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 Tuesday, July 1, 2003
A New Way to Make $$$ from Open Source. A New Way to Make $$$ from Open Source
Hm... Maybe I'm nuts on this one but in the past two days I've done the following:
- Printed the docs for TikiWiki (360 pages)
- Hole punched them
- Put them into a binder so I can read them.
I've done the same thing for phpAdsNew and for the PayPal api docs. All of these were done in PDF files. I wondering if one of the online print businesses might offer this as a service to the Open Source community i.e. you have a "Order Docs" button which lets them get your pdf, print it, bind it and send it to you. I'd spend some $$$ for this. Reading PDFs on screen basically sucks wind. And its worse then ever with the new Acrobat so this makes sense to me. I don't know if its economically viable but if the project got say 20% of it, it might work for all parties. Thoughts? [The FuzzyBlog!]
Not a bad idea and one that holds some real possibilites, not only for Open Source documents but such things as scientific papers. I hate reading pdf on screen and would relish the ability get a load of them bound and delivered to me. 11:40:32 AM 
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How We All Lost $500,000 or "The True Costs of Echo". How We All Lost $500,000 or "The True Costs of Echo"
I was just thinking over the whole Echo / New RSS format issues and here's what I thought:
- There's no way that RSS .9x / 2.0 is going away. It is too entrenched and will just be around for a long time. Think of it as "the ASCII of syndication". So every vendor that is involved in Syndication will have to support it. Maybe completely new vendors can escape it but anyone who sells a product or provides a service that does RSS now will have to support it for the indefinite future. Say 3 more years at least.
- Let's say that there are 50 vendors out there that support RSS and now also need to support echo. Let's also take an arbitrary cost estimate to the vendor of $10,000. Assuming a fully loaded cost of $100 / hour for a software engineer to do the implementation, document it, etc, that's only 100 hours of labor or 2.5 weeks. And that just isn't that much time when you come down to it. Sure I did my first RSS implementation for Feedster in less than a day but after bug fixes? I'm probably every bit of that. Now this could be high or could be low but let's assume that it is good.
- That means the cost of Echo is $500,000*.
Hm.... That $500,000 could do quite a bit of good in the world. It could give Dave Jacobs a new kidney. Or it could do a lot of other good. So the question that comes to mind is this:
Is Echo Worth $500,000 ?
*And don't forget that we all still have to pay for supporting existing RSS, fixing bugs, adapting it to new conventions, etc. [The FuzzyBlog!]
TANSTAAFL! How much is Echo development worth? How will small developers be able to compete with the bug guns that are now prepared to enter the field (i.e. IBM, MS)? What was so nice about RSS was that almost any dedicated developer could create something. The problem is that almost any dedicated developer could create something. But does this require a creation of a whole new standard? I have no idea and am really frustrated that there seems to be this whole war and discussion going on with so little apparent input from non-technical users. I simply do not have a clue how Echo will make anything better for me. Until this can be articulated better, I am simply getting more and more angry/distraught. 11:37:55 AM
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I particularly like withholding aid to financially weakened countries purely to help our own ends. Here is a list of the countries. Nothing wrong about that from our viewpoint, if you do not mind demonstratring to countries how little you really care about them. Of course, this is always the problem when they take money from a bully and come to rely on it. Someday they are going to have to decide whether they have to kow-tow to continue recieving the money, or refuse and lose the largesse. What a wonderful Hobson's choice! I just do not see how this does much at all but infuriate more people. Playing political hardball ALL the time, which seems to be the major attribute of this Administraion. Winning at all costs, particularly if you can humiliate your opponent, seems to be the favorite approach of many political leaders today. I think it is the last rattle of a worldview that will begin to decline over the next generation. It works well in the short term but will fail miserably in the long term. It will not be too long before we get leaders who do a better job, at least if we hope to survive as a representational democracy. Until then, I guess we are stuck with those that agin power by degradation, that view politics as a zero sum game where it is easiest to get ahead by knocking someone else down. 11:15:34 AM
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A fair description of the powerlessness of the progressive movement, the belief that you do not ever want your friends to be put in the difficult position of actually endorsing your viewpoint by actually doing anything to further it. Many of the so-called progressive groups seen today benefit by the status quo, need to make sure that they have opponents that allow the groups to continue asking for money to do nothing. Then they can ask for more money for their organization next year. Much as the labor unions became ineffective as they became controlled by people who worked for the labor union, not for the industry the union represented, many of these progressive groups are run by people who work for the group, not for the cause. They would be out of a job if the cause was every won. The article gives a very strong argument that progressive groups are run in the same top-down, authoritarian manner as any other bureaucracy. They ignore grass-roots approaches that come from the bottom. I expect that the leaders of these groups will contiue to put up a strong fight to keep their cozy jobs, even as the grass-roots find new ways to fight the battles. 10:47:34 AM
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EM>Robert Patterson has a great post describing some of the changes he has seen in personal relationships because of blogging. It fits right in with many of the things I have seen. People and groups that can effectively deal with the huge amount of information being created, that can generate knowledge that permits them to make sound decisions, will have a huge advantage over those that do not. It is like being able to see and move in a third dimension when everyone else lives in Flatland. 10:19:13 AM
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Army Times Complains About Bush's 'Lip Service'. From the Army Times: "In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap ? and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately." [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
Kind of hard to run an Empire if you do not keep the Armed Forces happy. 12:09:44 AM
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I thought you brought the potato salad.. From Time, June 29, 2003: Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq... [Electrolite]
And this is from Time! It is a very good article, bringing up many of the points that the White House will have to deal with. I expect them to toss Tenet to the dogs. He is a Democrat holdover that they would love to replace. 12:02:26 AM
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