Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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 ...

Dear Computer Futures,

Please stop calling me, I already told you folks ages ago I won't work with you. Back in 1999 you sent my resume to companies I specifically forbid you not to send it to. You called me to arrange interviews with one of your customers while I was already waiting in the lobby of that exact same customer your coworker sent me to, Twice.

There was no need in calling me again last week trying to convince me of working with you. I know you compete with the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you and you have absolutely no idea what I`m doing or what I`m interested in , as you don't even bother to search the web.

But most importantly do not try to call my customers switchboard to get in touch with me.

I assume that have read and clearly understood my message and will comply,
If you still really really feel the need to call me I will gladly accept your calls and invoice you at an appropriate rate for the time I waste.

I'd call this the 3rd strike and everybody knows what happens next

Marc Fleury has some good answers to the most clueless industry reporter around, starting with:
Spring is touting itself as a JBoss replacement. Smart PR, but false. Spring is a development framework comprising wrappers and dependency injection on top of Hibernate and Tomcat runtimes, both developed, and monetized by JBoss.

You can drop some balls, no one can keep track of what's going on in Open Source land, it's difficult enough to track what's going on in MySQL, Drupal, Virtualization and Distribution land but if you realize you don't have the whole picture (like not really knowing how the different tools compare to each other) please keep quiet.

So some unknown Sean 1800+ mails me .. doesn't know me .... wants to be connected with me , why ? Beats me..

He finishes his email with
"If you would prefer not to accept my request then please simply ignore this message. It would be very much appreciated if you did not click on the “do not know this person” button. Have a great day and thank you for your time. "

Now why would I want to do that ? He just spammed me, via LinkedIn, there is only one sensible thing to do and that is report him as a spammer. What was this guy thinking.. If I send unsollicited mail directly to someone's inbox he'll probably tag it as spam. If I do it via LinkedIn he`ll like it ?

I only link with people that I have communicated with over different media , know in person , have spoken with on the phone ( a head hunter that calls me doesn't count), worked with in real life or have worked with online intensively in different open source projects.. there are couple of exceptions in my connections from my early days when I didn't have my own set of rules yet.

I have a couple of people on hold .. knowing that I will meet them in the next couple of months.. , these are the kind of people I won't
click "Don't know" on.. mostly because I do know them, by reputation by referral but not in person yet.

Once in a while there is this person that you want to meet up with, get to know better, you are doing similar stuff and you planned to meet but just missed each other by 5 minutes.. difficult ..

LinkedIn is my personal addressbook , it helps me to keep track of people email addresses, it helps me to see where people are moving to and what their new projects are.

But please don't spam me there... it will only hurt yourselve