April 26, 2005
R0ml is blogging (again)
Not that I read him the first time he was blogging.
I was just surfing around and found out that he was blogging. I have heard him talk in person once and on IT Conversations twice. So entertaining.
Excited to read his blog musings regularly.
Posted by Kaliya at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
Hosting for the open source set.
Text Drive is catering to the open source online publishing set.
Posted by Kaliya at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
It works for Schools in the UK
Open Source just got the nod to be used in UK Schools. A report was released with extensive case studies.
Becta's report, based on a study of 15 schools, will state that open source office products have been demonstrated to offer schools a cost-effective alternative to proprietary software.
Among the key findings will be that primary and secondary schools using OSS substantially reduced the total cost of ownership per PC. Support costs - typically accounting for more than half a PC's total cost - showed the biggest reduction. Furthermore, case studies showed that the cost advantages of OSS were often used to increase provision, rather than reduce overall budgets in schools.
It will also highlight that OSS can provide an appropriate infrastructure for schools and is well supported, with good reliability and performance.
Posted by Kaliya at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
I think I am going to learn how to program
It occurred to me today that I am getting geeky enough to perhaps learn how to program.
I am going to attempt to learn Ruby.
Posted by Kaliya at 06:38 AM | Comments (0)
Open Source TV
The Participatory Politics Foundation is working on building blogTorent - basically Open Source TV.
The Participatory Politics Foundation open source TV. Essentially this allows video providers to distribute full-length television programs over the internet...bypassing Hollywood, cable providers, the FCC, Clear Channel, Adelphia, stupid local channels, and the almost moribund PBS.
Pretty cool. I have met them too. Great bunch of folks. They are looking for PHP progammers too.Posted by Kaliya at 05:40 AM | Comments (0)
The BuzzPhraser...
I am continually reminded about the ever present and unfolding genius of Doc Searls. I just found the BuzzPhraserand I wonder how many in the open source will be inspired to use it now that it has 'gone mainstream'. At least the marketing folks might be.
Posted by Kaliya at 02:19 AM | Comments (0)
My kind of MPG - FreeCiv is free...
I am not much of a gamer. I played Quest when I was a kid mostly version 4 and 5. Then I tried Myst - didn't "get it". I had a geeky boyfriend into Quake in the late 90's. Since then I have watched the gaming world 'go by'. This really peaked my interest - a game that actually was free. I wonder if the Games for Change folks have anything to do with it.
Posted by Kaliya at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)
Agile Development Conf. Covers Agile Contracts
My little company Integrative Activism has just got its first few contracts. We have done our best to estimate our costs and put this forward to our clients as the price. This process is one of the more difficult aspects of running the company. I just found this post about a workshop on Agile contracts at the Agile development conference. Both look very interesting and informative.
Posted by Kaliya at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Open Source Intelligence in the Blogosphere?
The Washington Post isreporting that the NSA wants to get DARPA to scour the Blogosphere for terrorist messaging and threats.
mmmm....
Posted by Kaliya at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)
Demos book on Open Source Released
I first learned about Demos when I was exploring the net about a year ago. They have a great paper called Open Source Democracy - really cool - talking about how open source ideas could influence how we 'do democracy' in our society.
They have just released a new paper Wide Open:Open sourcemethods and their future potential. I am psyched and will be reading this week. Hopefully others can too. Would love to know what you think.
from the blurb
the principles of open source promise to radically alter the we approach complex social problems....Just as it is now impossible to think about getting things done without considering the role of the Internet, so will it soon be impossible to think about how to solve a large social problem without considering the role of open methods.
Posted by Kaliya at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
Lego using Open Source
Pretty Cool - Who knew!
There is an Open Source Java based OS for Lego Mindstorms RCX (to run lego robotics) called leJOS - cute pun on the name, eh. (ooo.. that was a native canadianism.
Here is the link to it on sourcefordge.
Posted by Kaliya at 02:46 AM | Comments (0)
Israel, IBM and Open Source.
I just found this on Open Sourcery...
IBM and the Israeli government have made a pact to encourage open-source technology start-ups. Under the terms of the pact, IBM will supply all of the technical parts, know-how, market-expertise and support and the Israeli government will back the start-ups financially. While no figures were released, IBM has said individual companies may stand to receive up to $100,000 or more.
Very interesting development. I wonder if our government will every 'get this' paradigm (I know the government of Mass. does).
