Weekly News

Pamela Jones (Groklaw) [1] got a job by giving away her expertise. Pamela Jones has been running the Groklaw website for about a year coordinating and collecting information on the SCO-IBM lawsuit. This has been a purely volunteer effort on her part and has been very useful in focusing the open source community in fighting this challenge. As a result of her collaboration with Daniel Egger at Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) she made an industry contact. Last week (Feb 3, 2004) she announced:

OSRM has simultaneously retained me, part-time, to work on their indemnification project as their Director of Litigation Risk Research.

• Axiom and TechExplorer: How Money Slants the Thinking: When Axiom was a commercial product it had a front end called TechExplorer. The front end was not released as part of the open sourcing of Axiom. Instead it was sold to a company. One of the original authors left IBM and followed the product. Given that he was a co-author of Axiom I suggested that we do joint work to ensure that Axiom and TechExplorer worked together. He thought this was a great idea.

  There was one ``sticking point'', however. Since TechExplorer is a commercial product I would be working on the interface for free. That means that I'd be giving away work to a company that would ultimately sell the work for profit. Yet I would not be paid.

  However, you have to remember that open source software development is a gift economy. You have to be prepared to give away your time and talents to all. The ultimate benefit is that all Axiom users and all TechExplorer users have more useful tools.

  Remember: It's what you do for free that matters most.

• James Blackwell and Gnu-Arch: On Sunday night of this week (Feb 8, 2004) I ran into a problem with the Gnu-Arch [3] software version control system. I went to the website and found that there was an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel for Gnu-Arch [4]. I signed onto the IRC server and joined the channel. I posted my problem.

  James Blackwell [5] was online in the chat room at the time. He diagnosed the problem and told me what I did wrong. He went even further and gave me a short tutorial which included the proper sequence of commands that I needed to solve my problem. This is the real power of open source programming. There is no commercial product I'm aware of that will provide free debugging service at 1 A.M.

• County Energy bets business on open source [9] has switched from using Irix and Tru64 to Linux. They use a combination of open source such as Apache and proprietary software such as WebLogic and Lotus Notes. The article quotes him as saying:

  ``Talk to your peers about open source as there is not really a downside,'' he said. ``You can use it without risk and it won't cost you anyhing other than a bit of time. You'd be mad if you didn't try it.''

• Eben Moglen and Open Source Development Labs have issued a position paper on the SCO-IBM lawsuit and its impact on Linux [10]. In their press release they say:

  ``We see Linux deployments continuing around the world and many prudent customers are choosing to ignore SCO's legal threats until the courts rule, particularly given SCO's admitted uncertainty about its own rights'' [11]

  The Open Source Development Labs is a joint venture, non-profit organization that provides Linux expertise and computing and test facilities. OSDL members include: Alcatel, Cicco, Co-Create, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Force Computers, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC Corporation, NEC Soft, Network Appliance, Nokia, NOvell, NTT COMWARE, NTT DATA INTELLINK, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, SUSE LINUX, TimeSys, Toshiba Solutions, Transmeta Corporation, Trolltech, Turbolinux, Ulticom, Unilever, VA Software, and Wind RIver Systems.

  Hopefully that will convince you that there are some job opportunities with companies related to open source programming.