Open Source Growing Pains

Drupal.org recently had a three day outage. Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) written in PHP and supported by a MySQL back-end and which with I have just completed a small pilot project. These reflects the relative growing pains with Drupal as young open source project. I say young but Drupal is WILDLY popular. It's popular for several reasons. First it's written in PHP, one of the new young languages that is relatively easy to learn. Secondly it's actually a relatively secure package. Thirdly it pretty damn useful. It's literally community in a box and that's pretty cool.

So I contributed to the project about 80 EUs to help buy the new cluster of servers this project needed. They had long out grown their shared hosting environment but it took a crisis to make the change. They raised over $10,000 for equipment in less than 48 hours. This tells you how popular this project is. So I am encouraging everyone to give Drupal a try. If you like it, support Drupal with a donation.

Dogs and Cats Living Together!

Well this is a welcome change. It appears that Microsoft after an initial reaction of toxic shock to the open source community is beginning to learn to live with it. That's good because the open source community has been around for years and isn't going anywhere.

This accomodation is to be expected and in a way is quite telling. When LAMP first appeared on the Microsoft radar the initial reaction was to spread as much FUD as possible about the free software movement as possible. This resulted in the cancer comment and numerous other child like attacks. When the that didn't really work MS tried their more subtle, yet still wrong approach, the "Get the Facts Campaign" in 2003 . This also appeared to fail in the market as many of the facts were less than factual. MS has got to realize when the users experience tells them something completely different than a Microsoft test, they are going to believe their own eyes.

One thing the dot com boom did was create a huge number of developers familar with the LAMP stack. These developers have been using using this software for years now and are quite familar with it's capabilities. In many regards the dot com crash will help with the long term acceptance of the LAMP stack. Many of these developers either had to find jobs in the corporate world or if they were lucky enough they walked out of the Dot Com crash with some cash. As the developers who were part of the Revolution OS continue moving up the corporate ladder, further acceptance of the LAMP stack is going to continue.

Open Source Innovation

Over at the Microsoft Developers Network there is interview with Steve Ballmer who briefly talks about innovation. Ballmer largely dismisses innovation from the industry leaders such as IBM, Oracle and Apple (all leading innovators in their own right). He briefly lumps the open source movement into this same group. However I think it's important to point out the important innovation of the open source movement is the commoditization of basic software protocals. Because of this commoditization it becomes an innovation engine for business allowing businesses and individuals to launch and develop new business models relatively cheaply.

Take a look at all the innovation that is happening in the web space such as wikis, blogging, geo blogging etc. These all are happening on the open source software stack of MySQL, Apache, PHP, PERL, and Linux. These allows a small shop of developers roll out a site without the added expense of licenses and additional development costs.

I am quite excited about the continually developed tool set that is available to developers today. The type of innovation is web based business models is going to continue for years.

Nightstalker returns?

I have to admit. I don't watch a lot of television. So when ABC announced they were redoing the Night Stalker I totally missed it. So I happened to be wandering over to the ABC website (in search of information on another show "Dancing with C List Celebs"), I noticed the ad for the upcoming show. I naturally clicked on it and read about it. I was a huge fan of the original and totally dug Darrin McGavin. Why? He is a classic proto geek. He dressed poorly even for the early seventies. He wore his hat long after wearing hats was out of style. He carried around a really sweet portable tape recorder which looking back on it was probably more expensive than his car. I really wanted that tape recorder. He believed odd things and suffered through a horrible boss (Tony Vincenzo) and worked in a third tier wire service based out of Chicago.

The newer version has a strong "24" influence based on the rough video clips on the ABC web site. Only one scene begins to capture the flavor of the original, the third clipped where Carl Kolchak is discussing the case with the sexy skeptic. Covering his walls are notes and photographs of the case. Only in that scene do you get a sense of that the Carl Kolchak can become obsessed by strange things. Instead of a actor like Darren McGavin, they have cast Stuart Townsend (you remember him as Dorian Gray in League of Extraordinary Gentleman and the Vamprie Lestat in Queen of the Damned). So we get a young, good looking Carl Kolchak. The question is whether or not Townsend can act through his attractivenews and protray his true geekiness. David Duchovny was able to do so in X-Files. Based on the clips I have seen thus far I would say no. The scenes are far too brightly light. (Remember X-Files guys even daylight didn't seem too bright on that show.) When showing the other worldly on television, darken things. It somehow makes it more believable. Additionally the night stalker was a solo guy. It was just Carl. For this show it looks like they are going with the team approach. There's the sexy skeptic (another reporter), and her camera guy and of course Vincenzo is no longer an over weight Italian guy but a good looking older thin editor. What's wrong with casting real looking people in shows? With reality TV you think people would be used to it by now.

I will probably TIVO the damn show. I hope it doesn't suck. Otherwise it may go into the memory hole that Highlander 2 went too.

Light of Day

The founder of Go Computers is suing MS for largely killing Go's pen computing efforts. Due to the fact that the information on the internet is so sparse before the last ten years, most people wouldn't remember Go. Go was at the time a pretty promising idea in pen computing. While the technology was relatively under developed, and probably to immature, Microsoft decided to kill the technology by making a pen computing division and then spreading enough FUD and strong armed ISVs to make sure that development partners didn't do any development for Go's platform. Eventually they killed Go and then promptly closed their pen computing division. Sound familar? It should as it's exactly what they did with IE & Netscape.

Well with some many facts coming out during the MS anti-trust trial, it shouldn't be surprising that more light of day lawsuits are coming about.

Happy Comet Smashing Day

Bruce Willis would be proud.