Gas Guzzlers Find Price of Forgiveness - New York Times

I expect Carbon offsets will be traded on ebay. This article on the New York Times will be available with free registration for a short while, after about a week they request a fee for archives. It is an interesting idea for organisations projecting a responsible image. The article notes that

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund bought offsets to cover the amount of pollution produced by all 1,479 people who attended conferences at its Pocantico Conference Center in Westchester County last year. Ben & Jerry's buys enough offsets to cover its manufacturing and retail operations, and even the Rolling Stones have bought offsets to make their concerts carbon neutral."

Gas Guzzlers Find Price of Forgiveness - New York Times: "To people who take the threat of global warming personally, driving a car that spews heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere can be a guilt trip.

But to help atone for that environmental sin, some drivers are turning to groups on the Internet that offer pain-free ways to assuage their guilt while promoting clean energy.

It involves buying something known as a carbon offset: a relatively inexpensive way to stimulate the production of clean electricity. Just go to one of several carbon-offset Web sites, calculate the amount of carbon dioxide produced when you drive, fly or otherwise burn fossil fuels, and then buy an offset that pays for an equivalent amount of clean energy."

Web sites like terrapass.com, carbonfund.org, nativeenergy.com and self.org focus on automobile emissions because drivers can become aware of their carbon footprint every time they fill up. An average car produces about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Is it time to build in BPM?

After the Eclipse story, I thought I had better add this article on BPM (note this still isn't BPR though).

Is it time to build in BPM?: "Will 2006 be the year that business process management moves out of its specialist ghetto to become a built-in component of every application?

Some vendors say business process management should be built into applications rather than bought as a separate product:

* Traditionally, BPM has been a separate middleware purchase
* There is a fragmented market of point solutions
* A lack of mature standards has held back progress
* Now some BPM vendors market their wares to application vendors
* Embedded BPM can make it easier to adapt to changing processes



Traditionally, enterprises have seen BPM as an optional extra investment. When necessary, they've signed up for an all-singing, all-dancing suite from the likes of Savvion, Fuego or Tibco, or for less specialist offerings from existing platform vendors such as IBM, BEA or Microsoft. But increasingly, enterprises today are opting to let application vendors do the grunt work for them, taking a bundled option built into the vendor's own application. With ERP vendors, data management vendors and the like embedding BPM functionality, several BPM vendors have moved away from selling direct to enterprises and instead have started to position themselves as primarily embedded or open source options. Examples include two vendors who coincidentally were both acquired last year — FiveSight, bought last month by Redwood, CA-based BPM specialist Intalio, and Oak Grove Systems, which last summer became part of Atlanta, Georgia-based legacy integration vendor Seagull Software."

Linux News: Developer : OSDL Offers Cash for Linux Development

Funding news is always important for Government and Open source developers:

Linux News: Developer : OSDL Offers Cash for Linux Development: "The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has moved to boost Linux kernel development with the launch of a fund to provide financial support for open source Latest News about open source software developers.

The pro-Linux organization's OSDL Fellowship Fund aims to provide resources to engineers working on Linux and open source community projects who do not otherwise have access to financial support."

Linux News: Developer : Eclipse Adding Tools to Manage App Life Cycle

This project is still "on the way" but is a very interesting development if the different development products can be brought together. ITIL, PRINCE and RUP have all got strengths, but none are really open source. The Institute of Government Business has made a key point about ensuring that the business process reengineering is properly addressed in the development process. If there is any information on how Eclipse will handle this, please let me know:

Linux News: Developer : Eclipse Adding Tools to Manage App Life Cycle: "The Eclipse Foundation detailed plans to expand its traditional focus on individual open source development tools by adding a project for managing the entire application life cycle.

During its EclipseCon conference, which took place in late March in Santa Clara, Calif., officials of the open source community provided further information on the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Project under development by several of its members.

The Eclipse ALM system promises to tie together development tools from multiple vendors without requiring point-to-point integration.
Single Platform

Eclipse is targeting users like Loren Larsen, chief architect at World Wide Packets in Spokane Valley, Wash.

Larsen said he would be interested in using Eclipse's ALM project to help his company avoid having to buy an integrated suite from the likes of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM Rational Software unit. Larsen said he would prefer to use best-of-breed tools for the elements in the life cycle.

'[Open source ALM] is the only way we will get a lot of the different tool vendors to come to the table and provide a single platform everyone can use,' he said.

Larsen said his company, which provides Ethernet products to telecommunications carriers, now uses incompatible requirements management, scheduling, defect-tracking, compiler and software configuration management tools.

The Eclipse Foundation planned to roll out proof-of-concept code for ALM at the EclipseCon conference, said Ian Skerrett, the organization's director of marketing.

More than 30 vendors have signed on to support the project, which was launched by Eclipse member Serena Software last spring. The completed ALM code is expected to be available in October, Skerrett said."