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My posting summary

1 to 10 of 17

My comments

• "Postgres is an enterprise Java database"?
  
  PostgreSQL is written in C. In reply to: "Is it Postgres' time to shine?"

  October 12, 2009

  0 replies

• At OpenNMS, we too had a bad first quarter. While our support revenues were steady, our bread and butter comes from development projects, and while we had a number of them in the pipeline, they were all on hold. They tend to be fairly large and thus it seemed like everyone was holding their breath.
  
  Second quarter is a different story. By far our best quarter ever. A number of development projects closed (and all that code goes back into the main OpenNMS project) and our support customers jumped in number. We're getting ready for a new stable release and are looking to hire if we can find the right people.
  
  Life is good, and I'm hoping this trend continues for the rest of the year. In reply to: "Do I look ugly in this open-source license?"

  June 23, 2009

  1 reply

• I was just going to ask the same thing (and not just because Matt and I often don't see eye to eye, plus I was going to ask nicely).
  
  It appears that Red Hat passes what I'm calling the "CentOS Test". If I can take your code, remove trademarked images and references, recompile it (with or without changes) and distribute it, it's open source. I don't know of a single product where Red Hat distributes code that you can't also get the source. In reply to: "Up to 24 percent of software purchases now open source"

  May 12, 2009

  0 replies

• I was always against iTunes because of the DRM. Not because I steal music but because I play it on my iPod (ok), my phone (not ok) and on the Phatbox in my car (also not ok).
  
  When Amazon MP3 came out with high quality DRM-free audio files, I found myself spending a ton of money there. They had finally found a price point where it was much easier for me to just buy the song than to look for it online. My time was worth more than the hassle. Heck, they even had U2's latest album for $3.99 - almost all of that I would assume to be pure profit and it is much less than the physical CD (I don't even own a single purpose CD player anymore).
  
  This is where videos need to get. At $1.99 a pop for a TV show, it doesn't make sense. A 20 episode season would run $40 and that tends to be more than (or at least close to) the DVD cost.
  
  I *will* applaud Apple's policy of "pay once, use on many" when it comes to iPods. Both my wife and I have an iPod Touch and we can share apps under the same iTunes store account. In reply to: "Finding good reasons to spend money on free goods"

  May 11, 2009

  0 replies

• Medsphere - isn't that the company that sued its founders for open sourcing code? In reply to: "Picturing open source vs. proprietary software"

  April 17, 2009

  0 replies

• You know I disagree with you when you label commercial software business models "open source" and several statements you make in this post, such as "someone must pay to have software written" go so against my experience with open source as to make me wonder if there is just that much of a disconnect between North Carolina and Silicon Valley, but my goal with this comment is not to rehash something we'll never agree on.
  
  I have a question regarding Alfresco.
  
  In one blog post of mine I referred to Alfresco as "open core" but I'm not sure that is the case. It appears that 100% of the software code in your "enterprise" editions is also available under an open license. I'm not sure if this is the case since the enterprise trial license agreement has very non-open requirements, so I was hoping you would clear this up for me.
  
  My question: Does Alfresco withhold some code from the "Labs" side of the project, or is 100% of the code available under an open license. In reply to: "When open source moves from evangelism to implementation"

  March 6, 2009

  1 reply

• You write that "Widenius' ideals don't translate well to a big software business". Perhaps it is the other way around, and that open source spells the end of big software? His ideals were enough to create a company that sold for US$1 billion and to challenge such big software companies as Oracle. The future of software is not in billion dollar license fees, but is instead in those companies who have the best tools and the hardware to deliver the solutions their customers need. I believe that the best tools will be created with a true open source development model, and that split or open core models are doomed to fail in the long run, if just for the pressure that open source will put on them. In reply to: "Monty Widenius officially leaves Sun's MySQL"

  February 4, 2009

  0 replies

• Back when OpenNMS got started our first support customer was using Extreme Networks gear. Unfortunately, Extreme had poor support for SNMPv2 traps. Basically, they were leaving a zero off of a particular object ID and it was causing OpenNMS to reject the trap.
  
  We dutifully sent Extreme the network trace showing the missing zero and the RFC that showed it was required. Their response? "Works with OpenView".
  
  With a commercial product the client would have been screwed. Even though he wasn't a Java programmer, he searched in the code until he found the error log that OpenNMS was throwing, added an "if" statement before it that basically checked for the missing zero and added it, throwing a new log that said "Added the zero to cover up the stupid Extreme SNMP implementation problem".
  
  Start to finish the time was about 4 hours to correct the issue. While we would have helped him solve it through our commercial support, the fact that he was able to do it on his one speaks volumes. In reply to: "The enterprise value of modifying open source"

  January 13, 2009

  0 replies

• Open source is very close to free software, and while much of the free software ideals align with liberal or communist ideology, it also aligns with libertarian thought, which tends to be much closer to traditional conservative values than liberal ones.
  
  I have a friend who has developed a large community around biodiesel (specifically the production of biofuel from waste streams) and while it attracts your ecology centric tree huggers it also attracts the other side of the Bell curve - such as the people who want to pay for it with silver to avoid using US currency since that is just a plot by the government.
  
  I think open source holds a similar, although less polar, attraction and more of the people I meet working on it would classify themselves as libertarian than liberal. In reply to: "Open source is liberal? Nah"

  January 8, 2009

  0 replies

• I don't have any real problems with the hybrid, or open core, model. In the end customers need to choose the solution that's best for them, open or not. I just disagree with calling it "open source" as in "free and open source software".
  
  If course Microsoft would like to blur that line. By constantly repeating that the hybrid model *is* open source people will start to believe it. They will sigh and come to accept that to get useful software they have to pay for proprietary extensions.
  
  This is not true.
  
  People don't pay for RHEL *software*. They can get it for free from CentOS. They pay for the services that Red Hat provides, and in a large part for accountability. This is radically different from a model where software functionality is segmented into open and closed parts. If you have a software company that is looking after shareholders interests, you can be sure that their most profitable features will never be available under an open source license. It doesn't make any sense for a software company.
  
  However a services company can align the interests of its shareholders with the interests of the community much more closely, and thus they can benefit each other. It's okay to monetize open source ... as long as the source remains open. In reply to: "We are all open source/proprietary now"

  December 19, 2008

  1 reply