Super Volatile

So my model is kind of a reverse “end result justifies the means”. Hell no, that’s the stupidest saying in the history of man, and I’m not even saying that because it has been used to make excuses for bad behavior. No, it’s the worst possible kind of saying because it totally misses the point of everything.

It’s simply not the end that matters at all. It’s the means – the journey. The end result is almost meaningless. If you do things the right way, the end result *will* be fine too, but the real enjoyment is in the doing, not in the result.

Linus Torvalds on Macbook Air, raising kids and the process around kernel development.

You don’t love programming. I respect that. But the second part makes it sound like your days of learning and creating ended when you got your diploma. I can’t respect that.

A response to the 501 Manifesto.

Enter PhoneGap. The PhoneGap project has been on GitHub for quite a while and already contains an enviable list of contributors. The project has been very successful and the move to Apache is a result of Adobe's recent acquisition of Nitobi, creators of PhoneGap.

By ASF regulations the project must spend time in the "Incubator" even though it has already proven itself as a technology and as a community to the rest of the world. The project requested git as its version control rather than subversion, for obvious reasons. The request was met with some hostility and new pressure has now come down on the CouchDB "experiment".

The author argues that Apache Software Foundation is becoming not only irrelevant in the age of Github, but is also actively harmful. ASF aside, I'm becoming concerned that probably a huge majority of open source projects out there rely so much on a single company. Fortunately, distributed nature of git makes it unlikely that the code will disappear even if something goes wrong with Github.

As far as Oracle is concerned, everything is going swimmingly:

Oracle Corporation today announced fiscal 2010 Q4 GAAP total revenues were up 39% to $9.5 billion, while non-GAAP total revenues were up 40% to $9.6 billion.

In particular, Sun seems to be making plenty of money:

We estimate that the acquired business [Sun] will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

Open source fans may cry over Sun, but Oracle was able to rapidly profit from the acquisition.

The famous programmers aren't really famous for programming anymore, but instead because they created some business or non-profit. Their code can't stand on its own as awesome, it has to be paired with some non-code fame formation and then people can grok their concept.

On the surface it's the story how Zed Shaw discovers that being a great programmer won't make you a celebrity. But it fact it's about a deeper problem: that contributing a lot of time, effort and good code to open source is unlikely to earn you any recognition, not to mention gratitude.

Good read.

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Sent from my iPad

A letter to Steve Jobs on H.264 with a reply.

Google hopes to stem that divide by making VP8 open source, providing a high-quality and open alternative to existing codecs. On2 first announced VP8 in late 2008, promising more efficient video compression than other available codecs. At launch, On2 went so far as to claim that it could provide “50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.”

Google tries to solve the competition between H.264 and Ogg Theora by introducing the new codec. If it's really so good, it could be interesting. But will Microsoft and Apple join this game?

It’s great that (at least in this Western world) we have things called weekends. We also have time where we are not working. Some of us have (a lot) more of it than others and generally waste it playing video games or watching TV. I’m fine with that, but there is a limit I feel before it turns from “relaxing” into “slacking off”. You have to realise that you are part of a world-wide community. You are using something developed by people world wide and it is time that you gave back.

On contributing to open source.

Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I'd see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards.

Google's Brad Fitzpatrick on what happens to open source programmers when they join the company. Also, what open source can learn from Google.

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.

If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.

Potentially worth taking look at.