Posts in Category ‘Linux’

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Please don’t insult me!

Topic of the day: Craig Mundie’s (Microsoft) speech about open source.

At the beginning I must tell you that I do believe in Karlgaard conspiration theory made public in Forbes.

I’m almost crying, we are insiders. Most of us know what is Open Source, how it works and why is good. Unfortunately business leaders, does not. Most of them are taking Bill Gates and Microsoft as some kind of oracle, and follow their suggestions blindly. It does not make any difference that Linus is right, that Newton and Einstein has done more for humanity than any company. Business is about profit not about humanity, they don’t *care* about humanity.

I guess, Open Source will continue it’s way, out of any commercial and business interest, just like it was at the beginning. I’m onlyv sorry for companies who invested in Open Source, because their effort is shadowed by Microsoft. I would like only to mention IBM and Sun for their involvement in Apache projects or Intalio which made: Castor, Open-EJB, Tyrex and many other companies.

Myself I co-founded a company just to be able to use Linux full time and do Open Source full time. If there was a moment at the beginning (1999) when I show a future for the company, now my hopes are fading away, Open Source in Business game is over.

Perens: “There are companies that see Free Software, especially GNU/Linux, as an interloper to be shut down, a competitor to be eliminated. Some of these companies have increased the rate at which they file new patents. It’s not impossible that these companies and their business partners could start going after Free Software developers, en masse, with patent infringement lawsuits. Since essentially none of us can afford to defend ourselves, most developers would be forced to cave in, withdraw their software, and stop participating in Free Software development.”

discover: “Fullerton hoped the transmitter would do what he had been told was impossible- send time-coded ultra-wideband electromagnetic pulses, rather than continuous radio waves, via the backyard antennas. Ever since a professor at the University of Arkansas told him that such pulses could not be used to transmit a clear signal from one antenna to another, Fullerton had been obsessed with proving they could. Five years later, here he was, standing in his yard under the moonless sky with a smile on his face, listening to his favorite band: “Waiting for the break of day, searching for something to say . . . “

There are two things I like about this article. First it proves that if somebody thinks something is impossible that is not necessarily true. Second the implications of the technology. Imagine a wireless home with 40 Mb/s transfer rater or an personal radio station.

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Daily Rumblings

Even if it is hard to believe, I’m still alive :). So, time for excuses: I’ve been so busy. Of course nobody will buy that. The truth is that I’ve been busy building something, which I like to think, needed a lot of creative work and the time frame was kind of relaxed, you can’t rush creativity. It required such an effort 😉 that I missed my schedule with around three months. I know that 10 minutes is not so much time to spend for this page, but my big ego would disagree with you.

So, events! Well, in November or December last year I gave an interview for the Application Development Trends magazine, and then in the same time we had a TV crew from NHK public television for some Internet related documentary. What really impressed me about the TV shooting, among the fact that they filmed around 2 day/10 hours per day for around 5 minutes of broadcast, was the kind of focus they where having. Starting every morning at 9 AM till 10 PM, no coffee breaks, no lunch break. No wander Japan is where it is (or was ?). I never got the tape with the show, so I have no clue what was that they actually broadcasted :). And after that came the relaxation time, spending the New Year’s eve up in a very remote area of the Romanian mountains. Hope I will have the time to scan some pictures, because
the peisaje was really impressive.

I’m the kind of guy who likes gadgets. So, now I have an Compaq Armada M700, an Psion Series V and an Nokia 6210 mobile phone. In this idea now I’m mobile (TM) and perfectly interconnected, you know my notebook talks with my phone, my phone talks to my Psion, in one word everything talks with everything. But of couse one is theory and other is reality. The Nokia Data Suite is a crap piece of software, which really doesn’t matter since I don’t use Windows anymore (I don’t have to much against Microsoft, so that’s not the reason), but under Linux there is little software available and what exist is not for my devices. Bad luck. I would write them, but no time. Anyway the morale of the story: there is no such as smart devices if you don’t have the smart software.

The Open Source and Linux in Business game is over. This hurts, because I believed that this model really offers (if it’s done properly) a plus to the client. It’s true it’s hard to find a revenue model in the movement, I’m not even sure if there is one. I agree that Open Source might not be appropriated to every type of software but for some the benefices offered to both the companies and to clients is huge. What is most annoying is that I feel that not necessarily was a model which didn’t found a place in the business sphere because it lacked real value and therefore died. I have the feeling that it died because of bad conjuncture (the dot-com phenomena, and the problems with the American economy) and because of an aggressive marketing with no real value behind.

The truth is that now maybe the whole software industry might get a bit calmer. I always had the feeling that what happened lately was not OK. We are not a special industry, and the software engineers are not a separate species, who deserves special thratement. We are workers like peoples in any other field. We have to produce tools, which other people will happily use. Customers don’t care if it is JNDI, J2E, Java, C# or Net based. They are still using Cobol and 10 years old applications because of the simple fact that they work and does the job which is supposed to do. Wake up people.

And of course one game ends another one begins. The name of the new game is: Hailstorm, .Net, SOAP, and Web Services. A new madness begins. Aldo not sure about the benefits of the Hailstorm for the average user (except that if he would use real cash, his wallet would be a lot lighter :), the new game will change a bit the Internet, which might be good. Just like the Open-Source/Linux game revitalized the movement (lot’s of new software, lot’s of new quality peoples) maybe the Internet will be a bit more after the new game.

Related to RUE, without any update since October, people begin to be more and more interested in it. Great daily activity and downloads, that’s good, the 2 year prediction seems to be true.