It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters.
Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.
For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.
Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach).
I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily.
My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it?
I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.
Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else – it’s like other websites just time out.
I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.
Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick.
It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.
As Rawhide, I’ve been using it on and off for a while now, and to be honest aside from the few things I ended up filing, there hasn’t been an awful lot wrong with it. One thing I’d particularly like to call out are the small improvements arriving in virt-manager, which is slowly improving release by release into a really tasty piece of software.
apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality. I would link to something useful if I could, but surprisingly(?) their website is well out of date. Paraphrasing the specific questions they’re asking, though:
When should ISPs be filtering/blocking traffic? Should Govt. intervene over Phorm-like services? Do we need new initiatives to protect privacy online? Is the global approach to kiddie porn working?
So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle. Personally, I didn’t see that coming – didn’t see Oracle wanting to get into the hardware business, but maybe they will literally just chop those bits out and sell them off. Or maybe they do want to get into hardware.
This has some interesting implications for free software projects, though:
Java. Clearly Oracle are huge fans of Java and will want to continue the development.
So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.
Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.
If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.
