Odds and Ends

Remember 1999? Back then investors were throwing money at anything that moved and, in the case of Linuxcare, they were also throwing money at things that could barely manage a crawl. Open-source vendors VA Linux and Red Hat enjoyed massive IPOs...IPOs that quickly fell back to earth.

Linuxcare never made it that far, opting to pull its IPO, replace its CEO, and fire much of its staff.

Before we got to that point, however, someone came up with this lovely Linuxcare pre-IPO poster to celebrate, however. I had a hard time getting a good picture of it (and it was too big to scan in), but it does a great job of describing the tenor of the time, showing who the movers and shakers (and shaken) of the time were:… Read more

Chris Blizzard of Mozilla gives a great interview to der Standard in which he highlights how Firefox is increasingly pushing the envelope on browser innovation. If you've taken a look at Mozilla Labs lately, you'll understand what he means.

While Mozilla may not have innovated everything in the browser wars (e.g., tabbed browsing, which arguably came from Opera), it is responsible for driving these innovations onto more than 150 million desktops worldwide.

The most salient point for me is that Firefox is gaining market share because it is better, not because it's open source. Firefox, then, … Read more

I left my Kindle on a flight into SFO on Monday night, and unfortunately it doesn't appear that I'll be getting it back. After a two-hour delay to my flight, I think I was a bit brain-dead by the time we touched down, causing me to leave it sitting in my seat.

Feel free to contribute to the "Give a Blogger a Kindle" fund. Just hit "refresh" on this page 1,000,000 times today and my check from CNET should cover a new Kindle. :-)

Seriously, I'm really bummed. It was proving … Read more

Joyent's David Young has written an excellent treatise on why "clouds" (as in cloud computing) should be open and not proprietary. He details nine attributes of an open, "platform as a service" cloud.

My favorite? Young's contention that while an open cloud could lead to everyone "rolling" their own, the rationale behind doing so is, well, not so rational:

If you're writing an application, and you want to be able to achieve tremendous scale, the answer shouldn't be to move off the cloud onto your own "private" cloud of dedicated servers. Of course, if the cloud computer is open, as we've described, you can build your own cloud. It's also true (that) you can generate your own electricity from coal, if you want to bother. But why bother?

This is a fundamental tenet of open-source businesses. There's much that you could do to fork an open-source project and create your own splinter project, but generally, it's not worth the bother.

The Slashdot community piled on to comment on Young's post, with some insightful questions as to the viability of uploading a company's "crown jewels" to the cloud, "for all the world to see." Others suggest that "'cloud computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software."… Read more

Just when you thought the Open Season podcast couldn't offend anyone else, Episode 20 rolls in. We take on Ubuntu (Does it taste as good as it runs?), Sun (Will it make it?), Apple (Rampant disappointment at its launch snafus over the past few weeks), Linux desktop (Blame the Mac guys for making it even less relevant), and more.

Larry Lessig showed up (sort of), and I did an impromptu review of the Clearplay DVD editing service. (I'll be writing up a more formal review here - I really, really like it.)

Have a listen and enjoy. I … Read more

Some time ago I discovered that I didn't like reading "the news" very much. Perhaps this resulted from reading too many British newspapers, which don't try very hard to disguise their angle on a story. Some are pro-monarchy, some are pro-business, some are pro-Left, some are pro-Right. You choose the paper that matches your bias.

In the United States, we still pretend to be unbiased. I'm not sure why. I'll occasionally get comments on this blog accusing me of bias in favor of Apple, against Microsoft, or whatever. Of course they're right. I make no attempt to hide it. I find blogs refreshing precisely because, as a general rule, they make no attempt to mask bias. This is what I want: Transparency, not some purportedly clinical examination of "news." I don't believe the latter is possible.

Take a look to the right. CNET clearly displays my bias, as it does for all of its outside bloggers. See the disclosure link? Now go to one of CNET's writers and bloggers' pages, that of Ian Fried, in this case: No disclosure page.

Not that CNET is alone in this. Head over to Tom Yager's blog at InfoWorld. No disclosure. Steve Gillmor over at eWeek? Nada.

Presumably this is because these writers aren't biased? That they have miraculously managed to live on this planet for a few decades as a tabula rosa, writing the world as it sees itself? Let me pause while I snicker into my sleeve.

We don't read these excellent writers because they lack bias. We read them precisely because of their biases. It's the commentary that makes "news" interesting, and that commentary is always heavily flavored by bias.… Read more

I took my team to see The Dark Knight today to celebrate the good work they've done. I might have chosen a better reward.

The movie is exceptionally well done. It is also relentless. Everyone is smeared. Everyone is corrupt (or corruptible). Except, frustratingly, Batman. What I would have given for him to end the movie early by listening to the Joker: "Hit me!" It would have been soooo easy.

Anyway, I only blog it here because I know many of you will want to see it. I don't suggest that you not see it, but … Read more

There are many things that don't interest me at all as a blogger. I couldn't care less about the newest version of your product. I just don't. Unless you're Apple, in which case I care because I worship you. :-)

But for the PR people who want to find space on this blog, please send me case studies. I love hearing how customers are using software. The customer is always right, so even if I don't personally dream about your company/client every night, if a customer does, I want to know, and I'd … Read more

I posted a week ago about the problems with web anonymity. In a nutshell, people say things on the web under the cloak of real or imagined anonymity that they'd never say to someone's face. At least, not if they hoped to have friends for long.

Well, tonight I experienced one of the joys of web anonymity. I'm not a super-social person: I get on a plane and pray the person next to me doesn't want to talk. If he/she does, I glower at them until they think better of it. In this way, I'm sure I miss out on meeting lots of great people.

The web, however, lowers barriers to conversations that I (and others) would never have. Intriguingly, one of the people I chastised for making negative comments (though his comment really wasn't all that bad) apologized in the comments section of my blog. More intriguingly, a friend of his, Bethany, went a step further and IM'd an apology to me tonight. She proved to be a sweet, generous person, and any lingering ire I might have felt toward Brad dissipated.

What are the odds of that happening offline? You'd never be able to apologize to the person that you cut off in traffic because you're almost certainly never going to see them again. Online, everyone is a stranger...but also a potential friend.

The web, in short, perhaps gives vent to our less desirable traits, but it also affords an avenue to demonstrate the nobler side of our natures, which I believe prevails with most people.

So, thank you, Brad, and thank you, Bethany, for taking the time to demonstrate the other side of the web. … Read more