When I saw this headline in my alerts – “Nigerian Bank Chooses Red Hat and JBoss SOA Solutions for Mission-Critical Banking” – I immediately assumed it was a 419 scam manifest as RSS. Sad – but the misdeeds of a few have created a stereotype that the Sub-Saharan finance industry will take decades to erase. However, I’m glad I didn’t ignore the alert; the press release actually has some pretty nice quotes :

Bank PHB migrated to Red Hat’s open source solutions to achieve the next step in scalability, performance and the ability to handle heavy workloads and achieve cost reduction more effectively than with other proprietary software platform

and

Cost saving was not the only reason we went with open source, though it was certainly icing on the cake. Our decision was driven by the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provide constant innovation and the flexibility that enables us to develop products that we can launch to market faster …

And another success story from from Booz Allen Hamilton :

The combination of efficiency provided by the virtualization capabilities embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, the scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System, the clustering feature inherent in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice

Alec Muffet makes a good point - something I’ve said a few times on this blog – Open Source isn’t an excuse for not being as good or better than competing proprietary technology. The mass-market doesn’t care about the ideology – they just expect stuff that works.

I’ve been playing with Fedora 10 on the XO and will be trying it on my home desktop in the next week – this discussion of the 13 prime features of Fedora 10 is a good read if you’re thinking the same.

LinkedIn has just added a host of new features / app. integration for networking – I’ll be giving them a closer look if I get time.

On the subject of social networks – I recive a couple of invites every week inviting me to a new social network platform thingy – just FYI – I’m not really interested in managing new networks – I’m completely satisfied with LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook at a push or if you get really desperate give me a call or send me an email.