Recently my Olivetti Olibook S1300 - a gift of Salvo Mizzi, of the Working Capital fame - died. I decided it was great time to face the experience of making my Acer Aspire one printing. While below you’ll find a detailed report about my journey to make possible to print via Linux with a Canon LBP 810, first I wish to share my thoughts about what all this means.
Plug&Play maybe a frustrating experience if something goes wrong for some reason, since most of the times you have little chances to fix an issue if that arise. On the contrary with Linux you’re given the unique opportunity to be in full control of your destiny, and you can litterally build your own future (no pun intended).
As you can easily figure out yourself - or if you don’t have the time just go on and read my painful experience to make it print - freedom really come at a price here. Note that the problem is not that by bad luck my old Canon printer for some weird reason doesn’t come with Linux drivers. To be honest the LBP810 doesn’t even come with Mac drivers.
The Windows network effect is a fact, and the Microsoft industrial processes associated with making Windows the ubiquitous desktop is also a fact. All OEMs play by te market rules, and they make sure their products are compatible with all the Windows flavours. Unless the market will observe Linux desktop crossing the chasm, we won’t see any YoLD. Period.
So said, go on and read if you want to know how to configure your Acer Aspire to make it print on a LBP810.
Continue reading ‘Printing with Ubuntu and Why Microsoft Will Never Be Obsoleted’
ICANN about 10 years ago shared a proposal for a redemption grace period for deleted domains, in order to simplify the management of unintentional domain deletions. As a result the Redemption period rules for all .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net and .org domains. So far, so good.
Unfortunately many registrars are now billing outrageous domain redemption fees, nearly 200 Euros in my case.
Few days after my blog post about OSI’s possible future, OSI wrote a second statement on the CPTN transaction, somehow reaffirming my concerns about a maybe too narrowed view on software patents. Now that even Groaklaw gave up with software patents - rightly in my opinion - leaving it to IT giants and patent-trolls, will OSI fight software patents as a whole?
While waiting to understand how OSI will behave in this respect, we might move on other topics, like how OSI could fulfill its mission.
Continue reading ‘The Open Source Road Ahead - About Put an End to Vendor Lock-in’
Having been interviewed recently, among other topics, about my take on how FSF and OSI might rethinking their roles in the next future, I want to share some thoughts around how OSI could move in the years to come.
Changing OSI is now possible, and I am personally taking the chance by joining the OSI Governance working group, chaired by Simon Phipps. While the future governance of the OSI is still under discussion, here I’d like to throw some ideas around on what OSI could do about things like raising funds, software patents and “Open Core”.
Continue reading ‘OSI: The Open Source Road Ahead’
I have been rarely playing the prediction game in the past, but now that Red Hat finally seems to fulfill my old predictions - also in the cloud - it is time to join Bob Sutor and others to play again.
Open Source and the Cloud.
Open source is now the maturity phase, and it is interesting to look at how compares open source and cloud computing (courtesy of Google Insight for search).
But the open source world is not so small, looking at the same graph for different European countries makes a difference. While France looks at the cloud as much as North-Americans do, other countries (like Italy) are lagging behind (see also EC2 statistics).
Continue reading ‘The Open Source Year Ahead’
Commercial Open Source blog is yet another year older, and it is time to zoom back once more and look at things happened during the fourth year of its live.
SOS Open Source has been my primary focus over the last year. I have been using my methodology to help customers, make available reports for vendors and also to qualify and select open source e-commerce applications. Stay tuned for more reports, the very next will be around open source monitoring.
Conferencing. Over the last year I have been keynoting at Novell and Red Hat events, organizing a series of events around open source for IBM (more to come), chairing the Analysts session at OWF, as well as giving speeches and managing round-tables discussions at cloud computing events.
EU-funded open source projects. Having been invited by the EU to bring my perspective around EU-funded open source projects’ sustainability, I started to share tips and hints about online dissemination. Of course I didn’t stop to look at existing projects, and I look forward to share more findings about some of them.
Last but not least I wish to thank my webmaster Matteo Ionescu for his great job.
Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors. Foremost, for the most of us before anything else software (open source included) is a tool towards a goal.
Continue reading ‘The Open Source Innovation Backbone for Startups’
James Dixon - Pentaho Chief Technology Officer - about two years ago wrote the “Beekeeper model“, telling the word about how open source firms writing the majority of the code make business.
Now James released the first draft of the new version asking for comments, and I am glad to give him some feedback again.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Business Strategy: Feedback on the Beekeeper Model Revisited’
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