Open Source

Friday, December 13, 2002

Microsoft Sharing Source in India From V.K. comes this: MS to share Windows code with India PRAGATI VERMA TIMES NEWS NETWORK [  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2002 02:31:31 AM  ] Microsoft is virtually doing the unthinkable in India — it is planning to share the Windows source code. Not with one and all, as Linux does, but with a specific government body which, in turn, will share it with others for the purposes of e-governance and education. Microsoft has already made a proposal to the ministry of information technology for sharing the Windows source code with one government body. The nature of the body has not been spelt out; it will presumably be worked out after discussions between the company and the government officials. Interestingly, the offer comes at a time when state governments are showing interest in rival Linux operating system as the latter's source code is free and downloadable from the internet. [_Go_] Interesting ... Now the Indian government will have an incentive to NOT support Open Source which is quite bad.  Sigh.   9:21:19 AM

Thursday, September 05, 2002

BlogBack: Followup on Miscellaneous Random posts Just a follow up to different recent posts.... About this Blog I mentioned rearchitecting this blog (god I hate that as a verb) earlier and here's what it looks like.  I'll make these sub blogs which don't exist yet hightechmarketing101 inbox buddy lessgeekyscott (for at least my mom and perhaps people who want my writing that is understandable to non geeky folks) evectors blogging opensource php & fuzzyoffice searchcritic webcritic Frequency on the sub blogs will obviously be less but this Radio blog will remain my "SuperBlog" and contain everything.  Comments?  This will all happen around next weekend when i have the time.  A preview of 1 of the blogs is a http://www.hightechmarketing101.com/ with a small taste of the content and some problems with the CSS / broken links. All stories will remain here but be pointed to from the other sites Radio makes this all intricate to setup but not hard at all. PHP Stuff I've been coding too much PHP to write some more but work is ongoing on FuzzyOffice and other things.  Checking some of the domain names I've registered recently might be interesting for folks. www.oscommerce.com seems like an awesome open source replacement for the pain that is Miva Merchant.  I'm still getting it running for a new test site but someone I respect greatly has it up and running already (from like Friday).  And you have to love a product so good that it runs a cool online lingerie store. www.phpbb.com is outstanding !!! Marketing 101 John responded to my responses to his article.  Got that ? Rich Editing in Mozilla or "I Don't Wanna IE No More" Andy from www.surfmind.com is taking a swing at this.  If you are interested in it, swing by www.surfmind.com and let him know or IM / email me and I'll hook you up. Xopus is another approach to it. Adam seems interested enough to at least respond to my email about it.  A big name pushing for this would help a lot. Mozilla 1.1 is much better -- it runs well on my machine at least.  And Andy is a huge advocate for Mozilla as always (side note -- it's astonishing how just one enthusiast can change your mind on an Open Source project; project leads take note) Buffy Stuff I saw somewhere online that Faith is coming back for 5 end of season episodes At last 2 post 30 year old Buffy fans have admitted privately to me that they watch the show.  It's ok people -- Joss is an outstanding writer and the humor is wonderful.  I was wrong about Dawn breathing fire being new -- that's last season -- Thanks Deb ! Can you believe that there is an honest to god Buffy paper magazine? Copyright and RIAA WebRadio seems to be dying: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956730.html Napster is more dead than ever (big shocker there) Web Development www.rackspace.com remains outstanding ! (had to plug a great company) Windows Yet another Windows crash last night.  Would you believe I found over 1.3 gigabytes of temp files on just 1 drive. I loathe and despise Microsoft more than ever for their shoddy engineering practices I got the CDs for Redhat 7.3 recently so my desktop Linux workstation will be updated and going back into daily use in a week or two Another bad security flaw in Windows: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-956729.html Other Short Items Eszter is looking for help with cool PC gadgets -- got suggestions?   6:43:53 PM

Recommended: Douglas O'Flaherty Doug is someone I've met a few times and have a really, really good feeling about.  His skills are good and he knows what he's doing.  He's also newly laid off due.  If you are looking for someone with startup experience and good overall skills both technical, marketing and product management, see: http://oflaherty.homeip.net/douglas/resumes/ He's also got a pretty strong Open Source background and I suspect would be open to contract gigs if you needed (although I honestly have no idea on this one; that's a suspicion only). 8:12:38 AM

Monday, August 26, 2002

My Apologies to Mozilla on PC Readers I just discovered that the sidebar of this blog doesn't display correctly using Mozilla.  I'll have to fix that.  Sorry.   7:04:02 AM

