The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been getting some attention here and there, mainly for the potential for file sharers to get disconnected. Turns out there's a lot more on the horizon; quite apart from the agreement's potential to ban fairly innocuous practises such as deep linking (boy Google, are you in trouble), the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade has been soliciting. (pause) Ahem, that was worth the sentence fragmentation. To resume, the DG has been soliciting input and commentary from various stakeholders.

The Global Intellectual Property Center under the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the wold's largest lobbyist organization) has responded with this letter (that's a pdf link). It's a really good read, and I commiserate unequivocally. With the mothers who raised these slimeballs.

I have been making myself scarce on my own website of late; when you move back to your homeland after 12 years and pick up a very exciting new position with a place as cool as Rambøll Informatik, you'll tend to drop off the radar for a bit.

Thanks to Pinse I now have a long(er) weekend, and there is one thing I wish to piss and moan about. I want to call out the Danish Welfare Ministry.

The story goes like this. Eight Danish municipal authorities are moving towards e-voting and the Welfare Ministry (for byzantine reasons which with any luck will be tackled in the comment section of this post) is stakeholder in requirements definition and tender formulation. And the Welfare Ministry has warned the municipalities against mandating open source.

I was listening to Josh Berkus speak to Laporte and Schwartz about PostgreSQL versus Oracle on FLOSS Weekly, and a real bona fide gem emerged.

Josh relates the difference in product offering between a Sun supported PostgreSQL and a typical Oracle offering, and it isn't the price difference (significant though it may be) which is the real issue, it is the difference in expectation between Sun and Oracle.

Oracle need to sell the database as it is their primary product. At Sun, if the PostgreSQL business breaks even that is well enough since it wasn't the primary business: the platform is. PostgreSQL is just part of a stack making the whole platform look more appealing.

So as a commercial database consumer, you have a choice there, and the choice goes to the heart of vendor relations quality (upon which most other cost and performance factors can be demonstrated to depend). One of the vendors will want you to use the product because it will create a direct revenue stream for them, and the other has no direct commercial interest in you using the system, though they wouldn't mind it if you ended up liking it and looking at their other products.

Of course, this is over-simplifying matters a little. But when you're talking vendor relations management strategy, you're talking long term and when you talk long term, it's the broad brush that paints the clearest target.

I was very happy to see my article, The Free Software hardliner, the Corporation, and the Shotgun Wedding on linux.com a few days ago.

For one thing, it is obviously an honor to have articles you've written running there. For another, that article discusses some things I eeded to get off of my chest, and the comments section of the article indicate that there may be others who feel the same way.

And of course, it's nice to be paid for writing! (No, this little puppy isn't making anything other than €0.00 per copy yet...)

One thing which I do miss from Debian is how unintrusive the package management is. Neither apt-* nor aptitude really make you feel like the system is under any significant load, which should be par for the course.

Now zypper on the other hand is the package management equivalent of Rupert Murdoch; must have it all and must have it now. At certain stages of even a simple operation like zypper lu, this box (which is a 1.8 Ghz 512 Mb lappie) slows down to a grinding halt waiting for Mr. Zypper to let system resources out of his clutches.

I've graphed the system load average stats for a simple routing zypper lu here; the result is pretty dramatic and speaks for itself.

Many newcomers to this ancient and unique city find themselves initially fascinated in a somewhat morbid manner with techniques employed in driving. This paper was compiled with the express intent of easing the Cairo novice into the driver's seat, mainly through a brief discussion of some of the less orthodox strategies currently in employ in the guise of a list of pointers.

Cairo traffic jamIt is the author's hope that this list will also serve as an acceptable refresher for the grizzled veteran; carnage takes practise after all. But onwards.

If you've been following any reputable news source over the last few months, you'll know nothing about the fact that I released my debut novel "The Banjo Players Must Die" into the wild armed only with a Creative Commons license in August.

A day or two ago, this novel rounded 4,000 downloads between archive.org, memoware, manybooks, and scribd.

The advancing stature of open source in the enterprise is unquestionable. Open source technology has a demonstrable foothold in numerous industries and roles, and it has indisputably acquired a portion of mindshare which is appreciating. Looking back to the beginnings of open source where even the terminology was radically different (free software), it can often be difficult to recognize enterprise open source as a direct consequence of the birth of the free software movement. Badgeware as an example was not on the map in the early free software ecosystem, and vital components of healthy open source technology are not on the agenda in many enterprise open source deployment scenarios today.

Open Source Startup Marketing: Initial Steps

As innovative open source startups gradually grow ambitious enough to start thinking about an enterprise-class client portfolio, marketing becomes more of a pressing priority. My observation is that marketing is overwhelmingly regarded by open source geeks (an accolade I aspire to myself despite my sub-standard code-fu) as either superfluous nonsense-ridden hand waving, as arcane dark arts taught only in the bowels of the netherworld, or somewhere in between.

For a smaller open source startup, it doesn't have to fall into either category. It can be simple and straightforward, and that is what I have written this article for: to reduce the dimensions of kickstarting the marketing function for an open source startup by emphasizing on key areas with disproportionately emphatic results. More bang for your unit of effort. Less of a marketing department, and more of an image and a strategy for how to access the enterprise client market.

Think of this as an "We're a small open source startup and we're all arsekicking engineers, but it looks like we need to market if we're going to attract lucrative clients" HOWTO.

Here's a very brief ten minute presentation on the position of F/LOSS in higher education which I was recently asked to do.

Creative Commons, as usual. Powerpoint to improve its reach.