Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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T-Dose 2009

As every year in october a small crowd navigated to Eindhoven to spend 2 days discussing Open Source , Free Software and Beer

The good part about T-Dose is the fact that it is so small, you actually get the chance to talk to a lot of people, you get the chance to sit down with them and play with the code they have been working on ,

T-Dose had talks on IPv6, Bind10 , Linux Auto Update USB, eTokens on Linux , VirtSec, Django , Puppet and other topics.
I actually missed talks that I had wanted to see.. just because I was in the middel of interresting discussions with people. That’s totally different from some other conferences where I don’t even make it to the talks because of the smalltalk :)

It's the solutions you build with it !

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

Racketeering in 2009

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.

"Idle"

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 Im not writing code Im 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 ?

MonitoringForge

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.

Open Source Business Models

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.

Some people just don't get it

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 .

Dual Battery Support

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 !

On Conferences

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..

T-Dose 2009 CFP,

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