This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast

We talk about the open source “rug pull” du jour in this week’s Software Defined Podcast: “This week, we discuss CockroachDB's relicensing, the ongoing debate about remote work, and platform engineering. Plus, some thoughts on the use of speakerphones in public.” We both steer us towards a conclusion something like: yup, the open source vendor can change the license and start charging whenever they want, that’s the new reality. You can control that risk if you use foundation-hosted projects, but if you use open source projects, you now need to do some risk analysis of the price going from $0 to $0+n in the future.

Is this good? I mean, no? We all enjoy a social contract where we’re on the free end of getting a lot of value.

If anything, the open source world should figure out the problem of “we gotta make some money.” Historically, that’s been a difficult subject for that community to talk about, and it’s certainly never been resolved.

We also talk about a similar shift in norms when it comes to speaker phone use in public.

Take a listen to the episode!

SpringOne Live-streamed, free, next week!

Next week is SpringOne, our conference all about the Spring Framework, which I think is the most widely used Java framework. It’s free to register for and watch online.

I’ve seen a lot of the content, and helped work on some of it. You can watch it all for free next week, starting August 26th at 9am pacific time. It’ll run for three days.

If that’s your thing, sign-up for it and watch for free.

Wastebook

• In enterprise IT talk, instead of “seamless,” consider saying “easy,” “simple,” “quick(ly),” or just deleting the word altogether. (That said, “seamless” is a term of art in IT, so we sort of all know what it means based on the context of how it’s used.)

• Necessity is the inventor of compromise.

• “‘The Art of Pantomime in Church’ is this weird mashup of clowns and Christians and I have no idea how it even got made. The thesis is that professional clown Randall Bane can teach you how to incorporate pantomime into your church services. I have no dog in this fight, I’m not particularly anti-Christian or even anti-clown, but I literally do not understand how I struggle to get by and yet there was money to produce this thing.” Via.

• ”it’s a reminder that people of my generation, those who grew up watching the original (and best!) Star Wars trilogy, are now the people running the world and its weapons systems” Here.

• Commin' 'atcha with another Coté Footnote(tm).

• Incomprehensible spaghetti.

Relative to your interests

• IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending - “IDC has recently unveiled the latest release of its Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, 2024 V2. Presently, the global Artificial Intelligence market stands at nearly $235 billion, with projections indicating a rise to over $631 billion by 2028.” // Something is weird with this estimate. There’s no way companies found an extra $235 billion to spent on new IT projects. And if they’re reallocating that money from other IT projects, like, your grocery buying app is going to stop working because there’s no budget for the computer needed to run it. // Meanwhile…

• C-suite enthusiasm over generative AI wanes, putting pressure on quick wins - “Interest in the [AI] technology fell 11 percentage points among senior executives and eight percentage points among board of directors, respectively, since Deloitte’s Q1 2024 survey.” // I think the people most enthusiastic about enterprise AI haven’t actually used even enough consumer AI to get a grasp on how little AI can actually do. And, as with new tech (like cloud computing in the early 2010’s), they underestimate how expensive it is to use, and how difficult it is the change how their organization functions. // Also, there’s a bit danger that the AI-driven company valuations jumps too quickly drop due to lowered expectations. // Speaking of…

• AI may be distracting organizations from other IT priorities - Well, things are getting better, but enterprise AI is a distraction from keeping the lights on. // “IBM reports that fewer than half of the respondents believe their IT organization is effective in delivering basic services, compared to 69 percent from a survey in 2013. Among chief execs, that figure is 36 percent today, down from 64 percent previously, while for chief financial officers, the figures are 50 percent now, down from 60 percent before…. What might be causing this? The Armonk-based biz says that 43 percent of surveyed tech CxOs indicated that concerns about their IT infrastructure have increased over the past six months due to the focus on optimizing their infrastructure for generative AI.”

• Private Cloud - What’s in a Name? - “Forrester’s ‘Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023’ reporting that 79% of surveyed cloud decision makers are implementing internal private clouds” (Source: "Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023," Forrester). Cf. my past attempt to round-up private cloud usage/market-sizing.

• How public intellectuals can extend their shelf lives - Spend a lot of time steering yourself to be optimistic, and engineer a continuous drip of new ideas and perspectives.

• Platform Engineering: The Next Step in Operations - This is a really good overview/state of thing. // Once again, I think it’s all about introducing product management to operations and continuously building the platform, the product.

• Developer Content That Ranks in 2024 - Educational content attracts the most attention (“how to”). Also content where you define things (“what is”). Converting that content into sales, or at least pipeline, is the secret magic.

• $ git push heroku betty - That sounds like fun. People keep telling me about the revitalization of Heroku. It’d be great to see that happen. If everything just want their own Heroku, what’s been holding them back? Solving that puzzle would be wonderful to see after all these years of PaaS yo-yo’ing. // I like the unstated opinion here: “Many are now facing lots of scattered homegrown production platforms and are starting to feel the pain of maintenance, technical debt, and difficulty in consistently delivering reliability, stability, and security while trying to scale. There simply aren’t enough engineers for every company to support this, nor does it make business sense.” // The opinion is: stop doing that.

• An American came to stay – and completely changed my attitude to water - As Europe gets hotter (not good, sure, but:), hopefully they’ll understand the pleasure of ice water.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

This year, SpringOne is free to attend and watch online. Check out Josh’s pitch for the event. There’s an on-site conference as well at Explore if you’re interested. But, for those who can’t, now you can watch all the fun!

SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29. DevOpsDays Antwerp, 15th anniversary, speaking, September 4th-5th. SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts! SREDay London: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

I won’t be at Explore and SpringOne next week. I’m hoping to write-up my thoughts and analysis from my Amsterdam perch. Of course, I know a lot of the content already, but actually seeing it presented and thinking about how I’d “live blog” it in the old days is another thing. We’ll see what happens!

//

I’m slowly starting a project called “things that are happy that you’re about to eat them.” I might call it “Please Eat Me” (maybe “Pleased to be Eaten”?) for short. I’m on the lookout out for food labels and ads that depict the thing you’re about to eat as jolly. You see this is a lot with BBQ places, like the old Bill Miller BBQ back in Texas:

Those are pretty tame. That pig seems super chill, though. You see it a lot in candy and hot dogs. The best is when a hot dog is putting ketchup or mustard on itself: getting all ready to be chomped on:

It’s a bit morbid when the food is an animal, but we should have some compassion for the fruit and vegetables too:

Also, there’s a highly-related category of, like, “Please Kill Me” (maybe “Pleased to be Killed”?) where the animal/fruit is happy that you’re buying a device that will help kill it:

If you see any, pass ‘em along!