While I applaud Sun for getting on the bandwagon, and while it is true that imitation is the best form of flattery, I’m not sure if Sun might be a little too late to the dance. Linux just has too much momentum today, and trying to re invent Unix this way seems like a long-shot. Linux today is a real enterprise solution, used by almost all of corporate America, and the only OS that is actually growing in sales. On the one hand, while it is the hope of open system aficionados everywhere that this Sun venture succeeds, I’m not certain that as a company, Sun would have been smarter to stay with pure Solaris and their SPARC-based architecture and played to their strengths. This is what IBM has done around their System p architecture and it has served them very well in recent years. At the end of the day, you are what you are. I’m not certain that Sun really knows where they are today.

In my opinion, Sun’s objective has generally been to get or stay in various markets by competing with Linux as a presumably valuable open source option. This has led to a seeming corporate schizophrenia at Sun, with separate and aided missions to also sell proprietary hardware and a proprietary UNIX.  Sun has provided many great open products, yet has a lot of trouble relinquishing control. Only recently have they decided that they loved Java and Solaris enough to really set them free. They would probably be better off making OpenSolaris interoperable with Linux by kernel and user space contribution. If Sun were to concentrate on providing better tools for Linux, we’d probably see a value added advantage for Sun, placing it in a good position for the future — If.

If you absolutely have to run Solaris I’d recommend OpenSolaris. Otherwise and always, I’d recommend Linux (which distro would be up for debate), as Linux is the agile answer. Linux is the answer that you will wish you had made in years to come, as everything will run on it, and it will run on everything. Efficiency and optimization should not come into play, as next month’s hardware will outpace tenfold the few and minor empirical differences in efficiency that can be argued for Solaris over Linux.

In Vitruvius’ Ten Book on Architecture, Chapter 1, The Education of the Architect, Vitruvius calls for a wide foundation of knowledge for the architect, including art, math, history, philosophy, music, and medicine.  That a good architect should strive for a breadth of applicable knowledge.

He also points out the usefulness of understanding the nature of practice and theory in all of these subjects, that a balance should be maintained.

2. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.

I would argue that the same logic is very well applied to our occupation today, in that over-specialization is not particularly suited to success.  That is, EA practitioners are IMHO better as generalists, with a breadth of knowledge, both technical, and non-technical.

For my part, I typically look for experience and success in the following areas:

• business (corporate and entrepreneurial)
• software development (multiple languages and types [OO, functional])
• systems administration
• creativity and problem solving skills
  
• engineering
  
• open source
• open standards
• development methodology
  
• Unix/Linux
  
• marketing
• writing
• speaking/presenting
• more…
  

In the real world, I see too many architects relying upon theory alone (hunting the shadow as it were), create problems for themselves and their teams.  For this reason, I’m a big fan of the people at CodingTheArchitecture.

Ten Books on Architecture from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/29239-h.htm

Originally Posted by john joseph roets at the-enterprise-architecture-network Google group, an example of reuse in writing.

Post in complete context here:
http://tinyurl.com/a8w5tk

Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU
via Slashdot: Linux by Soulskill on 1/2/09

RealityThreek sends this excerpt from an article at IT Management:”Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year. … [Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation] sees Linux and the FOSS ecosystem surrounding it as having insurmountable advantages in any market over its main competitor Windows — advantages that an economic downturn only intensifies. At a time when a search for the lowest possible price point is happening in such areas as notebooks, FOSS is available at no cost. It is easy to rebrand and customize in a way that Windows Isn’t, and is also technically more efficient.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Posted via email from createTank Posterous

Post in complete context here:
http://tinyurl.com/8qp4t4

Hi Biju, You are right that most EA frameworks are IT centric. That is a great failing.

It is interesting that if you talk to a typical business architect (typically trained in the IT camp), and ask for a model of the architecture of the business, they will show you a process flow diagram, showing the DATA flows.

But if you talk to a business person and ask for a model of the business, they will show you a spreadsheet that captures the CASH flows.

These are completely different.

This is the great disconnect between IT and business. And I claim that an EA should be able to explain each model, and inter-relate them.

– Cliff

On Dec 23, 9:58 am, “Biju Abraham” <abraham.b…@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that EA should not be IT centric..however if you look at the
> frameworks itself, they seem to be derived from technical level. eg.
> TOGAF… TOGAF is very descriptive at technology/information architecture
> level and not so at the higher levels.
>

…