WWW8 Developer's Day Information
Last Update: 3 August 1999

WWW8 Developer's Day - 14 May 1999

Track D8: Room 717A, 1:30PM -- 5:00PM (Afternoon only)
Open Source Software


Track Chairs:
Organizational co-chair: Brian Behlendorf, O'Reilly and Associates and the Apache Group,
On-site co-chair: Cameron Laird, Network Engineered Solutions


Details of Talks:

Time Speaker   Title
1.00 - 1:45pm Rasmus Lerdorf, and Guido van Rossum, CNRI Open Source Development Strategies for PHP and Python Guido's Presentation (PowerPoint) ]
1.45 - 2:30pm Mark Abrams and Constantinos Phanouriou, Virginia Tech. User Interface Markup Language (UIML) Open Source Project   ... [ Presentation:  Remote (PowerPont)  ~ Remote (HTML -- IE 4/5 only) ]
3:00 - 3:45pm Paul Everett, President, Digital Creations Funding The Perfect Beast: Venture Capitalism, Intellectual Property, and Open Source
3:45 - 4:30pm Manoj Kasichainula, IBM The Elephant and the Feather: How IBM embraced the Apache open development model   ... [ Presentation:  remote ~ local (HTML);   Local (Lotus Freelance)  ]



Open Source Development Strategies for PHP and Python

Rasmus Lerdorf, IBM, and Guido van Rossum, CNRI
Full Talk: Guido's Presentation (PowerPoint)

There are many ways in which open source software projects can be managed -- some succesful, and some not. In this presentation, Rasmus Lerdorf the founder of the PHP project (http://www.php3.org) and Guido can Rossum, the developer of Python (http://www.python.org) will discuss these two highly succesful open source projects, describing the developments strategies they used, and how they worked.

About Rasmus
Rasmus Lerdorf created the PHP language in 1995. While still very active in the development of PHP, many others now help improve and extend the project. Rasmus recently joined IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina as a senior software engineer.

About Guido
Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages. He created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in Amsterdam (the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands). He is still actively involved in the development of the language.

In 1995 he moved to the US where he now lives and works in Reston, Virginia, for CNRI (the Corporation for National Research Initiatives). At CNRI, he heads a research group working on a framework for mobile agents written in Python, and is technical director of the Python Consortium, an international consortium hosted by CNRI, formed to promote and further the development and use of Python. His home page on the web is http://www.python.org/~guido/


User Interface Markup Language (UIML) Open Source Project

Mark Abrams and Constantinos Phanouriou, Virginia Tech & Harmonia
Full Talk: PowerPoint ~ HTML-IE 4/5 only! (remote)

In the new world of information appliances to access the Internet, it is a programming nightmare to make an information system accessible away from desktop machines on many types of devices. You would have to maintain multiple source code bases to deploy C++ or Java interfaces on desktop PCs, Wireless Markup Language or Voice Markup Language interfaces on phones, PalmOS or WindowsCE interfaces on palm devices, and so on. You would also have to learn the idiosyncrasies of many technologies, from GUIs to voice.

To simplify the world, we have worked for almost two years developing a universal and device-independent language called UIML (User Interface Markup Language). It describes UIs in a very device-independent fashion. A family of interfaces for different devices can be described in UIML, then mapped to different devices through style sheets. This talk describes an open source project whose vision is to develop a rendering engine that can map UIML to any device in the world. We discuss what we've done, how we coordinate and organize development, and what we'd like to see contributed.

Marc Abrams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.


Funding The Perfect Beast: Venture Capitalism, Intellectual Property, and Open Source

Paul Everett, Digital Creations

History is littered with brilliantly conceived software projects whose candle once burned brightly but sadly flickered out. To appeal to business decision makers, Open Source software projects need a sustainable business model that includes a framework for financial backing. How then can software freedom marry into a culture favoring protected intellectual property?

This talk describes the relationship between Digital Creations, the company behind the Python-based Zope web application server, and Verticality Investment Group, its first-round investor. Within a month of the investment, Verticality convinced the Digital Creations principals to release their web application server as open source. What business strategies supported this? What replaces intellectual property as the strategic asset? How did Digital Creations recast its business model for success?

Paul Everitt is President and Co-Founder of Digital Creations, a software consulting company that focuses on dynamic business solutions using its free, Open Source Zope web application server. In 1992 as a United States Naval officer Paul created the Navy's first public web server at www.navy.mil. He has been published in WebReview, has authored a W3 Technical Report, and served on the program committee for the W3C-OMG Joint Conference on objects and the Web. His company is an original member of the Python Software Activity and a member of the Python Consortium.


The Elephant and the Feather: How IBM embraced the Apache open development model

Manoj Kasichainula, IBM
Talk: HTML (remote);   HTML (local);   Local (Lotus Freelance)

This talk will discuss the process by which IBM is switching from its own proprietary web server to the openly developed Apache web server. I'll talk about the technical, business, and legal issues in the decision-making process to join the Apache development effort, and on how the IBM web server team is organized to contribute to and take advantage of the open development model.


About the Chair:
About Brian: Brian Behlendorf (
brian@hyperrreal.org) is CTO, New Ventures, at O'Reilly and Associates, where he is busy brewing up some interesting new projects to assist Open Source. Prior to that he was CTO and co-founder of Organic Online, a web development shop in San Francisco. Prior to that, he was the chief engineer at HotWired, and had set up Wired Magazine's first web site in 1993. Brian is perhaps better known as a developer and advocate for the Apache HTTP server, the most widely used web server in the world, as well as for having written a chapter for O'Reilly's Open Sources book, published earlier this year.
About Cameron: Cameron Laird (claird@starbase.neosoft.com) works for Phaseit, Inc., a small consultancy just outside Houston, Texas, he co-founded. Many of his projects are in process control or telecommunications. He's also a part-time journalist, turning out occasional technical reviews, news stories, and two monthly columns: "Regular Expressions", on scripting techniques, and "WebAdmin", for SunWorld Online and Webserver Online, respectively.

Ian Graham
Centre for Adaptive and Academic Technology
University of Toronto
Last Update: 3 August 1999