open source

Sep 16 2008

Swallowed the Poison Pill

I kind of poisoned my laptop earlier today , I fell for the Google Trap , their new browser somehow seemed interresting enoug to look at. With CodeWeaver's
Chromium build I got tempted into installing the thingie.

Mistake :)

Yes it all looks nice and fancy , but at first sight it isn't really faster than
my firefox. Now the real disappointment comes when you start browing the web
with it. The first time you end up a a site that uses flash however you realise
you won't be using the codeweavers build that much.
Yep there it goes wrong ...

So I don't really see the advantage of running Chrome in Wine while my Firefox beats the crap out of it on all levels.

rm -rf /opt/chromium/

The bad wine is gone .. back to regular business again..

Aug 25 2008

T-Dose CFP Extended

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

Aug 25 2008

Where are the Virtualization Zenpacks ?

Zennoss has announced the entries for their zenpack contest . What strikes me is that there is not a single entry that plans on monitoring Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or any of the other Open Source virtualization technologies .. Not in the contest entries and not in the existing community packs .

This sounds like a big opportunity to me :)

Aug 25 2008

SELinux is Dead !

No really it isn't but so isn't AppArmor, altough Russel claims it is. Weird how he totally rewords the OpenSuse statements

From "While our customer experience shows that AppArmor is the best solution for the vast majority of users, applications, and use cases, we want to give all of our users the ability to choose the security framework that’s appropriate for their respective environments and needs. We continue to enable AppArmor as our default Host Intrusion Prevention System......"

To "The next step will be to make SE Linux the default and AppArmor the one that exists in a repository, and the step after that will be to remove AppArmor."

Given Ubuntu's AppArmor adoption I don't see it die that fast ...

The real problem is who uses AppArmor or SELinux, sadly most of the installations I run into have none of both technologies enabled. Most Admins overrule their favourite distro's default config. The reason is pretty obvious as I've heard a lot of intelligent people say "Life Is Too short For SELinux"

So I wonder, how can you die if you never were really alive ?

Aug 19 2008

Getting Rich Fast ?

Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

Lots of other companies are innovating on top of Open Source, they are using the LAMP stack or just Linux as an OS to build their products on they need the stability and the features an Open Source stack provides them with and only in this way they can deliver their customers with a stable and cost effective platform. Lots of these companies contribute back to the open source community (sadly some don't ..yet) .

But at the end of the day there is much more money involved in the Opensource world than the money the Open Source product vendors like RedHat, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zenoss and are getting from selling their products.

And that's what counts !!

Jul 10 2008

Fired because of Open Source

When Dana Blankenhorn asked yesterday if Open Source was one of the reasons why Diane Greene was fired at VMWare I had to smile a bit .. obviously the economy is changing and Open Source is a real competitor to proprietary software ... but to fire the CEO , nah .

Firing developers that are working on an almost obsolete product however is a relevant thing to do. IBM just let go 150 , 30 of which in their Tivoli department.

Tools such as Tivoli, HP OpenView (what were they smoking when they chose that name) , and others are obviously feeling the heat from opensource. With frameworks such as Nagios and tools such as Zabbix, Zenoss and HypericHQ their fate has been written already .

Jul 03 2008

Choose your platform wiseley

The last couple of years , more and more infrastructure companies have arosen that focus on one platform. These platforms are companies like VMWare , Microsoft, Oracle, Documentum, and lots of the other Big Software Companies .

This is a very dangerous path to take. These companies lay their whole future in the big guys’ hands.

The second one of the companies these folks have been building on changes their API, or goes of of business They can be put out of business by the flick of a button.

While this wasn’t done on purpose, it illustrates the dependency of the client companies on the master company.

I also wouldn’t start a company that depends so tightly on another one.

Building your business in a sane way is building it on Open Standards.. not on a proprietary API.

Feb 25 2008

Honest Open Source

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the right tool for the right project .. afterall there is no vendor pushing him to plugg a certain solution, there is no higher margin if he chooses the red box over the green box (as he isn't choosing boxes) The opensource guy will be open and explain to the customer why product X does not fit his needs and product Y does, he will give his customer some honest advise. He will help the customer to solve his problem, not create more.

I was pretty surprised yesterday that even the guys from MySQL were supportive when I stated that MySQL Cluster was not a fit for Drupal. I can't imagine people from Oracle or IBM agreeing on one of their product being a misfit for their customer ..

Aug 02 2007

Marc Fleury on finding the right people

In Resurrecting Marc Fleury

Marc is asked :

Can you create an open-source developer? You were able to find them. Did you ever "build" one?

His response:

We tried once to create an open source developer out of a normal developer, but it completely failed. We never tried it again. Truth to told, I had an aversion to it.

An open source developer is a self-starter. He's competitive - this is someone that wants to prove that they can do something better than you can.

It's so true !