Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Great Unix Buttons


The great part of Unix lore can be captured in the buttons.

I am not sure the 1983 USENIX button would be allowed today :-)

Thanks npg

David Axmark's Open Source Law

I was speaking with David Axmark, Co-Founder of MySQL, at the Chaminade Resort atop the Santa Cruz Mountains that overlooks Monterey Bay. David made a very interesting statement that really caused me to pause and think. We were discussing open source and David said, "you are not doing open source until someone says no."

The key point David was making was that if you are open sourcing your code but retaining 100% control of your entire code base, that is not doing real open source. Obviously, there are many examples of companies/individuals doing this type of release (retaining 100% version control) very successfully, but David makes a great point.

There is a corollary on the sales side of the house that I heard many, many years ago which says:

You are not selling until the customer says NO.

There are not too many Laws that have both technology and sales parallels, but this is clearly one of them.

Sun Grid Engine 6.2

I had the good fortune of traveling with Curt Harpold down to Virginia Tech on January 28th, 2009 to listen to Curt present, "How To Program 1,000s of Processors". Curt wowed the ACM members on the challenges of programming lots of processors as well a the many tremendous features of Sun Grid Engine 6.2.

For complete details of this along with a video as well as Curt's complete presentation, please go to John Edstrom's blog entry here.