This picture explains why Microsoft doesn't have to be Apple cool to everyone, it just has to be cool to the rank and file developer. Seriously, kudos; a company that can get its advertising on its clients' license plates is a force to be reckoned with.

Looking from my admittedly narrow vantage point over European public IT procurement, I see today a structural and very fundamental incompatibility between how enterprise IT is expected to be transacted and how open source lends itself to commercial activity.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Take the recent example of the Hungarian government allocating over €40 million to open source. Part of the reason they were forced to such a drastic gesture was that the value of the contract they were putting out to tender was above the threshold set forth in the European directives (in Denmark, I think this is roughly around DKK 1,400,000 or roughly €200,000). Think about that, two hundred thousand euros. With proprietary licensing models, it isn't too difficult to hit that kind of threshold. The threshold is in fact set that high because it has been geared to traditional software procurement, which has been proprietary and expensive enough to suggest a threshold of €200,000.

Towards the end of last year, I was advisory solution architect on a project where I assessed that Alfresco was the right base product to build on. This was a very large project for the Danish public sector (high 8 digits at the very least in Danish kroner), and the bid team understandably wanted commercial technical recourse. Making a long story short, I got in touch with Matt Asay who got us on the phone with the European representatives (one of whom was actually on vacation), and pretty soon we had technical and economic estimates from Alfresco. All within 120 minutes, at 8 in the evening. I think that anecdote obviates the need for any superlatives; if I ever have my own company, that will be my benchmark for responsiveness.

I must confess, I'm writing this as part of a conspiracy with Roberto Galoppini. Alfresco is on our maps, enterprise open source is on our maps, and public sector open source is also. I have not seen much Alfresco in the European public sector and none in the Danish public sector, and this is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what Alfresco could represent.

I was privileged to be invited to speak on open source at Videnskabsministeriets IT Arkitekturkonference (The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation) this last Thursday in Århus. Those who attended my speech at Open Source Days 2008 will know that I have some points but my delivery can be lacking; I managed to overcome that this time with a bit of preparation. A video of the speech is embedded after the jump.

I see you're firing up to 6,000 people. Analysts say you're in more trouble than a pregnant cheerleader, and that you've been that way for a lot longer than nine months. Analysts think you should spin off your hardware business (but then, they thought you should spin off Java back in 2003...) And those are your small problems.

I just got back from day 1 of the Open Source Days 2008 conference where I gave a speech entitled "Free Software in the Enterprise: from Use to Community Membership". At this point, I have slept 4 hours in the last 72 so this won't be a long post. I'll just say that the conference organizers have done a brilliant job and I'm glad to have helped fill the speakers roster.

I am also very very happy with the content of my speech (presentation deck uploaded here in this post), but I dread seeing the uploaded video; my delivery was very far below standard. Still, I am happy not to have clogged the conference with yet another generic "business open source" rehash; I think the ideas in mine are solid and quite new.

Again, a pat on the back to the organizers and conference staff. Embedded slideshow after the jump.

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...)

zypper update brought me a kernel update this afternoon, which gave me an intriguing prompt:

      Overall download size: 158.1 M. After the operation, additional 2.2 M will be used.
      Continue? [yes/no]: yes
      kernel patch license:
      This update can be used to install a new kernel.
       
      If you decide to use the kernel update, we recommend that you reboot
      your system upon completion of the YaST Online Update, as additional
      kernel modules may be needed which can only be loaded after the system
      is rebooted.
       
      In order to install this package, you must agree to terms of the above licencse. Continue? [yes/no]:

That I think is as close as one gets in an urxvt window to replicating the windows functionality of prompting for reboots after updates.

I'm not entirely sure how good an idea it is to make the suggestion to reboot in a license exhibit for GPL'ed software. It just doesn't work on so many levels...

Much like unjobs.org, eurobrussels.com is an excellent resource for vacancies in Europe with multilateral organizations and all form of interesting private enterprises.

Unfortunately, the site is still RSS-disabled and the process of looking on the site for new jobs is temrinally inconvenient. So what's a python programmer to do?

Out comes BeautifulSoup and PyRSS2Gen. A quick examination of the source code reveals that the geeks there are good enough netizens to use (relatively) reasonable CSS classes. A little bit of time, and you've got a nice screenscraper for your RSS generator.

Find the python script attached to this post.