Thursday, August 22, 2002

My Comments on Lessig Versus Winer This comments on Dave Winer's very perceptive comments in today's www.scripting.com.   Cross Reference.  I too am as much of a legal neophyte as Dave Winer. Still I feel that I have something to contribute to the debate. Like Dave I am a happy capitalist and I think that you should have a right to sell software if you want to. It doesn't mean that people can or will purchase it over a free alternative but Lessig also doesn't have the right to take this freedom away from me. Even though software may be unsellable after 10 years, it still doesn't mean that Lessig should take my legal property away from me. As Dave said, Lessig seems to be going after the Big COs with this. And I think he is. What he is also after though is the wrongful copyright extensions granted by Congress that extend the rights of Disney and the like essentially indefinitely.  There are two fundamentally different types of content involved -- why should the same laws be applied to each?  Let's see these copyright extensions repealed to the founding fathers original intent (don't have the # off the top of my head but it was much lower) OR set to the same time period as a patent. Why are these different after all? They both serve to protect intellectual property. Direct Comments on Dave's Points: >>Second, it comes at a pretty bad time in the software business, which has been reeling from the idea that what we produce should all be free. The software industry is, imho, reeling from: The continued dominance of Microsoft and its rapacious penetration into new markets. There just aren't all that many places for new developers to go. It's no wonder that giving away code seems like such a good idea to many.  Let's face -- we're programmers, programmers want to see their code in use and they'll give it away if that's the only way to see it in use.  And that's OK.  They have that right. The movement towards so much software being bundled on computers has created a reality where many, if not most, consumers just don't have to buy software at all. This creates a culture against ISVs in general.  If people aren't used to buying software, it's much harder for them to do so.  And this isn't just Microsoft. There is now so much software bundled with modern Macintoshes that the Macintosh software market, which is generally stronger for an ISV than the Windows market (again IMHO), will begin to crumble. The rise in software prices relative to hardware prices. Every year hardware gets cheaper and software gets more expensive. While we may understand this, it makes no sense to the average consumer who basically figures "I'll use what came with my machine and pirate, download, or use free alternatives. i.e. it's the syndrome of How can a copy of office be worth 50% of my Macintosh iBook?" >>Perhaps Lessig and his friends are well intentioned, I don't know what the thought process is, and I don't care. Not wanting to know what Lessig's thought process isn't helpful to the debate. We may disagree with him but Dr. Lessig is a smart, intelligent man.  Shouldn't we at least try and understand people we are being critical of? 7:02:11 PM

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

From Russell.  Too Damn Funny.  And also too damn true.  I mean can't you see Bill out there with a baseball bad viscously clubbing baby penguins. 5:37:30 PM

Thursday, August 15, 2002

Open Source: A Perspective from Russia I just got one of those over the transom, totally unexpected emails from a reader in Russia based on one of my essays on Open Sources.  With his permission, I am blogging the response so it's available to a wider audience.  My reponses are delimited by [SJ]. His company is Stuffed Guys, www.stuffedguys.com, and they produce software like this (it's his own words): Our product is called Stuffed Tracker, it allows to track Return on Investment stats for any site that uses online advertising and that has some sort of ordering process (it might sell products, or just have a registration system). Tracker url is http://www.stuffedguys.com/tracker.html. It is quite simple but it is $39.95 and just "plain works!" (c) by you, i think :).   One of out clients uses it on his e-commmerce site for half a year now and he is quite happy. We also plan to release a powerful poll system with advanced feature like automatic polls, comments with post and pre moderation, etc. But right now it is not ready yet. Sergey's email: Greetings, Scott. I think, there is one more view on the open source vs. commercial software issue. I own (with a partner) a small company (Stuffed Guys) that is located in Moscow, Russia. We are doing all web development related stuff, ncluding *nix system administration. Traditionally :) we are working with foreign customers, as there is not much work on our local market for a small company. And there is a big problem for us. It is very hard to receive payment for our work, because for example PayPal doesn't work with Russia and there is no way we can use it. So we are forced to use offline means of receiving money - Western Union. And there are lots of lots of disadvantages, starting from huge percents that WU takes away from every payment (around 20% for a $100 payment and down to 5% for $1000+ payments) and also it takes too much time to get up and go to the local WU office and get this 100$-200$-whatever, if you know what i mean :). It will be much easier if all this micro-payments would accumulate on one account where we could collect the money when we feel the need to. [SJ]  Ok there are two different issues here -- one is how you get paid and the other is whether or not Open Source is viable.  More below. So, naturally, we decided to do commercial web software (forums, polls, etc) and sell it through one of registration services that would take payments for the software for us (we use ShareIt http://www.shareit.com). And this is a real solution for our problem. We receive payment for the products on our account in ShareIt and we take the money out of their system whenever we want. And now to the point of this email. We just can't use Open Source model, where software is free and we earn money on services. Because of the payment issue. If we were a big company here - it won't be a problem at all, but we are a small company, with no office and mostly doing small tasks and getting paid small (relatively) sums of money for them. We just can't build a serious business in this conditions. [SJ]  I see your point -- shareit gives you a payment infrastructure that you trust and makes it possible for you to do business and make $$$.  I don't think that this really changes my arguments regarding Open Source at all though -- you are talking about a very specific situation here.  I'd make your statement "We just can't use Open Source model" and make it "For us, for now, Open Source doesn't work due to lack of a payment infrastructure".  Have you looked at programming brokerage services like www.guru.com and www.elance.com ?  I don't know if they offer this or not but they might.  So we are selling our own software (we are aiming at a cheap niche of $20 - $60), we might make a completely free product, but only to attract attention to other software that we sell/going to sell. [SJ]  That's great!  I never said that all commercial software was going to go away (although some may have read that into it).  You also fall into a commercial niche of utility software with that pricing and that's always going to exist.  It's a small enough amount of money to be throw away if it doesn't work. This is also our main job, and we can't afford to do it without money, and there is no sense in doing it. [SJ] Amen!  We all have to eat, pay the rent, buy cat litter, etc.  And we all do it lots of different ways.  Congrats on making a living in today's wild and wooly high tech world. Sergey "the Eych" Smirnov One of the Stuffed Guys http://www.stuffedguys.com   8:00:45 AM

