Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I`m gonna have to quote Tarus once again :

For years now I’ve been struggling to educate the market on the fact that the business around open source software is not about software. It’s about solutions.

Let me repeat that .. it's not about selling software ...

It's about solutions

And obviously FLOSS is the Ideal platform to build value for your customers

With the fresh launch of inuits.be this long overdue post popped up again , Earlier this year we got this very nice letter from the BSA That's right the Business Software Alliance.

The letter pictured below is in dutch, so allow me to translate
some parts :) (Although I`m pretty sure you've seen variations of this letter in different languages before..)

In short they are warning us about using software with no licenses.

They warn us, that in the next couple of weeks they will specifically focus on our sector, that is the Linux and Open Source Consultancy sector,

Obviously they are pointing out the potential legal risks we are taking if we would be using illegal software. What illegal software ? What on earth makes them think we are violating licenses ?

Now sending us that letter is just plain stupid, but sending that letter to a lot of other companies might get them all terrified , and that's just racketeering isn't it.

Anyhow feel free to have a good laugh with the letter below

For those who wonder why my blogging is so low these days (apart from today) .. I`m actually writing more Lines of Code than Blog Entries the last couple of weeks:)

And when I`m not writing code I`m reading :) Either proofreading an upcoming book on Zabbix or reading some of the other books Packt sent me.

Next to that I`m busy preparing my T-Dose presentation

Oh and did I mention a 40 something questions questionnaire about some merger ?

I found the initial announcement in my Spambox, thats where I send all the mails from GroundWork as unsubscribing from their marketing lists doesn't seem to work ..

Tarus pointed it out.. he already mentionned Marketing, low community imput etc..

Nevertheles I had a look, and my first and last impression was, NagiosForge, no active community, and empty pages on other imvho more relevant Monitoring Projects created by GroundWork employees.

Big John coined the "to pull a GroundWork" phrase aiming at their early products, err logo placements. When we were evaluating differen Open Source monitoring tools for our OLS paper about 18 months ago we looked at the tool and it didn't make the cut .. it failed in all areas where it claimed to be strong, ease of installation , lack of errorhandling during the installation, etc ... some while later another collegue tried again and we ran into similar problems

Yet some people claim it to be a great product.. I'm not a fan yet ...maybe one day they they'll know to convince me .. but for now
When I need Nagios .. I`ll be looking at Djagios , Opsview , Icinga or the real thing.

However, ther's still Hyperic, Zenoss and Zabbix :)

There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don't seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can't sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way they used to.

So that's not the one that eventually makes the authors happy,

Then there is the RedHat model, which tends to please a lot of people, which tends to be something traditional IT resellers can take in their portofolio, but partnering with a RedHat style company as an open source expert consultancy company isn't easy , as the expert consultancy companies have the knowledge themselves and won't push reselling subscriptions.

So that doesn't make the Distribution Vendors happy

Back when XenSource came on the market we asked them if they could help us supporting some of our customers with Xen deployments, they didn't care they wanted to build a product and a fast exit ..

That didn't make us as an integrator nor the customer happy.

You'd think us opensource folks are really unhappy wouldn't you ?
Wrong.. as we are all in it .. Just for Fun

and the money!

I mean, we are heading towards 2010 , some of us have been using Open Source for decades, the Open Source vs Free Software discussion was like last millenium, and we've been doing open source consultancy for over a decade, yet today companies still think their customers are stupid,

Fancy this story on ZDNet today .. there's actually companies out there claiming that "Bind" because of it's FreeWare nature , yes that's right you've Read FREEWARE , (hadn't heard that word for over 5 years..) , is less secure than their proprietary offering in the Cloud. So the very nature of their Secure product is offering Security by Obscurity in an insecure environment .

The sad part is that they probably get customers that believe their story, afterall it's hosted in the Cloud .. so it must be good not ?

Oh well... James McGovern had a nice comment on that earlier today "

"The goal of the security market is to make money, not to ensure the customer's security"

I'll keep my security infrastructure Open, thank you very much

But afterall everything is a fine DNS Problem ...

About 2.5 months ago while I was on a highspeed Belnet connection at UZA after Amber got born I ran in to some annoyancies with my fresh Fedora 11 and multiple batteries, upon replacing the CD drive with an empty battery (to be charged) while I was on AC power the machine shut down.

I filed a bug , while going trough my post holliday inbox backlog I noticed it got fixed . Thnx Richard !

This is how open source works ..

Somehow this year my schedule really isn't going to get filled with conferences,unlike my 13 speaking engagements last year this year I decided to go for a lot less :)

Froscon together with OpenSQLCamp is convienently scheduled during an already long planned family weekend .. but I really hope to go there nex year

I've been wanting to go south for conferences for ages, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy , Greece are all places I'd love to go and see how the different Open Sourcen conferences play out there. This summer there actually were some different conferences tha took place in Spain, Gran Canaria etc . but I coouldn't make it there for the obvious reasons..

The October conference schedule has another but similar problem , apart from T-Dose which I plan on going to again, I`m doomed to miss LinuxKongress 2009 and the Open Source monitoring conference as they both collide with DevOpsDays

LinuxKongress was initially scheduled for late september which meant it was on my planning but as they rescheduled because of a conflict with the Linux Plumbers Conference at the other side of the ocean , it means that for the 2nd year in row I`ll miss LinuxKongress (last year was on purpose as I had already been to OLS) ,

So I`m on the lookout for some new and exiting conferences to go to :)

There was an OpenSourceWorldConference in Malaga last couple of years , but their site hasn't been updated anymore for 2009 .. anyone knows what's going on there ?

Dear MySQL and Drupal , Plone and other Open Source folks, you might want to be interrested in giving a talk at T-Dose 2009 ,

Jean Paul pinged me with the following mail :

Maybe it escaped your attention that the Call For Papers for T-DOSE 2009 is already out. It has been announced on 12th of June 2009. Below you will find the original announcement.

Call for Papers and Projects
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 13:57 — jpsaman

T­-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. It is held at the Fontys University of Applied Science on 3 and 4 October 2009.

Speakers can send ideas and abstracts to the organisation at abstracts _AT_ t-dose.org. The e­mail should contain a short biography of the speaker and description of the talk. All talks will be held in English and last ~50 minutes. The deadline for abstracts ends on 31st of August 2009.

At the event location there is room for Open Source market. Stands and rooms are free of charge. Applications for stands are handled in order.
More information is here; http://www.t-dose.org/t-dose/files/t-dose-2009.pdf

I hope to see you all at this years T-DOSE.

Kind greetings,

Jean-Paul Saman

T-DOSE Foundation
www.t-dose.org