I will put my 'activist' hat on with what I know from my visit to Israel/Palestine in 2000.
Palestinians don't enter the sciences because they can't get jobs for 'security reasons' cutting of that very lucrative industry to a whole generation of Palestinians. It seems that western companies invest in Israel they might consider links to this investment including a stop discriminating against Palestinians with technical and engineering hiring. Opening up real economic opportunities for people who are oppressed reduces terrorism because it gives them hope for the future.
Posted by Kaliya at 02:05 AM | Comments (0)
Certification - which one and why?
Peter Hosikins ponders...
So what makes one certification better or more thorough/more trustworthy than another? Is methodology enough? Or is it the menu of open source stack permutations that are certified that makes one company the go to source for open source?
Why doesn't IBM/HP/Dell just ship a server with a certified LAMP stack image already burned?
Not sure I know the answers to these but they are worth thinking about.
Posted by Kaliya at 01:05 AM | Comments (0)
Spike Source is the tip of the iceburg.
Reading this post by ZDNET blogers Dan Farber and Daivd Berlind they say that SpikeSource and other companies doing similar things are just the tip of the iceburg in terms of potential open source business models.
They quote Doc in a recent Linux Journal Article..
The fact is, or will be, far more money will be made because of open source than will be made with open source–or with any of the infrastructural (in Tom’s words, vanilla) software it replaces. Think of open-source infrastructure as a huge, flat cake on which you can build a vast new market for any kind of topping you like. A cake which, by the way, only gets bigger.
We have another word for that cake, one I know Tom (Frieman author of Flatland) likes: a marketplace. The open-source marketplace isn’t for open-source goods. It’s for what you can build on them and with them. There’s no telling how big that market will be. We do know, though, that it’s flat and seems to go on forever in all directions.
Just this morning I was listening to R0ml's talk at OSBC '04 and he was talking about more missing open source projects. It seems that these four missing projects offer who ever does them an opportunity to make a lot of money. One of them has already happened SugarCRM.
Posted by Kaliya at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2005
Dot Project
I just learned about DotProject
...a web-based project management tool similar to MS Project and Share Point Services. It handles file uploads and forums as well and managing projects and tasks.
Interesting development in this space. Seems like it could be cool.
Posted by Kaliya at 06:38 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
Town Hall - Vendors lambasted - Open Source the answer
I just foundthis article that recounts Phil Moore's rant about software vendors at the SpikeSource town hall.
Posted by Kaliya at 02:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
MySQL has a giant ecology
This really speaks to what I wrote about on the SpikeSource Blog yesterday. The building of ecologies. I had no idea that the ecology around MySQL was so big...
Arkeia Corporation is announcing that it has installed its 500th MySQL plug-in. Arkeia's data protection software enables customers to reduce costs and increase profits by enhancing the inherent performance of the MySQL database.
Posted by Kaliya at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)
Dah-dah-dah...the shark is coming.
Visualize the stealth shark fin coming towards you from a postgresql vendor out there...
Posted by Kaliya at 01:23 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2005
Migrating to MySQL
MySQL just released a beta version of their migration tool.
Posted by Kaliya at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)
Free Tag Found
With folksonomies all the rage right now - I just found FreeTag plug-in for MySQL-PHP.
Posted by Kaliya at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
Open Source Usability
There is a mini-movement arising - Open Source Usability. I attended the FLOSS usability sprint out on by Blue Oxen and Aspiration.
This post covers a lot of the history of the movement along with the Spirnt.
Posted by Kaliya at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
Beauty is in the Laptop
At MySQL I was stoped by Jeremy Cole from Yahoo (title - mysql geek) and Tobias Asplund from MySQL AB (trainer and conslutant) for them to take a picture of my laptop.
Interesting new phenomena - the laptop tatoo as 'geek magnet'
Posted by Kaliya at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)
Sugar CRM talk at MySQL
Open Source you 'really have to produce.' Speed of product development is higher.
Greater communication with open source community the great the feedback and the more you will be rewarded by the community.
How much is open and how much is pro? Different versions have different amounts of openness.
You must be completely transparent with your developer community - they must believe and be true.
Outgrew source forge - sugarforge.org is the collaboration space. Over 30 projects.
So much power in being open about the project sharing ideas. Having forums and not being afraid to reveal all about the company.
What is Open Source - it is a disruptive innovation.
