Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9.  Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else.  Two technologies in particular - KDE 4 and Firefox 3 - were the center of my focus.  Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.

The upgrade itself went fast and easy.  But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release.  While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start.  While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.

The login screen.  It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much.  Logging in.  Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so.  Logout.  Switch into long awaited KDE 4.  From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes.  Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all - even more fun so.

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Quoting comment in Slashdot discussion:

The truth is both a blessing and a curse. It takes a lot of work to realize the truth and most people will not challenge themselves. Once you learn the truth, however, you are cursed with trying to explain it to others.

This clearly explains the high density of Open Source advocates, as well as many experiences of my own.

By the way -  happy birthday, Open Source!

With the recent news of Sun Microsystems buying MySQL AB for one billion dollars (insert Dr.Evil’s evil laugh here), I hear plenty calling Sun the largest contributor to open source. I beg to differ.

Sun is doing a lot for open source, there is no argument about it, and whatever they do is much appreciated. But calling them the largest contributor to open source, is a little bit too far fetched, I think. First of all, let’s see what we are talking about. Here is the list of open source stuff from Sun (according to their open source initiative page):

• Solaris Enterprise System / OpenSolaris
• Linux from Sun
• StarOffice / OpenOffice.org
• NetBeans
• OpenSPARC
• Java

That’s something, but doesn’t qualify for the number one contributor. First of all, these are mostly Sun’s own offerings. Secondly, some of these (Java and OpenSolaris) have been opened to be saved. They were open when it was pretty much obvious to everyone that if they are not, they aren’t going to last very long. Or, at least, they won’t prosper as they should. Thirdly, the effort that was put in some of these (StarOffice / OpenOffice.org) by Sun isn’t all that impressive. I mean, yeah, they bought and opened StarOffice. People jumped on it and started to improve it. And it improved a lot. But it’s still huge, bloated, and clunky, after all these years…

As I said, it’s still appreciated. There is plenty of good in Sun’s open source initiative. But I think there are companies that have done more good to open source than Sun did. I think that IBM did a great deal more. And it did it before anyone else, when open source needed help the most. Then, I think Google has done plenty and is still doing a lot. And, I think it’s not fair at all to forget Red Hat. These guys made a lot of money on open source software, but they were more than willing to share and invest those money back into the community.

Somehow I ended up connecting to the Undernet IRC network today and joining #cyprus channel.  Last time I did it was a good 10 years ago.  Maybe even more.  Back then IRC was a huge thing in Cyprus and all Internet clubs were full of kids chatting for hours.  I remember, it was so packed, that I had to buy a club membership to get some priority in queue for my HTML hacking.  And, of course, I did IRC too.  What was happening back than on #cyprus channel?  It was exactly as it is now.  Here is a screenshot for you (I won’t go as far as posting a log of this noise).

What is different about it now?  Well, it looks like they use a tiny bit less of colors.  And they have their own web site now.

Me? I’m living on the FreeNode these days.  That’s where most of the open source fun is happening (#fedora, #wordpress, #perl, #php, and others).

Slashdot runs an excellent discussion on the topic of “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“.  If you want to learn more about what people on the Web had changed their minds in 2007, try this Google search - plenty more there.

What did I change my mind about in 2007?  Short answer: Google.  Continue reading for the long version.

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