Odds and Ends

Mark Shuttleworth: Walking the line between idealism and pragmatism (Economist)

Mark Shuttleworth is on a quest to control the British media. Or maybe he isn't, and it's the British media that is on a quest to give him maximum coverage. Whichever it is, my recent trip to London had Mark on the BBC and in this Economist article about free software, and Ubuntu's role in it.

Mark does an excellent job of balancing idealism and pragmatism in how he approaches open source, which comes across perfectly in the article:

...[O}pen-source software tends to polarise opinion. It has vociferous critics who suspect that software written by idealistic nerds, and made available free to anyone who wants to download it, must be some kind of communist plot. Zealous believers, meanwhile, long for open source to triumph over the evil empires of commercial software. This clash is often depicted as an epic struggle for supremacy between Linux and Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system. But the truth is that most computer users do not know or care about the politics of open-source software. Mr Shuttleworth says most people simply want to read their e-mail, browse the web and so on.… Read more

Digital music imitating open source?

Just read this in The Independent. I admit to never having listened (knowingly) to Ash, a Northern Ireland band, and the band's decision to move all new releases to the web probably won't change this. As in open source, the fact that someone releases their code as open source (or songs on the web) doesn't necessarily make them a good company/band. It just means they have the right licensing model, though perhaps no talent.

What I find interesting about Ash's decision is, however, just how closely the band's thinking mirrors much that we see in open source:

Frontman Tim Wheeler said that Ash... would be "dedicating ourselves wholly to the art of the single for the digital age." By abandoning traditional recording and publishing methods, Wheeler said fans would be able to download new music as soon as it was recorded.… Read more

OSI and the value in holding firm

I was reading The Economist on my flight home from London today, and came across this paragraph in an article that resonated with me, because it reminds me of the various non-profit "lobbies" within the open source software movement.

Too many Brussels think-tanks accept large chunks of their funding from EU institutions and national governments. Others depend on big corporate sponsors, so that the lines between research and lobbying becomes queasily blurred....Nobody seems able to change the default formula for Brussels policy seminars: good coffee and croissants, dull speeches and a brief exchange of conventional wisdom. The painful comparison is with Washington, DC, where the best think-tanks refuse public money, compete to set the agenda with provocative ideas, and enjoy extraordinary access to administration and Congress alike. (June 9, 2007. 45) Open source software has the OSI, the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, he Linux Foundation, various conferences (OSCON, OSBC, LinuxWorld, etc.), and various other overtly open source or friendly-to-open source organizations. How effective they are in promoting open source is, to my mind, directly proportionate to their independence.

I thought it was a net negative to see the Free Standards Group merge with OSDL. FSG was a "bottoms-up" organization, despite its corporate funding. OSDL was never more than an attempt to rein in Red Hat. I think very highly of Jim Zemlin, and think he bleeds more FSG (his original home) than OSDL, and believe he can do much good. But he has his work cut out for him to ensure the community's voice is heard in the Linux Foundation.… Read more

Making enterprise software more like the web

Yesterday was the second day of Alfresco's quarterly management meeting (and no, I don't like this one because there are no football matches during the summer, though I am going with Luis to see The Drowsy Chaperone tonight. During the meeting, we spent awhile talking through changes in enterprise software; or, rather, changes that should happen in enterprise software.

What's the biggest problem in enterprise software today? I mean, besides how expensive, complex, and clunky it is?

It doesn't work the way the world works.

What do I mean? I mean that despite the fact that, as John Donne might write, "no corporation is an island, entire unto itself," most enterprise software treats corporations (and their denizens) exactly as islands. Little pools of creativity who share within the walls of their own corporation, if at all (and generally not at all). … Read more

Traveling The Open Road with Matt Asay

Consider this my "Hello World" from the Land of CNET. I've spent the last year or two of my life talking with you from my Open Sources blog on Infoworld.com. Now it's time to open a new chapter.

For better or for worse, however, I'm the same person. With the same biases. And gunning for the same goal: complete and absolute world domination. :-)

Not really, of course. I'm a pragmatist and understand that the world moves slowly, especially in IT. Remember, I used to work for Novell where the company largely stopped … Read more