and video input/output. The only disappointment is the snail-like 33.6K modem that comes standard with this model–hardly fast enough for today’s Internet activities.

If you don’t have room for another appliance on your countertop, the iCEBOX LCD model fits under the cabinet and sports a small, flip-down LCD screen. It is a step up from the countertop version, with a 12.1-inch screen, beefed-up audio capabilities, USB and Ethernet ports, and a 56K modem.

The countertop iCEBOX will probably retail for around $499 and is slated for nationwide release to computer retailers and home appliance stores in July 2000. The tonier iCEBOX LCD will make its debut in September 2000 for about $2,200 and will be available only through your local homebuilder or remodeler, so don’t expect to see it on retailers’ shelves anytime soon.

Bradley Kuhn, vice president of the Free Software Foundation, says the organization is contacting LindowsOS representatives because the company has not included source code with its “sneak preview” releases. Lindows CEO Michael Robertson says his company will comply with the GPL when the product is released to the public.

Kuhn says a Lindows insider tipped the FSF off to the possibility of missing source code. Lindows insiders are those who have registered and paid a $99 fee to receive beta releases of LindowsOS and other non-public information. LindowsOS is a distribution based on the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The GPL states, in part, that the program instructions in their original form as written by the programmer (source code) must be available to users of the program. The GPL also requires that users be allowed to copy, modify and redistribute the program freely, but they must in turn provide the source code.

Robertson does not deny that the source code for LindowsOS isn’t included in either of the two beta releases. “It’s a work in progress. We’re hopeful our first release will happen around the middle of the year. When we release an official version, all the GPL pieces will be properly distributed.”

Robertson doesn’t appreciate the negative attention focused on the Lindows project, likening it to “eating your young.” He says he is surprised that “some in the Linux community are quick to cast aspersions, with no facts.” Robertson points to his contributions to the Open Source community as proof that he has its best interests at heart, beginning with his career at MP3.com.

“We battled for the consumer at every step. We battled for open formats. We fought against secure music schemes. And we made contributions to Open Source software, since MP3.com was entirely LAMP based.”

And now that he’s working on making the Linux desktop a reality, Robertson says his dedication to Open Source continues. “We’ve joined KDE League at the highest corporate level. We hosted and sponsored Wineconf 2002. We worked with the project leader to identify the top 25 contributors and paid for roundtrip airfare for all of them, from as far away as South Africa and Norway, to San Diego. There was no registration fee. We also sponsored LPBN.org to broadcast the event.

“We’ve agreed to sponsor the upcoming Debian conference. Our sponsorship included funds to pay for an awards banquet for all attendees, as well as travel support for some. We’ve made a large investment in an Open Source company; we’ve also paid about a million dollars to get code produced … We’ve paid these funds to companies as well as individuals.”

And, he says, support for Linux and the Open Source community will also come by way of ingenious marketing. “If we can get to 5% market share, an ecosystem of healthy Linux companies will emerge which will be around for the long run. Look at the incredible things that would happen. Hardware manufacturers will ship Linux drivers for their peripheral devices, in the box. Computer stores will dedicate sections of their store. Major OEMs would ship computers with Linux. It’s a travesty you can’t walk into major retailers today and buy a computer running Linux.”

And while the code is important, that is not what it will take to get Linux to “20 million desktops.” Robertson says to help more people understand Open Source, better marketing and lobbying is needed. “And yes, battling Microsoft and their huge coffers which influence OEMs, retailers, politicians, and the press in ways you only understand if you talk to them personally, which I have.

“Hopefully, Lindows.com will contribute on each of these fronts, but it will take more than one company. It’s a shame that virtually every commercial Linux company has abandoned the desktop. Our goal is to build a company that will give consumers a choice for their operating system. At the same time, we’re committed to being a good corporate citizen and being a supporter of Open Source for the long run.”

Robertson seems dismayed by the FSF’s attempt to enforce the GPL. “No wonder there’s virtually no healthy Linux companies. The community seems to attack them when the real focus should be elsewhere.”

Robertson says that many of the critical pieces of GPL code that have gone into Lindows have been distributed back to the community already. “Where do you think that Codeweavers got their code for Crossover Office?” he asks.

