Development > Interviews

Move over proprietary telephony systems. Australian engineer David Rowe started the Free Telephony Project three years ago to build an affordable IP-PABX system out of free hardware and software. That’s right, the design of the Free Telephony Project IP-PABX is open for any interested person to review and improve. With the first Free Telephony Project products now available and in use world-wide, Rowe hopes it will go along way to improving the availability of voice services in developing nations. In this edition of Open Source Identity, TechWorld interviews Rowe to uncover the burgeoning business of open product development.

In this interview Microsoft's leader of C# development, Anders Hejlsberg, took some time to tell Computerworld about the development of C#, his thoughts on future programming trends, and his experiences putting out fires. Hejlsberg is also responsible for writing the Turbo Pascal system, and was the lead architect on the team that developed Delphi.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

In this in-depth interview, we chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell. Peyton-Jones is particularly interested in the design, implementation, and application of lazy functional languages, and speaks in detail of his desire to ‘do one thing well’, as well as his current research projects being undertaken at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat to Prof. Roberto Ierusalimschy about the design and development of Lua.

In one of the final scenes of the movie, "Charlie Wilson's War," the story of America's part in Afghanistan's victory over the Soviet Union, Congressman Wilson is shown asking for more funding to rebuild Afghanistan, a request that is denied.

Google, which celebrates 10 years of its incorporation this month, remains strongly committed to its Enterprise unit and to the customers it serves, including IT and business managers and CIOs, although most of the company's revenue comes from online advertising.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

Computerworld's investigations into the most widely-used programming languages continues as we chat with Guido van Rossum, Monty Python and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan. Van Rossum is best known as the author of Python, and currently works for Google, CA where he gets to spend at least half his time developing the language.

In this interview we chat to Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla Corporation. Eich details the development of JS from its inception at Netscape in 1995, and comments on its continued popularity, as well as what he believes will be the future of client-side scripting languages on the Web.

We chat with Luca Cardelli, a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge,UK, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.