Launchpad’s “Secret Sauce”!

I noticed on Launchpad’s site that the plans to open source the service is scheduled to be completed by the middle of 2009. The only thing that struck me as odd was the fact that there are components that Canonical see as their “secret sauce”. Those components will not be open sourced.

It makes you wonder how a company with a business plan of servicing freely acquired software, can justify writing their own software and choosing to keep some closed because that is their “secret sauce”. What if the Linux kernel decided that their was a subsystem that was their way of keeping the competition at bay and they would only release, let’s say, the scheduler as binary only. This just doesn’t seem to jive with the spirit of community and giving back and such.

As always just my 2 cents worth.

Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft new bed partners!

I have been looking for more info on the new deal Red Hat has signed with Microsoft. So far it seems to be an interoperabilty agreement concerning the two companies Virtualization offerings. After reading further in to the news concerning the deal there seems to be a coming together of Novell, Red Hat, Citrix and Microsoft to squash VMWare. I’m not sure that an opensource leader as Red Hat calls itself, should be participating in preditory business tactics. I do not think it is a coincidencec that all parties involved in the lynching are making announcements for their new offerings and colaberation to seemingly take attention from the VMWare conference happening in Europe.

I believe that this type of business ethic is the exact thing that keeps opensource and Linux fighting for deserved attention and adoption by regular companies and users (that being Microsoft and other proprietary companies not competing on technological terms but FUD and other predatory scare tactics toward free software)

My main point is that OPen Source and Free Software can win on its superiority and innovation coming from our methadoligies and open development practices. We should not resort to “win at any cost- deal with the devil” tactics.

This sort of made my decision as to what community I will be contributing to and hope that the Ubuntu community and Mark Shuttleworth continue to avoid making a deal with the devil (MSFT). I don’t think we need anymore money hungry corporations making deals with Microsoft for financial security or gain (Novell). It only serves the IP accusations still made by Ballmer to this day.

Just my two cents

Fedora 11 nicely coming along!

I have chosen Fedora as my Linux of choice after a scitzo past of distro hopping. I have been wrestling with leaving behind Windows as you can see in other posts but I am sincerely convinced now that Linux and opensource/free software will be my future.

This post is more of a call out to those who had issues with Fedora and Ubuntu and the Intel Wireless driver 4965. I had very slow performance issues and could only resolve it by installing the backports package for Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 was giving me the same problem unitil compiling the compat6_wireless updates from linuxwireless.org.

I am happy to say that Fedora 11 has this issue fixed as of the Alpha release I downloaded and installed today.

Just thought I ‘d give a shout out to all those looking for an update on this issue. I know it had me pulling my hair out. I’m not sure if the fix is in the latest Ubuntu beta but it probably will be if not yet.