Getting to critical feature mass quickly through open source fast.
Posted by Kaliya at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)
Open Source Apple
I just found this link toApple's open source page.
Posted by Kaliya at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
What does Freedom mean?
Listening to the ongoing debates surrounding Solaris going open. The frame around open source means. This postwent through my aggregator.
Nethertheless licences associated with open source may have implications for developers wether and how open source code can be reused. And these legal implications are actually enforced in front of courts. Companies which want to use open source in their own products but maintain their own intellectual property have to consider which open source license to use: The CDDL under which OpenSolaris is licensed is the right approach for such companies - the GPL is not. There is an ongoing debate around the right open source license with some critical misconceptions. In an open world the key to freedom is choice - and this also applies to open source licensing. The GPL with its viral character fails to acknowledge this.
It is choice? or is it the freedom to see and be transparency.
What about the right of original authors to choose how their code is used.
Anyways this is an ongoing debate.
Posted by Kaliya at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
At MySQL - interesting Opening.
I just got to the MySQL users conference. They have lots of plugs around that is cool after OSBC all the folks with computers were relegated to the edges.
They are talking about Live Journal right now. It seems like an interesting story about how the teenage desire to talk/write incessantly can over run computer database systems. They are discussing the best way to do cluster systems - Distributed Replicated Block Devise and other things.
I caught the end of the opening talk about the state of open source by Tienmann he brought up two really interesting topics
1) looking at the history of civilization - Guns, Germs and Steel - what is the ultimate and proximate causes of major technology shifts. He was asking the audience to think about the ultimate causes of the success of open source.
2) Massive Change - a book by Bruce Mau (that I bought and read in November)
for most of us design is invisible until it breaks.
He went into an interesting set of numbers from Microsoft - their own numbers announced for how much they are going to be spending on fixing security - It is growing exponentially in July 2002 the amount was 100 million and in March 2005 they announced they would be spending 2 billion. By 2008 they will either spend down their entire revenue or have to cash all the money they have in the bank. The assertion was clear - of bad design was causing this massive failure. Perhaps Kim's work there is part of getting to the simplicity on the other side of complexity that will solve some of these complex security problems.
____
Software patents are a recipe for massive stasis in any field where their is a new patent for 20 years. He closed by asking some provocative questions about the binary relationship between the client and designer and if particular license re-enforced this - hypothesizing that GPL was strongly pluralistic and others were perhaps less so.
He closed with Moores Law - who is not referencing that this week?
He postulated Cox's Interperability Hypothesis. Linking Moores and Mentcalfs Laws. When one has 70% of the nodes one has 90% of the connections.
I looked up the Interoperability Hypothesis this is what I foundanother reference to Tiemann referencing - then I wonder is it real?
Michael Tiemann spoke to Open Source theory and quoted Alexis de Tocqueville's democracy on America.
He highlighted 'the value of option value' as a basic business
principle and a foundation of Open Source processes.
He Introduced Cox's Interoperability Hypothesis. "Metcalf's Law" value of network is proporational to the number of connections that can exist in geometric proportions. Spoke to themacroeconomics of compatibility. Proved that conventional economics rewards bad behavior.
Open Source leverages network economics; when the potential connections is in the billions versus the thousands, per Metcalfe's and Moore's Laws the productivity is millions of times better.
Here is another reference
Talking to Alan Cox, he says to look at Metcalfe's law, Cos'x [sic] (and why this reference didn't come up the first time) interoperability hypothesis. Degree of interoperability between competing subnets modifies the value of the network. Compatibility and cooperation increase value. Moore's law dominates in the small, Metcalfe's in the large. Fragmentation vs. dominance. Inertial power of the installed base. Force multiplier. Installed base size. 1M network has 1E6 force, 20 generations or Moore's law. 1B network has 1E9 force, 30 generations of Moore's laws.
Posted by Kaliya at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
Kim makes milestone.
Kim's Milestone interview about SpikeSource can be found here.
Posted by Kaliya at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
MySQL AB doesn't forget the developer community
I just read this nice post about MySQL and the conference.
But MySQL AB has not forgotten the little guys who want a DBMS that runs lean and fast, with near-zero administration. These users will probably continue to be its largest base. Significantly, under the conventional trappings I mentioned, I believe MySQL AB is still structured in a fundamentally different way from a conventional propriety vendor, and is still behaving like a network of brilliant independent software developers. They have always listened closely to their users--you can see that at their conferences, where dozens of developers turn up in distinctive shirts and attract flocks of petitioners for new features--but they now are listening to paying customers in the same intense, investigative manner.
