Misc. Bits- hitting every category I have in wordpress. Seriously.
- It is very hard to be an old legacy company trying honestly to turn into an open company, example #5321: Jonathan Schwartz’s request for benchmarking on new Sparc/Solaris boxes is directly contradicted by the Solaris license. I am absolutely certain this is not what Jonathan intended, and I know that clause is standard throughout the proprietary software industry, but Sun should really fix the discrepancy and continue their well-intended but unevenly implemented transition to a company that legally guarantees openness instead of just talking about it.
- I forgot to mention that my post about bounties and ‘crowding out’ was motivated by Herzi’s use of fundable to motivate handwriting recognition work. I have no firm opinion on this yet- it seems likely that the ‘self-funding’ nature of fundable might avoid some of the problems described in the literature that I linked to. In the mean time, I want good tablet support sooner rather than later so I’ve pledged support :)
- The excellent Ezter Hargittai has blogged about her research into what college students do online. The interesting numbers are on pages 17-25 of her slide deck, but the relevant numbers in a nutshell: less than 2% use flickr, less than 1% use delicious, 50% use myspace, and nearly 80% use facebook. Enabling people to talk to each other is the real killer app- a big part of why we’re using writely a ton at work right now.
- Some proprietary companies still staff open source teams like they were proprietary software; they should learn. Matt Asay puts this in language managers can understand :) Steven O’Grady also dished excellent wisdom about systems integrators who still don’t get open source, and about how open source analysis can not just work but kick the pants off traditional analysis. Excellent trio of pieces in plain english about the strengths of open source.
- The interesting question is not ‘who is the next microsoft’ but ‘who is the next Windows-like developer platform’. Netscape wanted to be it; Second Life wants to be, and MySpace is headed in that direction. I realize everyone else knew this already, it just finally became clear to me today and I wanted to write it down. :) [update: see the excellent How To Make Platform War for some better thoughts on this.]
- Was glad to see that the gnome mailman archives are back. To celebrate, all GNOME and GUADEC newbies should go read this important historical post relating to traveling in Spain.
- Apparently Prashanth (GNOME Summer Of Code hacker) has succeeded in integrating jhbuild, ldtp, and dogtail. I’ll not have a chance to use this myself, but I hope others start testing it ASAP and reporting issues to Prashanth- once he has ironed out the (inevitable) bugs, this will be a huge step forward for the free software desktop’s reliability and testing.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 10:18 pm and is filed under gnome, licensing, misc., personal, software, work.
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