Share the blame

Today's Sunday Times in Sri Lanka has a great editorial on how the blame for the LTTE situation needs to be shared by India, US, UK, Australia, Canada and others. All of these so-called "civilized nations" enabled, supported, ignored and downright cheered the LTTE for many many years. Successive Sri Lankan governments cried and screamed for help but it was ignored. It was only the late Lakshman Kadirgamar (a Tamil himself) who was able to make some headway finally. And then of course finally when 9-11 hit the US woke up to terrorism.

Yet, not really it seems. Yesterday the US asked us to stop the war. Compare that to what Ms. Clinton did at a senate hearing. Quoting from the editorial:

Take the typical case of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This week, giving testimony at a Congressional hearing, she asked that Pakistan take more action against (Islamic) extremists and asked Sri Lanka to 'pause' action against (Tamil) extremists. To cap it, she asked Pakistan to adopt a 'paradigm shift' and called for a 'change in mind-set'. Look who's talking.

Oh but there is a difference - LTTE is killing poor irrelevant Sri Lankans (yes all of them- Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and more) and Al Qaeda is killing precious westerners. Oh of course, that's why on one side you need to destroy but on the other side you need to give in.

She's not alone - right now there's a protest going on in front of the British parliament by LTTE supporters with LTTE flags and more. Um, aren't they banned in UK and isn't it illegal to support a banned terrorist group?! At least the French have been nice- they did not allow LTTE to run amok in Paris recently and arrested a bunch of supporters of the illegal LTTE supporting organizations. And India- well they have internal political problems which they want to solve at our expense. Two of their big guys (Secy of Foreign Ministry and National Security Advisor) were in Colombo yesterday - and "didn't have time" to fly to the IDP camps and see the real situation without believing LTTE propaganda. Now John Homes (UN's humanitarian guy) is in town- hopefully he can make the time to go see without doing what Al Jazeera did on TV last nite showing a "video from Tamil sources" showing injured & dying people. Smart.

Cut the bull lady and everyone else from the international community. We're on our own this time and we're not giving in to the BS. We're (finally) taking our country back. You have no leverage in Sri Lanka - please do keep the aid money if you wish; we'll survive. We are not committing any humanitarian disasters - we're trying to prevent them. If you want to know the truth come and see for yourself.

If the (esp. western) "international community" wants to look for humanitarian disasters, look at Iraq. How many have you killed there in the name-of-what-now? Maybe between 100,000 to 1,000,000 .. in just 6 years. You guys have no moral authority to tell us anything; if at all its your crap is what has killed probably 75,000+ people in Sri Lanka in 30 years.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu 9.04 came out on Friday .. I upgraded my laptop (Dell D820) to that yesterday and did a total restructuring of the machine. I also put back a (small) Windows partition .. I've been bitten enough times without being able to present that I had to do it!

So far excellent experience with Jaunty Jackalope! I had some issues with Thunderbird and the Lightening plugin (basically, it doesn't work :() but that's ok because we're in the process of moving to Google Apps .. so I took the chance to set up GMail and the Google Calendar to work offline etc..

I have to say the end-user quality of Ubuntu is amazing for a free product, no, for any product really. I think Ubuntu raises the bar that we at WSO2 and other open source manufacturers must meet or beat!

British MP's visit to Sri Lanka

Very interesting video of a UK MP visiting northern Sri Lanka and learning the truth about the LTTE. Thank you Mr. MP for setting the record straight.

4 years since IBM -= me

It was 4 years ago on April 15th, 2005 that I officially left IBM to start WSO2. I spent the next several months fine-tuning the business case along with Paul and of course WSO2 finally came into existence in July/August 2005.

Any regrets? None at all. IBM was a fantastic place for me to work at and she (it?) gave me incredible insight into how the software industry works, how to make it work for you etc. etc.. I also developed a lot of long lasting friendships and many of those are still active and strong.

In fact, before starting WSO2 I actually tried to do something like what WSO2 is doing (create a middleware stack with an interoperability focus in its heart) while in IBM. However, as good as IBM is with technology, IBM is MUCH better at business- and it was the wrong business action for IBM to take at the time .. so I quit :-).

