Last week I was supposed to be in Spain for the Free Software World Conference. I was invited there to give a short speech, but due to some last minute changes I had to stay in Finland. Just as well, because then I caught a really bad flu, so I wouldn't have enjoyed air planes and hot weather that much.

One purpose of the Open Life book and this site is to study different Open Source business models. And one category which has significantly increased during the last year is the body of software that was previously closed source and then released as Open Source.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet John Buckman and "Mrs Buckman" Jan as they visited in Helsinki. John gave a talk about his Magnatune business and Creative Commons in the Aula forum. Unfortunately, the video is not yet available online, but let's hope it gets here eventually.

You will probably have seen this already, but as there are only a couple hours left of 2006 I thought it's appropriate to blog this here too. TIME magazine has again chosen the person of the year, and for 2006, it is YOU!!!

I've come to the age where my time is more valuable than my money, and I don't have time to do all the things I would like to do. One of those things is to install time and again new Linux distributions on new computers. The only problem with this situation is that it is surprisingly difficult to buy computers with Linux pre-installed, especially laptops. For laptops this service would be particularly valuably, since support for different laptops currently varies quite much, so I would be willing to pay a premium for the expertise of actually getting a laptop that works well with Linux. And mind you, I need one with a Finnish keyboard, so EmperorLinux did not really fit this problem that well.

I did not see this coming.

There is a case coming up in the US Supreme Court, where Microsoft and AT&T are arguing whether a software patent granted in the US can also regulate how some software can be sold abroad. The case itself borders on ridiculous for an engineer to understand, but there seems to be no limits on what lawyers for big companies can come up with. Of course we don't want to care in Europe whether the US patent system allows something or not, just as we don't care about any other US laws either in our independent nations.

SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)[...] I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE. (me discussing Novell on LWN about 6 months ago)

Sun has been saying it for more than a year now, but we wanted action, not words. Then they open sourced Solaris, but we were not interested in that, we only wanted Java. Then last week it happened...