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Another Reason People Create Open Source Applications: Rage Note: Been programming since 3 am; may be incoherent and rambling -- but how many of my blog entries quote poems? Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. -- Dylan Thomas I've think mentioned this before, but at the risk of being pedantic, I wanted to make this point again.  I was stuck in traffic yesterday and thinking a lot about Open Source and why people do it.  For some it's: a desire for recognition scratching their own niche boredom in a job need intellectual curiousity altruism I think another whole motivation is very simple: Rage.  I mean let's be honest -- if you are a developer and you hit a bug or a crash in something, how often do you think "Damn It!  I could do this better" (even when you honestly can't).  It goes through all our heads.  Every time I'm in Outlook and the search engine (which strongly sucks little green toads) fails to find something that I know is in the folder, I get mad.  And every time it happens again, I get even madder.  And then, sometimes, the dam breaks.  And look at that!  It's an open source project for X where X = the current subject of the rage.  Here's what tipped me over into the Linux world: Microsoft Site Server.  This product, which is actually conceptually fairly nice, had, at least in 1999, the annoying habit of eating it's own data files.  You'd set up an index run and it would work for a while and then just die.  And you'd have to rebuild it.  After enough times, I finally said "Enough!" (actually my words were more like this "Damn MS **$&*($#@@_)@#" -- use your imagination).  That took me into Linux as a user and now other frustrations have brought me to the "Screw it all.  Time to launch my own project".  Now if you think about this from an industry wide, economic perspective, here are some interesting questions: What would Microsoft's revenues have been last year if Linux/FreeBSD didn't exist and every 1U box in a data center was running NT / 2000 / IIS? What would Sun's revenues have been last year if Linux/FreeBSD didn't exist and every 1U box in a data center was running Solaris? How many more programmers / support engineers / sales engineers / field staff would have been employed if Linux / FreeBSD didn't exist? Looking at it this way, you can see how Microsoft argues that Linux is bad for the overall economy (one of their very spurious arguments from a few months back).  Of course you also have to realize that the Internet as it is today simply wouldn't exist without Linux / FreeBSD.  Why?  Simple -- we couldn't afford all the license fees needed.  And server OS pricing would be higher without Linux / FreeBSD to put downward price pressure on them.  And I think everyone would argue that, despite the dot commage, the Internet has been hugely good for the overall economy.  So if you accept the premise that Linux has cut into OS revenues then the corollary is that Open Source will (and has) cut into commercial software revenues.  And, while we could argue that this is bad for the economy, just as we all say about the MP3 issues: Business Models Change.  It's just that simple.  For all too many years now, the high tech industry, software and hardware, has been terribly arrogant and basically getting away with poor quality.  If much of the open source movement is tied to rage, as is my premise, then they really have no one to blame but themselves.    Amazing what a little rage and a lot of smart people can do, huh?  Do not go gentle into that commercial world, Poor quality and bugs should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage and create something anew; Make it free; give it away. -- Poorly Done Mock Dylan Thomas (if there's a good poet out there, email me your version of Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night cast as a pro or con Open Source poem and I'll publish it here and link to you) 6:27:50 AM