The real reason behind Apple’s restrictive AppStore policy (November 17, 2009)

Have just came back from 5th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop in Berlin. The conference program was great this year (I’ll post the detailed overview of the event later), and I had a chance to have a lot of conversations with colleagues from telecom industriy and standardizing organizations, both peers and higher-level decision makers.

One of the interesting discussions sparkled after a presentation on BONDI, a device API which allow mobile applications of the future access device capabilities in a standardized way. The question being discussed was “Why do we need a way to restrict the application’s access in any way, be this AppStore review process or standardized API policies?“ Indeed, web and desktop applications ecosystem is able to survive and flourish without any external intervention and in majority of cases it’s the end user who (successfully) chooses good applications over malicious ones.

The very interesting answer being born in the lobby discussions included two major players in the AppStore game: telcos, who play directly, and government, who plays indirectly. Telecom industry is huge when compared to the internet industry. Just look at Google’s 2008 net income of $4,2 Bn, compare it with AT&T’s $10,5 Bn (data is from Wikipedia) and remember that Google is one of a kind, whereas companies comparable with AT&T exist on every continent. Telecom industry is also highly regulated, so the biggest fear for the telcos is the government intervention. I can easily imagine the situation where government closes GPS for public use after some criminal has stolen the victim’s GPS location and was able to commit a crime. For telcos this means complete loss of the revenue from location-based services, and to avoid that they in advance force the control over assets that may potentially compromise the end user’s security, hence the whole AppStore approval process story.

Note that none of similar regulations exist in internet, because there’s no easy way to enforce the control over it. This also explains why Android Market is review-free and Palm App Catalog is not (I consider those two as AppStore’s competitors): Google, unlike Palm, does not manufacture any phones subsidized by telcos, and will not suffer should government intervention happen.

Up to now market shows that AppStore protected by approval process could still be a success. Looking at the situation under this angle I may only guess whether developers will ever have a non-restricted access to AppStore.

Mythical Man-Month revisited (July 27, 2009)

University professor who was teaching me computer science during my first year in the university often said that every developer should of course read Brooks’ Mythical Man-Months and in addition re-read it every year. I am not fully following this advice, but yesterday finished re-reading MMM for the third time. No Silver Bullet and later follow-up, No Silver Bullet Refired (NSBR) included in my edition of the book took most of my attention this time.

NSBR divides companies participating in any stage of the software development and getting profit from that in four broad categories (examples are mine):

• Companies manufacturing hardware and included software like operating systems (Microsoft, Apple, Palm and some less known ones)
• Companies manufacturing software for internal use (most of the banks, insurance companies, etc)
• Companies manufacturing software to be sold to the end users (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk and others)
• Companies manufacturing custom software for someone else (any outsourcing company falls into this category)

What is very interesting about this division (note that NSBR was written in 1995) is that it completely unaware about the software service market — it hasn’t existed yet. You cannot place Google in any of the categories, just as you could not do this for zillions of small profitable companies flourishing in the Internet. This fact was so surprising for me because Brooks made a lot of predicions in NSB in 1975 of which almost all became true but even in 1995 he could not foresee this huge niche. The obvious observation that commodization of Internet lead to overwhelming results, just as commodization of computers did the same earlier become striking when you see that with the angle of the software engineer with the experience of Brooks’.

I recently asked in the programmer’s community whether there is any post-MMM influential book on the process of software development and it seems like it is yet to be written. Probably, will have to re-read Mythical Man-Month next year.

Phone booths as payment machines (Telefónica case study) (July 20, 2009)

It always interests me what kind of different telecom-related services are invented in different countries, so when travelling I always look around for something new. During my last trip to Barcelona I noticed very interesting thing related to phone booths in the city — they all feature the Telefónica’s advertisement begging you not to let your prepaid mobile account run dry. What’s so special? Well, it seems like it’s possible to top-up the Movistar phone (Movistar is the mobile division of Telefónica) using the phone booth. You dial a special free number in the booth (and they are on every corner across the city), enter your mobile number and drop coins in — voila!

This scheme is of course hardly possible when fixed lines operator and mobile operator do not belong to the same company. However, Verizon and AT&T in the US, O2 (being still close to BT) in UK, and a bunch of operators worldwide could reimplement this useful 24×7 payment service.

Nortel to bundle Mobicents SLEE with AS 5200/CS 2000 hardware (May 27, 2009)

Nortel may have tough times now, but they deliver good news to the JAIN SLEE community. Ivelin Ivanov, the manager of JBCP initiative in JBoss, recently posted a link to an analysis of the IMS strategy at Nortel. The strategy includes close partnership with RedHat and bundling the JBCP/Mobicents platform with novel Nortel’s IMS softswitches.

This is the first example known to me when JAIN SLEE platform is about to be deployed at the operator’s infrastructure using hardware other than commodity servers. Developer could see the benefits of that immediately: legacy Nortel systems could be seamlessly connected to IMS with JBCP at its core. The whole JAIN SLEE infrastructure in Nortel’s equipment is still yet to be opened for the third-party vendors, but closely affiliated companies have already started developming SLEE-based services using JBCP (the article mentions Telekom Austria which is known for its ties to Nortel).

Independently of who will inherit the Nortel’s business in the nearest future, it is clear that bundling open platform with carrier-grade equipment should become even more widespread. JAIN SLEE as the mature and evolving standard is in the good position here.

OpenCloud started an engineering blog (April 6, 2009)

Here’s the link. The blog features the Tip of the week (this one would save me from headache if I would have it half a year ago), and periodically a longer article (here’s the nice fresh one: ThreadGroups and classloader leaks).

Don’t forget to subscribe.

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