aross's blog

Most of the time I like my work - as you can probably tell, I feel injecting some passion into your work is important. The way I see it I'm going to be spending decades doing this stuff, so I may as well enjoy it. Like anyone though, I have things that nearly make me pull my hair out, and have had moments longing to try something else out. Read on if you dare (care?).

One might argue that trying to legislate against greed is pointless and harmful. No matter how much time, effort, and thought you put into legislation to prevent these issues it is likely to keep happening. And thus all you've really accomplished is penalizing everyone else that are ethical and play by the rules. What is the solution?

Since July last year we've been holding an open source business breakfast meeting once a month. The events have been very interesting, educational, and fun. Despite that, we've decided to put the breakfasts on hold for a bit to allow us to focus on other activities. We'll share more about what we're working on soon.

I was recently listening to a FLOSS Weekly podcast (episode 100, congratulations!) interviewing Chris DiDona from Google. One of the items he spoke of that resonated with me was his/their practice of deciding who they wanted to reach and focusing on that audience even if it meant delaying or forgoing contact with others. DiBona explained that to him, it seemed Google was the place Computer Scientists go to practice Computer Science. Thus, though it would be nice to reach other people such as open source enthusiasts, their real desire was to reach computer scientist practitioners. The rate of innovative product development, focus on algorithms and performance, and more demonstrate that nurturing Computer Scientists is a key part of Google's success. Thus I found it very interesting to see the languages chosen by entrants in Google's AI challenge organized by the University of Waterloo. Read on the see the list.

About this time last year, I made time to sit down and blog about trends I was seeing in the job market pertaining to open source skills. This is an update after 1 year. What are the trends in the job industry pertaining to open source? Evidence indicates there are good jobs out there if you know where to look.

This is the third in our series on Asterisk. This article will cover enabling asterisk to record calls. You may want this to interview people over the phone, podcast, or some other purpose. Read on.

In the past, we've been given feedback that as an organization supporting open source and open standards we should not use certain technologies. Adobe flash, and Adobe Air have been two notable examples of this. For some, this issue is black or white... if you want to reach people on the web, flash is a big part of doing so. Conversely, those advocating open standards note the risks and damage caused by using technologies encumbered by patents and royalties and thus push strongly for free alternatives. It is thus interesting to see what Adobe has to say on the matter. Read on.

This story is very interesting given it's significance from both an open and closed source perspective given the high performance and disruptive potential involved.

I meant to post this earlier but was hit with a nasty cold bug that clobbered me - the good news was my hair wasn't infected. The bad news was nearly everything else was.

This is a brief retrospective of what FOSSLC did in 2009, and a look forward to 2010.

Our original goals for 2009 were:

Like many of you who will take the time to read this, I have spent the last decade or so using great software from open source projects. I chuckle when I think of the weekends I lost in the early days fighting to get my XF86Config file tweaked just so, get my new network card working with bleeding edge code, or squeeze out that last drop of performance from my creaky old computer. Along the way I found I was drawn to learn from experiences building and nurturing community. I enjoyed writings and talks from people like Linus Torvalds, Mike Milinkovich, and many others since. I have learned a lot from them and developed a very healthy respect for what they do. They are the masters who make a complicated job of community/ecosystem building look easy. I wanted to share some lessons learned thus far from my own modest efforts, or at the very least, a few thoughts I consider important stated in my own words.