Open Source > Linux > LQ
April 14, 2005 Leave a comment
Looks like Firefox/Mozilla programmers are being increasingly recruited by large companies. First it was Google and now IBM is joining in. Being able to closely tie FF in with a middleware stack or web service is an extremely good business proposition and it's great to see some more Open Source programmers getting jobs.
–jeremy
April 14, 2005 Leave a comment
Interested in helping to spread the word about LinuxQuestions.org and have the chance to win a great limited edition LQ shirt in the process? The latest LQ Contest has begun. Good luck.
–jeremy
April 13, 2005 Leave a comment
I'm back and just starting to catchup on things. Looks like there was some drama while I was away. It appears that Linus will no longer be using Bitkeeper for the main Linux repository after Larry revoked the free license. You can get some of the details here, although some of the statements there seem to be a bit off. I'm still reading up on this, so I'll hold my opinion for now, until I am a bit more informed. I think everyone (including Linus) saw moving off bk as an eventually certainty, although Linus mentions that he had hoped to allow the free SCM projects to mature a bit more before the move. Tridge is a really smart guy and so is Linus, and the whole situation seems unfortunate IMHO. Hopefully I'll have had enough time to read up on this and form an opinion before the next LQ Podcast.
–jeremy
April 4, 2005 Leave a comment
The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) starts tomorrow, so if you're in the area make sure to check it out. Looks to be a very good conference and LQ is a proud sponsor. I'd have loved to attend, but I am actually traveling somewhere else this week, so it just wasn't possible. On that note, the blog will probably be fairly quite for a little while as a result of the travel.
–jeremy
April 2, 2005 2 Comments
Looks like the tags functionality at technorati is having some problems getting the correct post for some tags here at my blogs. I emailed their support and was quite impressed to get a response in about 30 minutes. I gave them some additional info and hopefully the problem will be resolved soon. If you have a Weblog and aren't familiar with tags, check out the info.
–jeremy
March 31, 2005 Leave a comment
It appears that Dell is once again offering workstations preloaded with Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS to be exact). A major manufacturer selling Linux workstations is something that has been sorely needed, and hopefully once one major manufacturer starts others will follow. It's easy to be a bit skeptical here though. If you recall, shortly after Michael Dell gave the keynote at the 2000 LinuxWorld, Dell pulled all Linux workstations from their site. Some speculated that it was due to pressure from Microsoft, as kickbacks and spifs from MSFT is where Dell generates a lot of its cash. Here's hoping that this is for real and that other PC makes follow suit.
–jeremy
March 31, 2005 Leave a comment
As I mentioned in the most recent LinuxQuestions.org Podcast, Mark Cuban is helping Grokster in their legal defense against MGM. Grokster losing this case really has the potential to stifle innovation (the case centers around whether a company is responsible if a technology they come up with is used to do something illegal – in this case copyright infringement). It's a bit silly when you actually think about it. Gun makers aren't (usually) sued in gun related deaths and in the technology arena we have the betamax precedent. Seems some large media companies and associations are just lashing out in any direction they can. If they put as much effort into creating better products and keeping up with new technologies, they'd have nothing to worry about. Mark Cuban recently did a short interview with GELF and he's absolutely correct – “software doesn't steal content, people steal content”. There was also recently an interview with EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. The EFF will be representing Grokster in the case. Lastly, you can read what Mark had to say on the topic.
–jeremy
March 30, 2005 Leave a comment
While it's great to see MySQL maturing, one has to hope that they don't forget where they came from or why they are so popular. It's fantastic that they are adding stored procedures, triggers, views and ACID features to MySQL ('fixing 10 years of criticism in one release', according to one of the co-founders). Fantastic, that is, only if they can retain what has made MySQL so wildly popular – easy to install, a breeze to maintain and optimize and lightning fast. Each MySQL release I've used (3.22->3.23->4.0->4.1) has been better in almost every regard than the previous version and I'm anxious to check out 5.0 – I just hope MySQL hasn't lost what made it great in order to become “enterprise-ready”.
–jeremy
March 29, 2005 Leave a comment
An interesting article about how Progeny was able to weather the dot-com crash and turn into a profitable company. Some words of wisdom from Ian Murdock, who was a major reason that Progeny was able to stay afloat.
–jeremy
March 29, 2005 Leave a comment
I've had a little more time to play with Yahoo 360 since this post. I covered some of the things they did right in that post (Ability to add custom RSS feeds “coming soon”, ability to blog and share reviews, decent integration with other Yahoo! bits and Flickr integration, music sharing) and I also really like the grainularity in which you can control what others see. Overall I think they did a good job. Here's by feedback, FWIW. It seems they are going after the average, not necessarily technically savvy, Yahoo! user (of which there are about 30 million or so). From what I can tell, they are offering a bit too much for the average user but not enough for the savvy user though. I think they are in danger of being in that middle ground that tends to not be overly useful in the web space. As such, I can't see any main stream bloggers moving to the platform – and as I said I don't think this was Yahoo!'s intent. I'd also like to see more integration on non-Yahoo! bits (think Skype, gaim, even technorati) and the ability to customize things more in general. As it is, unless you are a heavy user of Yahoo! services, 360 is only going to be mildly useful IMHO. Lastly, we've yet to see any of the “social networking” sites take off – even Google's orkut has been fairly stagnant as of late. I think many of the issues that plague the space haven't necessarily been solved here. All that being said, Yahoo! seems to really be listening to users feedback on this one and the thing is beta. Overall I think it has a lot of potential. Nice start Yahoo! – I hope you follow through and continue to improve this. Good luck.
–jeremy
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