[SpikeWed] Life without SF, SpikeSource facelift, Microsoft says Open Source is just a developer phenomenon

Matthew Porter writes a thoughtful and interesting blog entry on what he calls the fallability of the very infrastructure that allows open source to thrive, namely the big developer communities such as SourceForge.  He points out that VA Software (the company behind SF) hasn't been making a profit for a number of years now and therefore, if they were to no longer keep the power on their servers what is going to happen to all that data? It's a wonderful observation and one that we shouldn't be complacent about.  Although I suspect if SF where to go under, I can see IBM, SUN or even Oracle stepping in very quickly to take over.  Aside; interesting to note that SF completely timed-out on me a number of times as I attempted to download NotePad++

• http://www.porterhome.com/blog/matthew/2005/11/15/1132088805733.html

Just a little infomercial, but the marketing crew within SpikeSource have launched our new mothership website.  This design is much cleaner and lays out all our products and services in a much clearer format.  Go on, give it a click, you know you want to!

• http://www.spikesource.com/  

In in ZDNet piece, Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, was talking up Windows Live, taking a swipe at both IBM's on-demand platform and the open source world, describing it as just "a developer phenomenon".  One of the quotes that he did come out with though, does actually make a lot of sense when you think about it.  "I doubt if you talk to users of Office Live that they have any interest in dorking around with source code. This is about customer experience rather than developer experience so it's largely irrelevant.".  He is absolutely right; at the end of the day, the end users don't really care about open source, they are just interested in whether or not it does their job, and if they are willing to pay for that, then so be it, that is the very nature of business.  What open-source does though, is to allow developers come up with far more interesting and innovative solutions than trying to consume the whole problem themselves.

• http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39237020,00.htm

Countdown to Christmas Fact#39:
In America in 1822, the postmaster of Washington, DC, complained that he had to add 16 mailmen at Christmas to deal with cards alone. He wanted the number of cards a person could send limited by law. "I don't know what we'll do if this keeps" he wrote.
Courtesy of http://www.20ishparents.com/holiday/cfacts.shtml

tags: microsoft  open source  christmas  sourceforge  

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