Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Interesting. I still think that S60 needs a drastic UI overhaul and simplification to compete with the iPhone long term and that Nokia would be better off with a Linux core for their mobile phones rather than Symbian and S60 but we'll see. Go Open Source S60 go! Does this mean both S60 and S40 will be 100% open source within 2 years? As the cliché goes, the devil is in the details!

From Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google's Android - ReadWriteWeb:

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Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source

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From The Symbian Press Release :

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Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

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Herewith my Grassroots Open Mobile Web presentation (original PDF) that I presented Monday April 14, 2008 at the Open Web Vancouver conference.

Presentation Links:

• Chumby
• Bug Labs
• How a Bug could save the US Government 100s of millions of dollars
• Bunnie's Blog about awesome Chumby hacks
• OSGI Java components whitepaper (used on the Bug)

The presentation was a lot of fun to put together and present. Next year, I hope to present a followup with my musings on the actual real Bug and any OSGI Java components that I manage to get working.

I am glad I can finally announce that Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght. Needless to say I am stoked and already enjoying working with my new colleagues. Working with Bryght has been great, the best job of my life and I am sure it will be the same at Raincity.

From my Raincity acquires Bryght story on bryght.com:

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We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!

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[UPDATE: check out the official Open Komodo blog post from ActiveState] 

Got an advance briefing about Open Komodo (initially a portion of Komodo Edit combined with other open source goodies) which is an open source client side (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) web application development platform from our friends at ActiveState and Mozilla. Add debugging and PHP support (hopefully soon, LazyWeb ?!?) and you have a killer open source Drupal development environment as well as one for XUL based Rich Internet Apps and CSS/HTML/JavaScript Web Apps (e.g. iPhone apps). Can't wait to try it and see how it evolves!

Something for  open source doubters to think about!

From  Nicholas Carr on opensource talking about The Ignorance of Crowds:

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We shouldn’t dismiss lightly the propensity for opensource to innovate, to augment innovation and to accelerate innovation, for the following reasons:

The diversity inherent in the crowd creates long-tail effects, and this causes the bazaar to come up with stuff that the cathedral wouldn’t consider; in cases where the cathedral does consider the innovation, the bazaar is often faster and cheaper; and finally, while tight coordination by central authority seems a worthwhile thing, we should not forget the number of camels designed by committees.

In fact that’s one of the key stanchions of opensource communities. They don’t do camels. 

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I'm really enjoying the Nokia N800 that I received from the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. Surprisingly, Nokia have made Linux almost usable :-) . Seriously, it's fast enough and does what it does well (of course what is the market for the N800? I think it's a great portable Linux computer for geeks and cheap phone and video call power users today!). I am not a big fan of the stylus so I am happy that you can use your fingers. Going to have to try to go a day without my laptop once I have all the apps installed (irc client, ssh client, and a few others).

I think that all major operating systems will be built on an open source core in less than 10 years. So why not build S60 on top of Linux instead of whatever it's built on top of now? Perhaps the N800 as atmasphere suggested in twitter is the one of the first steps to that.

In the long run, it makes sense given the introduction of Open C and Widgets on S60. If apps actually use these two APIs then they should mostly work if S60 were to switch to Linux.

Check out my N70 running the Nokia open source port of Apache, Raccoon at:
http://roland.tanglao.guest.at.openlaboratory.net/

I figure I'll leaving it running most of the time since I have an unlimited data plan.

Hacking python :-) Apache plugins in progress!

I think Jon is onto something. Mesh sounded great (could people blog more podcasts and videoblogs of the conference please? That's it, my goal will be to make sure that Northern Voice 2007 is 100% podcasted and videoblogged at decent quality, sorry Tim but not everybody can do awesome HD video for everything) but we are missing the common Web 2.0 thread that "meshes" everything together which I think lies somewhere in open source, ubiquitous inexpensive broadband (fixed today and mobile tomorrow), RSS, people (not just white male Californians, but women, Canadians, Indians, Filipinos :-) , etc.) and "Silicon Valley everywhere" (including Vancouver in my biased opinion with great startups like sxip, Dabble DB, eqo, etc.)

FROM Jon Arnold's Blog: Mesh Conference - Final Thoughts:

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There was lots of good content and obviously some great energy. I'm sure the successes of the show were a happy mix of good planning and putting everyone together to share and feed off each other. I definitely learned a lot, but for someone who is on a steady diet of VoIP and telecom conferences like VON, Internet Telephony and Globalcomm, this is a different world in many ways. Didn't hear much talk about VoIP or podcasting or SIP - stuff like that. But that's ok - Web 2.0 is about so many things.

And that's where the challenge lies for me. A lot of great perspectives were put forward at Mesh - both from the speakers and the attendees. However, there wasn't a lot of connecting the dots - maybe by design - but I'm left with the feeling that for as much as I learned, I still don't have a sense how these things fit together.

This actually brings me back again to the Mesh logo. You can't help but be drawn into that image and the energy it seems to radiate - which is exactly what happened at the show - so, kudos for the logo designers. The energy was there alright, but like the logo, I didn't really feel that all the strands - yellow, blue, green, etc. - connected. They're oscillating around each other, and bumping into each other a lot, but never really intersecting or truly meshing into a unified form. At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I'd like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.

My conclusion is that this did not happen, and I'm concerned that for some, the conference was just a blur, like this....

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[Cross posted from Bryght with title changed because I like Kris's better :-) than mine!]

Vancouver students: Want to earn $US 4500 while working on Drupal Google Summer of Code projects? We've got free WiFi, desks for two students and Drupal culture that you can soak up in spades (as well as Bryght guy Adrian being a SOC mentor) from us here at the Vancouver Bryght offices at 525 Seymour.

What's the catch? Well you have to apply by May 8th. Don't got any ideas? No problem. The Drupal community has plenty of cool ideas for software development projects. Apply online today! More info here on the official Drupal Summer of Code 2006 page as well as some tips on getting accepted.

One last thing: we'd love to have a Summer of Code student or two with us for the summer who's working on projects related to our other two open source software passions: Jabber and Identity

Interesting idea for a sustainable model for Free and Open Source Software. Not sure it would work!

From i repeat myself when under stress (free software business model solved) (longer form):

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When commercial software is free software -- publicly licensed -- the customer for that software can always get what they want by working with a coop or NPO. This means that the customer can always get their software by paying a fair share of the cost of development.

It's very fine that the customer can always get the free software they need by paying a fair share of the cost of development but that is a problem for developers who want access to investment capital. A developer who wants access to investment capital must have a good chance of returning a profit -- not merely breaking even on cost of development.

So my proposal is that some developers can be paid in shares of their customer's stock instead of cash.

If you issue stock, it is usually easy to grant someone else some of your stock in a way that costs you less in cash than it would cost to buy that same stock.

Now if a developer, paid in stock, immediately sells that stock for cash -- they earn just the cost of production but no profit on top of that.

On the other hand, if a developer paid in stock holds on to that stock, and the customer of the developer's program flourishes, the stock will rise in value. Later in time, the developer can sell the stock and get back the cost of development, plus interest, *plus a profit*.

A free software developer who can make a profit that way has access to investment capital. Such a developer is truly on an equal footing with proprietary developers, from an economic perspective.

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