Saturday, April 30, 2005

» Fab has a blog

Fab has a blog, at last :-)

» Clirr public API change reporter

A recent blog entry by Vincent Massol drew my attention to the Clirr project.
Seems to be a very, very interesting tool to those whom develop a framework (like me) that's used by other applications and where you definately have to pay attention to public APIs. Vincent's blog entry also points to this: Cactus' Public APIs/SPIs definition.
I'll definately give Clirr a shot :-)

Friday, April 15, 2005

» Munich chooses two local Linux suppliers

Two "small" local Linux suppliers will be chosen to deploy (Debian) Linux installations for the city of Munich.
So, here you can witness another important advantage of open source and Free software, even for pure capitalists: an open market. Everyone's benefit. Smaller business have a chance to win offers and to provide their expertise on products they didn't have to implement, something that would require a huge investment (and we all know how hard it is to do so nowadays). With Microsoft products, there's no chance to do so: licenses and documentation is very, very expensive, and you'll always loose a project when Microsoft gets into the offer, as they are the only ones to know about their undocumented, proprietary, closed APIs and hacks, and they can provide better integration with their crap than anyone else could do. Plus, they can lower their own products' price tags that, obviously, are required to run their solutions. It's also beneficial for the customers: they have a much broader range of service providers to choose from. The only ones loosing ? The big business that have enough money anyway. So, OpenSource is not only about communism, geeks, revolution, anarchy, or those things that some people think it is. It's also about having a fair, open market, creating jobs, dynamize the market.