Open Source

December 14th, 2003

Loic on Open Source

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Loic Le Meur, an entreprenaur and VC is thinking whether to take his ublog open source or not. He got most of the basic advantages of open source movement correctly but still not sure.

November 3rd, 2003

Asia Open Source Symposium

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I drop by at the Asia Open Source Symposium at the Pan Pacific Hotel (which is a 10mins walk from my office) this morning. I mean, I have quite a few old friends are here at this closed door (hmm..) seminar like Shuichi Tashiro from Japan and Ho Jian Ming and Wu Guo Wei from Taiwan.

Spend a lot of time catching up and paying too little attention to the speakers. But still, it is fun to catch up with friends, especially those who are once bitter enemies. As the Chinese saying goes, “You never know someone until you fight them”.

It is also a pleasure to finally met Dr. Kenichi Handa the author for Multilingual Emacs (MULE). We have some discussion on MULE (or just Emacs now) regarding input methods and rendering for various languages. For example, Khmer in Unicode is “broken” in 3.2 which is “fixed” only in 4.0, or the difficulty of supporting various Indic scripts (locale rules not available).

Particularly, I hope I can convience him to support the Afghanistan languages like Phasto and Dari. I helped to started an UNDP project to support Phasto and Dari last year and we badly need Phasto and Dari support for Unixes.

September 24th, 2003

Falling in love with Drupal

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I haven’t been blogging for a while…this is because I found a new love…Drupal.

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.

It is much more powerful then any commerical CMS I have seen and I have fun hacking it for the last few days. Perhaps I should contribute back some of my codes back to the community…

September 20th, 2003

Software to Service

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Eric S. Raymond, working on his latest book The Art of Unix Programming, wrote:

Open source turns software into a service industry. Service-provider firms (think of medical and legal practices) can’t be scaled up by injecting more capital into them; those that try only scale up their fixed costs, overshoot their revenue base, and starve to death. The choices come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to use and modify open-source software for its business purposes).


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September 10th, 2003

Linux: The Future is Open

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Heard that IBM is doing a new commerical in US where they compare Linux to a little boy, “growing fast, taught by the best, gaining wisdom beyond his years, and sharing”.

You can download the commerical from IBM (or from here) which, no surprising, support only quicktime, realplayer and mpg on Linux (Sorry folks..no .avi for Windows folks :-)

When you are there downloading, read the speech by Irving Wladasky-Berger on Linux too. (Dr. Irving, who happens to be one of the independent director of my previous company, is responsible for pushing Open Source in IBM back in the 90s)

Yes, the future is Open :-)