Free Software Linux

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies. Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

I like Tom Peters. Whenever I'm in need of a checklist for inspiration, a push for excellence or change, a reminder that change is the only absolute, or simply an unabashed exclamation mark, he's there, in living colour (Pantone PMS-032). Since Re-imagine!, my Irish sensibilities have found his style to be slightly over the top, but in a world that's creating ever new ways to clone, the only viable response is to create, differentiate, innovate. The exclamation mark is the best compass we can have, relentlessly pointing towards the future.

Sadly, it's become something of an event when Eric Raymond offers one of his stimulating essays on technology. I know he's supposed to be working on some top-secret, er, something, but couldn't we have a few more words like these? There's an argument commonly heard these days that open-source software is all very well for infrastructure or commodity software where the requirements are well-established, but that it can't really innovate. I laugh when I hear this, because I remember when the common wisdom was exactly the opposite -- that we hackers were great for exploratory, cutting-edge stuff but couldn't deliver reliable product.

Statistically speaking, you are not going to Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) 2008, but it's still worth your while to browse the PDC2008 Downloadable Master Session List just to see what Microsoft considers to be new and important to developers. I did and I'm going to highlight some of the key themes (cloud, advertising and Windows 7) and discuss Microsoft's current competitiveness on each one. To start with, there'll be lots of talk about cloud-as-buzzword (just as we're almost past similar talk about SOA), but PDC 2008 also has some talks that really are about cloud computing:

or how the future is being 'Windows Proofed' The one thing that you really need when teaching something to a group of children, students, adults, whoever, is to ensure that they are 'singing from the same hymn sheet'. Put less metaphorically, they all need to be accessing the same text book or work sheet during the lesson. If not chaos is sure to follow. Any teacher who has blith [...]

Scobleizer has been trying to get upbeat in a downmarket and made a great solo effort with his Recession Proof Your Startup post, but if you want to really bootstrap your entrepreneurial brain, you should plan to spend at least a couple of hours watching, reading and thinking about what some very clued in presenters said in the last few days at the Future of Web Applications 2008 in London. Most of it is available in full video, often with highlights and slides.

Talking of ultraportables, can it really be just a year that they've been around? Apparently: ASUS sold over 350,000 Eee PCs in the fourth quarter of 2007 and had sold 1 million by June of 2008. And according to recent reports, the company has now shipped 4 million. That original Eee PC 701 was only the start of ASUS’ plunge into the category and, since then, they have released over 10 netbook models.

Good to see that Microsoft is trying hard to keep up with free software: A recent Microsoft survey sent out to select users has us wondering what on Earth the mega-corp is planning to do next, and judging by the looks of things, it has everything to do with Instant On. We've seen a number of these lightning-fast boot applications, with the most recent being ASUS' Splashtop OS and the iteration loaded onto Dell's freshest Latitudes.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of most software-related patents as few actually reveal anything; they simply attempt to build a legal fortress around a concept. As Apple's patent for OS X Dock has finally been granted (after being filed just a shade before the new millenium in Dec 1999), Dock clone developers have got to be asking themselves - what could be done to evade the patent's scope?

Cleversafe has a very cool idea to address data security and reliability. Seems that the Wall Street Journal agreed and decided to award Cleversafe a WSJ Innovation Award.

Bernard Golden is a renowned expert on open source software and author of the excellent "Open Source in the Enterprise" recently published by O'Reilly. We caught up with him at the HP Finanical Services industry Open Source Advisory Council to ask him how Open Source is changing the way Enterprises use software.   Q1: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the rep [...]

Bernard Golden is a renowned expert on open source software and author of the excellent "Open Source in the Enterprise" recently published by O'Reilly. We caught up with him at the HP Finanical Services industry Open Source Advisory Council to ask him how Open Source is changing the way Enterprises use software.   Q1: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the rep [...]

Bernard Golden is a renowned expert on open source software and author of the excellent "Open Source in the Enterprise" recently published by O'Reilly. We caught up with him at the HP Finanical Services industry Open Source Advisory Council to ask him how Open Source is changing the way Enterprises use software.   Q1: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the rep [...]

... or "Linux feels the need for speed" A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's al [...]

Collaboration on software development is essential, but how do you include your partners, customers and even competitors as part of an extended team? The Eclipse Foundation's Ian Skerrett shares tips on using open source software to establish an innovative network for IT.