I agree.
Posted by Kaliya at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
BI tools introduction to Spike Source
I assume that BI means Business Integration tools.
Seems that two different tool sets went open source and the author of this infoworld piece is introducing them to one another and to SpikeSource for certification.
Posted by Kaliya at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
Open Office issues
Is the code base to big?
Is their to much control in the hands of sun developers?
These questions were raised at the mini-conference for OpenOffice.org
It all makes me wonder about Jerry Michalski's assertion that the whole suite of office/productivity tools needs to be re-examined. Makes sense because they old tools all come for our old metaphors of how things are done. The web and networks change how work flow can happen and what needs to be shared with who.
Posted by Kaliya at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
Australia is using Open Source
Interesting article on ZDNet- the australian government is favoring open source.
Posted by Kaliya at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
This is what blogging is...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marccanter/5164977/
Posted by Kaliya at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
Ubuntu - Humanity to Others
Welcome,
This it the start of this yet to be named blog on Free and Open Source Software. I will be blogging here and writing some longer pieces on the 'official' SpikeSource blog.
I was at an event last night and the word Ubuntu was mentioned but not in the context of linux or software. Mark Barisch was speaking about compassion - he is on tour for his book - Field Notes on a Compassionate Life.
The quality of his whole being and his presentation was deeply resonant and helped me connect back to my heart and the reason that I began my quest into technology. He infact has a need for what I have spent 2+ years trying to figure out - how to use the power of online social networking tools to link spiritual activist leaders and their audiences together.
My little social enterprise - earned income nonprofit - Integrative Activism will be using CivicSpace/Drupal (a GPL code base) to develop sites for leaders like Mark. When I first talked about these ideas so long ago people looked at me a bit funny. The reception and willingness to explore what using these tools might do to support those drawn to the ideas in the book was very gratifying.
So it was fortuitous that he would use the word Ubuntu with its real meaning, I did not know what it meant until he defined it and I laughed out loud - for I understood the power of naming a linux distro after it.
UBUNTU - kindness: >humanity, compassion, and goodness, regarded as fundamental to the way Africans approach life
This longer explanation from Constant Connect.com
Ubuntu in Practice
Ubuntu has emerged as the new catchword of recent years; it has been adopted by various organisations to depict their culture and spirit. Borrowed from the Zulu dictionary, Augustine Shutte explains that Ubuntu encapsulates the Ancient African axiom of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which translates into "a person is a person through other persons". This dictum conveys the values of respect, compassion and humanity to others. Put in a nutshell, it is the idea of working together in order to progress. The co-operatives in Zululand are the epitome of Ubuntu, for me. It was only after being educated about the nature of these enterprises that I was able to grasp the true essence of Ubuntu
I discovered that a co-operative is a group of people that unite, by pooling their skills and resources, to provide a service or manufacture a product, which is marketed. The surplus of the sales is divided amongst the members, providing many families with their only source of income. I was further informed that co-operatives are based on values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. Co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others, which are similar to the values of Ubuntu. The concept of co-operatives and the location of them are unknown to many; co-operatives have existed for years, but tend to keep a low profile. As a result, there are few studies and very little information on them, especially in South Africa.
Clare O’Neill, a senior lecturer in Organisational Psychology at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, has initiated a project to address this issue by providing more information on co-operatives in Kwa-Zulu Natal. She aims to profile co-operative activity and evaluate its institutional structures while assessing the dynamics within these structures. The research will be used to identify factors affecting the success of co-operatives in the province. O’Neill will compare governance strategies and study the impact of the co-operatives on their communities.
It is in this cooperative connection to others that also represents to me the spirit of blogging. I hope to find a way to sucessfully bridge the spiritual activist world and technology world - Ubuntu seems like a good word to encompass this work too.
So with all of this love for cooperation and open source...you must be wondering why this blog is on MT...well...I originally went with Living Dot my hosting company because they offered WordPress hosting. BUT... after geeking out for a day while listening to presentations at the Business of Blogging Summit ... trying very hard to get the XML-RPC hooks to work... I gave up. I am very open to switching over but at this point Word Press is to challenging for me to install.
Posted by Kaliya at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)