Geek Time with Chris DiBona

The end of the year is always a great time to take a moment and look back at the developments of the past twelve months. Two members of the Google Open Source Programs Office, Chris DiBona and Jeremy Allison, sat down together for a review of open source accomplishments in 2010, and the conversation is shared with you here. Chris is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google, which means he directs Google’s open source compliance, releasing, and outreach efforts. He reveals lots of insights into Google’s approach towards open source and the influence of open source on technology and business.

The video of their discussion is separated into five parts, with descriptions below.

Part 1
Chris and Jeremy discuss their favorite open source projects of 2010, including GoogleCL, Android, Chromium, Chrome OS, and WebM. Together they ponder the future of computing, debating whether or not 2011 will be “the year of the Linux desktop.”

Part 2
Chris explains how Google decides what software to open source and under which licenses. He also mentions tools such as Make Open Easy (MOE) that are used to help engineers release and maintain their code. The topic eventually turns to license defragmentation, and Chris describes his efforts to streamline the number of licenses that Google releases under. In the process he shares his theory about what makes open source projects succeed.

Part 3
Chris and Jeremy talk about Google Summer of Code, its history, and the impact it has on the open source community.

Part 4
Chris and Jeremy are old friends who met in the 90’s at a Silicon Valley Linux Users Group meeting. While reminiscing about the early days of Silicon Valley, they discuss the modern role of user groups, both here and abroad. Chris visited Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan earlier this year, and he compares the tech atmosphere in those countries to Silicon Valley in the late 90’s, with both open source and entrepreneurship developing simultaneously.

Part 5
Chris gives an overview of his career and explains how he came to be the Open Source Programs Manager at Google.

Happy New Year, and see you in 2011!

WindowBuilder becomes new open source project with major code contribution to Eclipse Foundation

When Google acquired Instantiations in August 2010, everyone knew about our Java Eclipse products. Shortly after we joined, we talked about how best to help developers now that we are part of Google. We have always wanted to get these tools in more developers’ hands. So, back in September we decided to give them away for free! The community response has been fantastic. With that done, we asked ourselves, how could we make a good thing even better? How about by open sourcing the code and creating two new Eclipse projects!

Today we are announcing Google’s donation of the source code and IP for two of these products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation. This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java code performance issues. Specifically, the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.

The Eclipse Foundation’s Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, states that, “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings. We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java developer community around the world.”

One of the exciting aspects of innovating in the open source arena is that customers benefit from a full community. We are very excited to see the diverse collection of companies and individuals that have already expressed an interest in contributing to these projects. Commercial level support is important to many customers. Genuitec, makers of MyEclipse, intends to offer commercial support for the various WindowBuilder based products including the SWT, Swing Designer and even the GWT Designer from Google. Please sign up on the Genuitec site for more information. Similarly, OnPositive intends to offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler, as well as lead as the committers on the Eclipse Community Project. Sign up on the OnPositive site for more information.

“Genuitec is pleased to offer commercial support for WindowBuilder-based products – Swing, SWT and GWT – in early 2011 for companies who wish to continue a paid support contract once their Google support expires. We’ve been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since the beginning, so we are very familiar with these products. Thus, providing commercial support for this product line is a natural fit for us,” said Maher Masri, President of Genuitec.

“Over the years OnPositive has built up unique experience with the CodePro Profiler and we are excited to offer commercial support for it. Google’s donation ensures that Java developers can build faster applications,” said Pavel Petrochenko, President of OnPositive.

WindowBuilder

WindowBuilder is regarded as the leading GUI builder in the Java community (winning the award for Best Commercial Eclipse Tool in 2009). It includes powerful functionality for creating user interfaces based on the popular Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), RCP and XWT UI frameworks.

CodePro Profiler

CodePro Profiler is an Eclipse-based Java application profiling tool that helps developers identify performance issues early in the development cycle and find CPU and algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other concurrency-related problems that can slow down an application or cause it to hang.

Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011. Once each one is set up as a project and available for download from the Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source code under the the standard Eclipse license. I am looking forward to leading the WindowBuilder project.

If you have any questions, you can learn more at this FAQ or we look forward to hearing from you on the forums.

SketchUp Pro Case Study: Daniel Company

This user story comes from Mark Lessmueller at Daniel Company. It came in via the Tell us your story link on the Sketchup Go Green! site.

Daniel Company has switched to Sketchup Pro for the drafting, design, analysis and construction of its air pollution control systems. Sketchup Pro has helped us visualize potential problems in 3D, allowing us to find conflicts on the computer, rather than in the field. This prevents us from wasting material and resources and reduces our carbon footprint. In addition, we can share our drawings and models with anyone across the globe. They can make suggestions directly on the drawings without having to resort to awkward phone conversations about “what change needs to be implemented where”.

This simplicity allows our clients to ensure that there are no intersections with existing equipment onsite during modifications. Additionally, due to the low cost of Sketchup Pro (especially in comparison to similar products), we were able to install Sketchup Pro on virtually all of our engineering computers, rather than just the drafters’ machines. The ability for our engineers to do some of our drafting when the drawings are “bottlenecking” production has proven invaluable.

We are about to begin start-up of the first system we created with SketchUp: a biological system where microorganisms digest the odorous pollutants. The system relies entirely on wastewater treatment plant products to feed the bacteria, rather than the typical method of spraying highly reactive neutralizing chemicals into the polluted airstream. The resultant waste of the bacteria can then be conveyed back into the wastewater treatment plant and treated via the microbes in that system.

While the air pollution control system was originally conceived by the treatment plant’s design consultant engineer, the actual odor control system manufacture was drafted, designed, analyzed, and constructed using Sketchup and LayOut. This includes an air conveyance system, hydraulic profiles, plumbing layouts, water control panels, two 12′ Ø x 40′ tall fiberglass reactors, and two 12′ Ø x 20′ tall fiberglass adsorbers. (Each of the 12′ Ø vessels was made in our shop in accordance to the LayOut files.) As the system is starting up, we are also planning to visualize this model in Google Earth.

Each of the pieces of the ducting (which supplies fresh air to the building and captures the foul air) was modeled in SketchUp and then turned into a cut sheet. Our fiberglass duct, tank, and scrubber shop easily fabricated the individual pieces. Thanks to Sketchup, it is a lot easier to make sure that each piece will fit on a truck (sent from California to Virginia), rather than relying on 2D drafting.

Since this was our first major project in SketchUp, most of it was created using the standard SketchUp tools. The plugins we did use were mostly custom modifications of plugins that were available for alteration. The CenterPoint and Conetop plugins were used to help make pipe transitions and to align pipes. We modified the Mesh Additions and the Parametric scripts to create an “elbow tool”. The PVC piping in the water panels was created with a combination of native SketchUp tools, this “elbow tool” plugin and the CenterPoint plugin.

Since this project, we have created multiple other air pollution control projects using SketchUp and LayOut. We’ve also used quite a few other freeware plugins. (We’re big fans of Fredo6 and Chris Fullmer’s plugins). FredoScale and Joint Push Pull have saved us on a number of more delicate projects, especially where we make a small apparatus and then need to show thickness in the ducting, or building our damper library. And Chris Fullmer’s Shape Bender has helped out quite a bit for other jobs where nothing else seems to work.

We’re now working to model some of our older existing projects in SketchUp and visualize them in Google Earth.

Thanks for sharing your work, Mark!