Nobody on this panel is wearing Birkenstocks.

That quote can be attributed to Bob Shrimp, Oracle’s VP of Technology Marketing. Although, I bet a few VC’s out there have been known to wear the ‘hippie’ seal of approval.

It was made in a Investor’s Business Daily article talking about open-source successes and the impact they’re having on traditional software verticals.

Mark Fluery originally recommended the article (and this one too), and I think it’s an interesting read.

Basically there’s little doubt in my mind that the large vendors have to start accounting for open source solutions. Whether or not it encourages/forces them to develop better solutions is up in the air. What we do have now, are companies like SpikeSource committed to the productization of open-source. They’re VC backed, but if they stray too far from their roots they’re not going to be successful. On the flip-side, the reason a company like SpikeSource will be successful because they are committed to helping and improving already thriving communities. Open-source companies have agendas (which without doubt are financially motivated) but many are directed at enabling not splintering the communities for which they serve.

For what it’s worth, I like JBoss. It does what it’s supposed to and right now, I don’t see a reason to look at a BEA or IBM solution. Likewise, I’m perfectly content to develop against PostgreSQL, but not adverse to deploying Oracle in a production environment. I think it’s important (for me, as a developer, at least) to keep an open mind and use the best tool for the job. As the article says, there’s an open-source solution available in nearly all verticals. Some are great, many are average, and a few are downright awful. They should be included in decision making, but I wouldn’t let the perceived value (either positive or negative) of open-source movement in general overly influence a decision. There’s a lot of good commercial software (be it proprietary or open-source based) that warrants purchasing.

The way software is distributed and built may change, but commercial software vendors as we know them will likely be around for many years to come.

25th Annual Terry Fox Run

Just got home from participating in the 25th Annual Terry Fox Run.

Was a nice day for a run, reason enough to get me out of bed earlier than the customary 10 or 11:00 wake-up call on Sundays.

The run itself was about 7.5km and there was a ton of people out walking, running, rollerblading, biking, etc. I went out super hard (3m20s through 1km, 7m through 2km) but managed to get things back under control. I was expecting a 10km run which is a bit beyond what I have been running so the 7 or 8km it turned out being was good. I’ve been trying to run consistent sub 4min pace and managed to do that today.

After the run, the local supermarket conglomerate was supplying free pancakes, sausages, oranges, banana’s and sunny d. I haven’t had sunny d in years but it was the only stuff around so I forced a couple glasses in.

Now the rest of the day will be spent relaxing and setting up my new Dell D610 laptop.

Installed Ubuntu on Server/Laptop

A couple days ago I attended the local linux user group’s presentation on Ubuntu.

It was given by Corey Berger, a member of the Ubuntu community contributing to its documentation and laptop testing efforts.

I’ve been having a lot of problems with my Toshiba laptop as of late, it’s been spontaineously powering off or locking up. Nonetheless, I decided to upgrade from Hoary the Hedgehog to Breezy the Badger (Preview). Everything went as expected and the laptop is still running into the same problems but at least has GNOME 2.12.

Last night I decided to take the plunge and install Hoary on my previously Debian sid/unstable system. I had an unused 40 gig partition so I didn’t have to wipe my old data. Everything installed as expected. From this point on, I don’t think I’ll mess around with regular Debian. I like running quite close to the cutting edge, but I don’t particularily care to endure too much in the way of broken packages or conflicts. I’ve run Debian unstable for years and only in the last few months have I really started to have problems. On the other hand, Ubuntu is a relatively polished Debian distribution that works well (pretty much out of the box) on my laptop, desktops and servers.