Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

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.

[Read more →]

Remember the other time I was agreeing with Matt Mullenweg’s prediction of Microsoft opening sources of Windows by 2017?  Remeber I wrote a list of bullets with my reasons?  Remember the first one being:

Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid.  They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.

Well, here is another piece of news that confirms that.

Quote #1:

Novell was paid a whopping $355.6 million by Microsoft in return for software licensing

Quote #2:

Microsoft purchasing 70,000 licences for Novell’s SuSE Linux enterprise server, which accounts for much of what Microsoft was paying for. Microsoft, in turn, then sells these on to its customers.

Quote #3:

“This is to bridge the divide between open source and proprietary source software,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the time, in what amounted to an abrupt about-face on his part given his previous criticism of Linux. “It gives customers greater flexibility in ways they have certainly been demanding.”

OK, open source innovation might be chaotic because it lacks direction. There’s no PR-department at ‘the Linux community office’ to ask what the current innovations are, what’s going on and what’s new. Instead of being lazy you have to find it out for yourself. Even someone who spends a part of the day reading news stories about open source software, finds at least ten innovative new programs he has never heard of in a list of 100 recommended open source programs (that’s what happened to me today). No, I’m afraid people who think open source doesn’t bring innovation and don’t see how the closed source model hinders innovation just failed their trendwatcher exam. Wake up, it’s 2008!

Here is an excellent post on how open source helps the innovation.

Mashable reports that source code for Movable Type is finally open sourced.  Movable Type is a blogging platform competing with WordPress, LiveJournal, and others.

These are, of course, good news for open source community.  The more open source software we have, the better.  And Movable Type is a somewhat high profile piece of software.  It used to be more popular a little while ago, and then many of its fans moved to WordPress and other alternatives.

One thing I wanted to note together with these news, is that it’s not only about open source.  Just putting up the code out there for the general public to grab and modify it is not enough.  It’s about the community too.  Someone has to lead, support, and inspire people to try, test, develop, document, and praise.  Someone has to listen and react.  This last part is one of the most difficult tasks in open source development.  And there are plenty examples to prove it (just look at most of the stuff at Freshmeat.net or SourceForge.net).

WordPress guys are terrific at driving their community.  With Six Apart manage to compete with that?  We’ll see…