Its been a tremendous ride. Recently I was asked what the most satisfying part of starting WSO2 has been- and to me the answer is dirt simple: the people. Without a doubt the experience of working closely (I was going to say intimately but maybe that's a bit too close ;-)) with everyone starting with Paul to the entire team has been the best and brightest part of it.

Four years is a long time. Yet, its a short time .. what we set out to do in WSO2 is far from being done! I'm thrilled at how things have gone so far but really, we've only just begun.

New Board Member for WSO2

Its my pleasure to announce that Alok Mohan recently joined WSO2's board.

Alok is a long time industry veteran with a lot of experience and success in growing businesses - which is exactly the stage that WSO2 is in. Alok's has an interesting and long career, including a stint at SCO .. no no, not when it was the "bad" SCO but before :-). He's currently on the boards of several other public & private companies as well. Alok's style is to be an active board member .. not a "geriatric" member as he says, which indeed is the common case for most people!

I'm thrilled to have someone with Alok's credentials and background to work with in growing WSO2 beyond the current stage. Every year since we began, we've more than doubled revenue and are on target for that again for 2009. The plan that we're working on is to accelerate that further!

I'm greatly honored to be working side-by-side with someone of Alok's stature. I know it will be a learning experience for me personally as well as for our entire company, especially the leadership team.

Let the games begin!

Talk on SOA & cloud computing at SOA Symposium

I had the pleasure of participating in the 2009 SOA Symposium - Government and Industry Best Practices on Thursday and Friday this past week. This was an event organized the US Department of Defence's Business Transformation Agency as part of its efforts to deploy SOA in the DoD.

Dennis Wisnosky, who was the "patron" of the event, is the Chief Architect and CTO of Business Mission Area of the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer, U.S. Department of Defense. He has the uneviable task of trying to get an incredibly large organization (of 3.5m+ people) adopt some type of consistent SOA architecture! That's when you realize how easy we technology providers have it .. its a LOT harder to get real, large organizations to adopt/adapt than to come out with yet another piece of cool technology :-).

I gave a talk titled "Scalable SOA in Your Own Open Source Cloud." Feedback welcome!

Scalable SOA in Your Own Open Source Cloud

View more presentations from Sanjiva Weerawarana.

I also met Thomas Erl again (since the January meeting in Germany) and also finally met JP Morganthal and Mark Little f2f! Very much a pleasure indeed .. I just wish I wasn't so damned jetlagged and out of it most of the time. Arriving into DC without my bag didn't help either.

Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera!

It gives me great personal thrill to congratulate Srinath on successfully defending his PhD thesis in Computer Science in the area of management of large scale systems at Indiana University a few hours ago! I'm also a member of his phd committee and it was great to part of this historic occasion in his life!

Srinath is the root of WSO2 in many ways. As an intern at the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), along with Dimuthu Leelaratne (who's currently in WSO2 and is one of our security experts) and 2 others, were the ones who created AxisMora, a prototype re-write of Apache Axis1 to show that a pull-parser based SOAP engine could do wonders. In fact they got it to go 10x faster than Axis1. Srinath went on to lead the Axis2 effort that LSF ran in 2004/05 and then went to grad school in August 2005.

So, if not for Srinath .. no AxisMora .. no Axis2 and probably no WSO2; at least certainly not in the form we're in today! The seeds Srinath and company planted in 2003 have dramatically changed the world as we know it :-).

In fact, ALL 6 of the people who originally worked on Axis2/Java are now in the US working on PhDs in Computer Science! Going beyond that group, a total of more than 20 people who've gone thru WSO2 are now in computer science grad school all over the world (primarily US). That's part of the long term impact I wanted to have when LSF and later WSO2 was set up .. Srinath is proof of it working well :).

Srinath is the first to graduate from that group of people. Now we have a pipeline :). He's planning on returning to Sri Lanka soon, where I hope he will join WSO2 and help us compete even better in the world! (And also lead some projects in LSF to help others follow in his footsteps.)

Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera! Its been an honor and privledge to have worked with you and I look forward to many more years together as colleagues!