A high level source at Codeweavers confirms that Lindows has indeed contributed an “enormous amount” of code to the Wine project. But while Crossover Office contains code that was created in conjunction with Lindows, it has also been built on code that was around before Lindows existed. According to the Codeweavers source, Lindows returned modifications to the Wine codebase only because it was persuaded by Codeweavers staff to return it. The Codeweavers/Lindows association was terminated in part because Lindows wanted to be able to keep its Wine modifications private.

Terracotta makes a Java clustering solution that it calls “drop-in” technology. Terracotta is unique, says Amit Pandey, chief executive officer, because it makes a way to offload temporary but important information that has traditionally been stored in expensive databases. In an effort to increase interest in the product, about a year ago Terracotta decided to open its source code and start giving the product away. According to Pandey, since Terracotta’s entrance into the community, “we’ve seen only goodness.”

Terracotta is licensed under the Terracotta Public License (TPL), a modification of the Mozilla Public License that includes an attribution requirement. The license is not officially sanctioned by the OSI, but Terracotta doesn’t restrict access to the code, and allows modifications and redistributions as long as the code continues to be licensed under the TPL.

Pandey doesn’t want to call Terracotta a database replacement. “We try not to position ourselves [that way], because it will take us a long time to get to the point of having all the features and functionality of a database. It might be enough, though, to be a way to offload the database.” Pandey says the reason he created Terracotta was because he believes traditional databases were developed “for a world when Web apps didn’t exist. Databases were great when the access numbers were fairly limited. Fast forward 15 years and suddenly the problem has become very large scale. Peak loads can happen at strange times; databases weren’t designed to handle that complexity. What you get is Oracle coming up with solutions like rack clusters, or the customer gets fed up and says, ‘I need to write some custom software to do things like caching and offloading the database.’”

Since many businesses cannot afford the costs associated with developing custom software, Pandey says, “they’re hostage to licenses. There was an opportunity here for us, where we could come in and provide essentially what people are trying to do with that custom software.”

Terracotta was on the market for several months as a proprietary product, with less than stellar sales results. “It’s a fairly disruptive technology,” Pandey says. “We’re out there saying, don’t use a database, use us. And that’s not the first thing that comes to people’s minds. They think, ‘let me add more databases.’ We’d have to send sales reps knocking down doors to get them to go to trial with Terracotta. We were trying to change a mindset, and we thought hard: what would be a lower-friction way of doing this? What we wanted was more of a pull mode, where people get excited about the product. If you have all these expensive licensing costs up front, people are not going to try new ideas.”

When Terracotta decided to start giving away the product and the source code, things started to change. “Before we went to open source, we used to have to engage people,” Pandey says. “We don’t do that anymore. Open source is a great place for new ideas. If we find a customer that wants to do a proof-of-concept, we point them to all the resources and links. If they need any help there’s a forum where we try to maintain excellent service levels. We give them the option of calling and talking to us, but we don’t push anything on them and there’s no pressure to buy. So people are more willing to experiment.”

If Web traffic is an indicator of interest, then Terracotta’s audience has exploded. “When we launched, we would get a few hundred visitors a month; now we get 50-60,000,” Pandey says. “It’s that wonderful word of mouth, and it’s a feedback loop. We have people out there doing the marketing for us that we would have had to spend millions on to achieve the same results.”

Because Terracotta is still selling a commercially supported identical version of the product, Pandey says his biggest challenge is reining in the salespeople. “We had to address keeping a very clear wall between the sales team and the community side of the business. The temptation is, let’s call up all these people on forums and try to sell something to them. But the reason open source works is people have to feel that they do not have to buy anything to make it work. We make sure the developers have access to all the features they need — no doing any bait and switch. The other thing is we do not let the salespeople approach someone unsolicited. They have to come to us first.”

Pandey says sometimes it is frustrating to see larger companies taking advantage of the free version. “You say, wow, they have tons of money. But it’s worth the tradeoff. I would not go back to the other model.” For one thing, he says, the honest feedback from users is invaluable. “In my experience with proprietary technology, when you do a customer forum and ask for feedback, there’s always that elephant in the room. They are thinking, ‘how honest can we be, because they’re going to try to sell me something.’ So you’re dancing around. They will say, ‘I want this,’ but they’re not going to reveal the true value they get from that feature. You’re always second-guessing that. That kind of thing goes away completely with open source. The customer will tell you exactly what they need and how important it is to them, because they know it’s not something they’re going to have to pay for. You’re getting unadulterated information and you can actually build and design things that people find useful.”