Friday, August 30, 2002

Shades of Shop Class My water cooled case arrived yesterday. It turns out it's not quite compatible with the ASUS SMP motherboard I got to go inside it, but it will be if I just drill eight 0.150" holes in it. So the manufacturer tells me. Now. Argh! 11:22:29 PM      comment []  trackback []

Three kinds of free. Ziggy wrote about an unusually clued article at CNET, Three kinds of free. It is about the different kinds of open source licenses (GPL and other more inclusive licenses). Most importantly, open source is not just about code; it is about community. You don't make a project open source just with a license. It takes the costly and time-consuming birthing of a community of code, a trusted gatekeeper function and a series of symbiotic commercial enterprises to make true open... [Ask Bjoern Hansen] I just found Bjoern's weblog. It has a very Lars feel to it (photos, layout.) It must be something in the water. 7:55:28 PM      comment []  trackback []

Joel on "Why can't Groove just give me their stuff for free?" Provocative Joel on Software article about platforms. He makes a few good points, and a few bad ones. My overall feeling is that Joel is accusing Ray of following the new rules of software companies that Joel helped write when he was designing software at Microsoft. Rule #1 to succeed in software industry: Get bought out by Microsoft. It still holds true, even (especially?) after the pointless antitrust settlement. Groove is ideally positioned to do that, by tying all their APIs to Office ones and ditching any hope of cross-platform deployment. They want to be no more than Office++, so that they get sucked into the mother ship at some point in time and everyone goes and gets a bigger house. They're not worried about ISVs or platform development, because then they'd be competing with their benefactor/future employer. But let's put aside the MS-screed for a moment. Even if Groove weren't laser focused on their exit strategy, going directly after the direct enterprise market before setting up reseller channels and/or selling to the consumer market actually makes a lot of sense for smallCo's just starting out. Platform development is for when things have settled down, you know what people are willing to pay for, and API's have frozen. You're making money, you have time to hire a different sales force, have the lawyers draw up a diffferent set of OEM documents, build up your reseller support staff etc. At this point in time, I don't know for sure that Groove has even released their flagship Integration Server product yet, have they? They have a product company web site, but it has that distinctive vaporware aura about it, as they've strategically and financially fallen into MS's gravity well. It's sad. Maybe Joel will take a look at REBOL. Carl is making a true attempt at going the platform route, and I'll bet he's got some pretty slick x-platform p2p code left over from the aborted Morpheus contract. I don't think Joel seriously considers anything that doesn't have MS plastered all over it, however. ("Gotta go with numero uno, yada yada yada"). 6:48:05 PM      comment []  trackback []