JY's Weblog

 dimanche 6 avril 2003

About the laws enforcing using free/open source software over commercial software: It looks obvious that a lot of clients do not care about getting the source code. What is wanted is open file formats (or great export functions) and open APIs so that you can switch to another software later if you have to. And if the total cost of a solution (software + consulting + training + support) is cheaper for the same value/efficiency, well go for it. Open Source is great to distribute big software endeavours across companies/individuals (one example is the use of Khtml in Safari for the rendering engine) especialy for what Doc Searls calls Infrastructure software, but requiering all software to be open sourced is like requiring that all cooks give away their recipies and let you force them to change an ingredient. Who cares, we only want good lunches (and often good lunches means giving away more money...).
  

Scoble is learning to program. So i told myself, "eh why not learn how to scobleize !". So, if you know some good books for this ("Scobleizing for the Dummies" comes to mind) please let me know. I figure i'll have to buy 3 Tablet-PCs, get an MSDN subscription, learn how to play golf to spend some week-ends with Steve Ballmer, and get an access to the Windows source code (just in case i want to go threw 50 millions of code lines during the week-end). The industry needs something like 50000 Scoble to get back on track, so let all learn how to Scobleize! (note: I'm currently programming with Cocoa on MacOS X, so learning to play golf to spend some week-ends with Steve Jobs would be just fine, thank's)