I read a few posts today that made me think that some people have put their brains on idle while their mouths (or, rather, fingers) did the thinking for them. I understand: I do the same thing. Regular readers of this blog will know that I do it…regularly.

One post criticized this blog for having a partial feed. How can a blog devoted to openness have a partial feed??? This conveniently overlooks that CNET relies on page views/advertisements to pay the bills, and so needs people to click through. Were CNET to give everything away for free (as in no advertisements/no money attached to its content), there would be no more CNET. While TechCrunch might like this, millions of others who log billions of pageviews on CNET each year wouldn’t be as happy.

In another turn, Kris Buytaert didn’t like my post suggesting that open-source vendors should expect loyalty and a mutually advantageous relationship from their system integration partners, and institute policies to help foster this. I wish I could comprehend Kris’ argument, but I can’t. The “pay me if you love me but don’t really need me” model doesn’t work (i.e., Support only). Period.

Sometimes we don’t really want the consequences of what we want. We want open source to be all about peace, love, and freedom. It’s not. At least, not to the extent that some of us (myself included) would like.

… Source:The Open Road

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Microsoft’s Craig Mundie sees a way for the software giant to shift its largesse to the developing world. It’s called the phone, and will challenge Microsoft’s desktop-centric view of the world in its attempts to grow beyond its Western roots.

Interestingly, Microsoft is actually innovating here. Truly innovating:

Microsoft will increase its focus on making mobile phones part of its strategy to spread IT to people in developing nations, based partly on a prototype already developed for the purpose called Fone+….

The idea is to connect a low-to-mid-end smartphone based on the Windows Mobile OS to a Television via a docking station so data on the handset can be displayed on the Television screen. That way, people can use the computing power in the smartphone on a massive screen.

Back in 2003, I looked at buying the intellectual property for Hancom Office’s embedded Linux-based competitor to Microsoft Office to kickstart this market. A friend and I couldn’t get venture funding for it, but that isn’t a problem that plagues Microsoft. Cash is in abundance in Redmond. It has the resources to do this right.

… Source:The Open Road

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I’ve been saying for some time that open source is not a price tag, or at least is much more than that. In criticizing Oracle’s “lite”/express approach to competing with MySQL years ago, I insisted that “free, as in price, is just one part of the open source puzzle. But it’s not necessarily the most important one.”

I stand by that claim, and received confirmation from Untangle this week.

Untangle is an open-source network gateway company. It started out as a proprietary software company, but turned to open source for growth. This doesn’t always work well for companies, largely because many get the model and/or culture wrong.

Untangle, however, has done it right, and the downloads have followed. From 145 in June of 2007 to 41,419 in April of 2008, interest in Untangle has rocketed with its adoption of open-source licensing.

Is this just because its code is free now, and not because it’s open source? A quick look at the data suggests that “free” isn’t selling Untangle. Open source is.

… Source:The Open Road

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Microsoft’s Craig Mundie sees a way for the software giant to shift its largesse to the developing world. It’s called the phone, and will challenge Microsoft’s desktop-centric view of the world in its attempts to grow beyond its Western roots.

Interestingly, Microsoft is actually innovating here. Truly innovating:

Microsoft will increase its focus on making mobile phones part of its strategy to spread IT to people in developing nations, based partly on a prototype already developed for the purpose called Fone+….

The idea is to connect a low-to-mid-end smartphone based on the Windows Mobile OS to a TV via a docking station so data on the handset can be displayed on the Television screen. That way, people can use the computing power in the smartphone on a large screen.

Back in 2003, I looked at buying the intellectual property for Hancom Office’s embedded Linux-based competitor to Microsoft Office to kickstart this market. A friend and I couldn’t get venture funding for it, but that isn’t a problem that plagues Microsoft. Cash is in abundance in Redmond. It has the resources to do this right.

… Source:The Open Road

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