Musings on the world of software from the sharp end of the long tail
Posted in open source, Technology on Oct 16th, 2008
Originally uploaded by sharps With a bit of trimming, a swap-file and a new build – I now have Fedora 10 running pretty reliably on the OLPC. I wouldn’t call it snappy exactly but it’s a start. Fedora is running off a writeable live image (using a 4Gb SD Card) which also hosts the swap-file. [...]
Posted in Enterprise, open source on Sep 19th, 2008
I’ve spent too much time in airport lounges this week and I’ve been trying to avoid the mainstream news – I think I’ll just read the dumbed down summary of the credit-meltdown in Men’s Health in a couple of months time. As such there were only a couple of items in my del.icio.us queue this [...]
Posted in open source, Red Hat on Aug 6th, 2008
I’ve been meaning to find some time to respond to a recent report by Fortify that cast some pretty negative aspersions on the security of Open Source software. Their conclusions are fairly sweeping generalizations that could be applied to just about anything : Government and commercial organisations… should use open source applications with great caution” [...]
Posted in open source on Jun 20th, 2008
Of course the real news was that Red Hat (and many others) were even given the opportunity to be part of the evolution of Java. This was only possible because a bunch of people (like Simon Phipps), inside and outside of Sun had the clarity of vision, passion and determination to actually make it happen; [...]
Posted in open source on Jun 19th, 2008
[also read part 2] At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology. At [...]
Posted in open source, Web on Jun 3rd, 2008
Firefox has been my browser of choice since at least 1.5 (2004?) and it’s provided consistency across the various OS’s I’ve used during that time – Ubuntu, Windows 95, Mac OS/x and Fedora. There are a number of reports that Firefox is seriously eating into Microsoft’s dominant market share – start here. Mozilla are planning [...]
Posted in open source, Red Hat, Technology, Uncategorized on May 18th, 2008
Last week I installed Fedora 9 on my laptop and so far I like what I see – the desktop and visual effects are pretty nice without being to much of a distraction. Security is pretty solid with encrypted disk and SE Linux if you need it. All in all – everything seems to hang [...]
Posted in open source, Red Hat, Technology on May 8th, 2008
There was a time when when the main selling point of (Free) Open Source was cost and consumers of the technology we’re willing to make compromises in other areas. I think that’s changed and Enterprise adoption is one of the causes. If your are responsible for maintaining your organization’s business crtitcal infrastructure – you’re not [...]
Posted in Business, open source on Apr 30th, 2008
Talking of Spring – SpringSource’s choice of license for their new ‘platform’ seems to have sparked some discussion over on TSS. In a way – it’s sad that a perfectly decent product launch is over-shadowed by their choice of license – we (the OpenSource community) still clearly have work to do. I haven’t decided whether [...]
Posted in Business, Marketing, open source on Apr 11th, 2008
In my (albeit short) experience of building a business based on Open Source; I’ve realized that demand generation is much more consumer (or individual) oriented – hence traditional marketing is no longer sufficient. An adoption-led market needs passionate consumers. Offering great products is a start; but investing in your community and building passion for your [...]