open source

Open Source is political: Blows Against The Empire

skeptic — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:32:53 -0600

Open Source product groups are occasionally highly politically motivated - frankly some come from a socialist/anarchist viewpoint of wanting to bring down the evil capitalist system. Whilst I realise that capitalism has an image problem right now, open source tools will never prosper in business until they get aboard business.

Limiting the Crowd to their own time at their own expense: the open community's distate for commerce

skeptic — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:15:05 -0700

Recently we looked at the Folly of the Crowd: how in all but the largest of online communities the supposed consensus community content is actually created by a fanatical few. This is made worse by the online world's distaste of people making a living.

5 questions for John M. Willis

skeptic — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:14:46 -0600

John M. Willis, a.k.a. Botchagalupe, or possibly a close associate of Botchagalupe, asked me to answer five questions which he posted on his blog, and to ask five questions in return. Here are my five questions for John. He works on Tivoli with Big Blue but if you can get past the vendor thing :-D John is a battle-scarred warrior of IT operations with a suitably hard-bitten view of the world that aligns well with my skeptical outlook. Enjoy his responses:

Open source systems management tools: an informal directory

skeptic — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:15:58 -0600

Operations is a commoditised domain now: people buy on price. Antivirus is a commodity. So is backup. So is much of the hardware. Watch what open source software does to systems and network management, media management and a bunch of other software types. CIOs want to spend their money on an ITIL project, ISO20000 certification, SOX compliance, COBIT audit, Project Management Office, CMDB, and a Balanced Scorecard Dashboard. Funds for IT Operations are limited: it is all about cutting costs now, or soon will be.

[Update: This directory is now maintained as part of Ops4Less This page will no longer be updated]

CMDB for free

skeptic — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:59:10 -0600

You can have CMDB for free.

The Craftsman and the Bazaar

skeptic — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 03:16:34 -0600

Many of you will be familiar with that seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a manifesto of the open source movement. If not, I recommend you read it. Today I want to talk about a different perspective: the Craftsman and the Bazaar.