open life blog

Steven Weber: The Success of Open Source and the stew in the magic pot

How many open source developers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is 17. It takes... 17 to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadedness of the light bulb architecture; 17 to argue about a new model that encompassess all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that light bulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the light bulb, and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being.

Matt Asay on Alfresco business practices

This blog is supposedly at least partly about Open Source business models. Here is a LinuxWorld interview with Matt Asay about many interesting actions taken in running Alfresco as an Open Source company. While this is a must read for anyone doing Open Source business, I'll summarise the key points here. (The article is rather long, but again, everything is worth reading.)

limericks on lkml and other things from my vacation

Uh oh. Summer vacation is over and I've been working for 8 days already. Honestly I preferred the holiday :-/

As you may or may not know, my current job is being a manager at Sesca Technologies. In short that means I get to sit in a lot of meetings, look at my budget in an Excel sheet and lots of other interesting stuff... NOT! I don't get to do any of the interesting stuff anymore, such as programming and all the other things I used to enjoy.

Enjoying yet another Kubuntu laptop

Conveniently for the start of my holiday we received a new HP nx7400 from LinuxComp.net. Outside the US it is still impossible to by those Ubuntu Dell laptops, so this one comes with Windows XP forced upon me, BUT it also comes with Kubuntu 7.04 out of the box, courtesy of the great service by LinuxComp's Jukka Hellen!!! (As you might remember, there is already one LinuxComp Kubuntu laptop in the family, so we already knew we would be satisfied with Jukka's services.)

Long tail

I'm now one week into my summer holidays. Jee!
Henrik taking a swim
We spent some days at my (and also my wife's) parents in Pietarsaari. In the picture here I'm taking a swim in a small sandpit. The water was warmer than I expected. (Next day we went to the beach by the sea. No swimming there, it was still freezing enough to hurt my feet!)

Navigator, Explorer, Konqueror, Safari

The recent beta release of Apple's Safari browser for Windows made me reminisce of the history of browsers and recall a funny fact in the naming of them.

Did you ever realise, that all the major browsers follow a historical path in their naming tradition? First came the Netscape Navigator. (Well, skipping Mosaic, of course.) Then of course the navigators were followed by explorers, exploring the new continents as they were discovered. When the KDE developers decided to start creating their own browser, they set this tradition in stone by naming their browser Konqueror, with the explicit explanation that historically that's what usually followed the explorers. (Of course the fact that it's a word that could be miss-spelled with a capital K in the name was probably a factor too. You think?)

Rights and wrongs in copyright

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

This slightly anarchistic, yet intuitively true and acceptable statement has been on my mind many times lately. In Finland the public discussion about copyright often circulates around some legislative questions and arguments for and against certain standpoints. I call this "the EFF tradition". In contrast in Sweden and some other Northern European countries the people active in this discussion represent the Pirate Party line. (Which also exists in Finland but is newly founded and not a dominant voice yet.) While the Finnish discussion follows the EFF-like traditions - raising questions like DRM is bad - the Pirate Party goes right for the other extreme: legalise "piracy" altogether. (Note than then it obviously wouldn't be called "piracy" anymore.) In practice, the stances of EFF/EFFI and the Pirate Party are quite close to each other, for instance on privacy issues or software patents, but the public image and the means towards the end are completely opposite.

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