The trunk
Finally
August 13th, 2005
The story told in the posts below has finally reached its end: the Ajax.NET project became free software, as it was promised.
The code was given to a business company, SediSys, that has opened a site, BorgWorX, for maintaining it.
I still have some doubts about a point (2.1 and 2.2) of the license, but it seems GPL compatible.
I’m very happy about that!
Have fun
Personal: job change
August 4th, 2005
After a brief period of skills sharing, I finally resigned from my job in Ogilvy, an advertising company.
My last day is just finished, now a short week of relax and study then I’ll move to Concept, a very small but interesting reality of the italian IT panorama.
See you the 16 of August!
Free software has its own defenders
July 20th, 2005
In my previous post, I was telling you a story about a, so called, “bad guy” who ran into troubles when the community around his “open source” project recognised it as a fake.
I’ve notified that odd behaviour to the SourceForge team. They’ve found that some “unwanted” posts from the project forum have been deleted. Well, actually you cannot delete forum posts from sourceforge, you can only hide them. This makes them available to the sourceforge team, if you forward them an inquiry, as I have done.
They’ve agreed and now the “bad guy” (actually, his work) has been deleted. That guy still has time to make the source code available, and, therefore, to have back his project. I hope he will.
This time the words “open source” have been used as an advertisement strategy.
In my own experience, I understand I have to think about using “open source” or “free software” as the way to describe something to my colleagues. “Open source” is sometimes mistaken as “gratis”, but when I talk about “free as in freedom”, I know what I’m saying and when the others do not, they ask me and I can explain them. I’m not a guru at all, but we can talk about it.
Have fun
Is “Open Source” a way to be advertised?
July 18th, 2005
Some days ago I was looking for something related to AJAX and I was, as always, looking for it on SourceForge.
The Ajax.NET project came up to my eyes: reading something in the forum, it seemed to be a good work but suddenly I read THIS.
It seems that the developers have built a library for integrating the AJAX method to their web projects and that they released the BINARY on SourceForge.
Wait a moment: the binary? Only the binary? And the source? Well, no, there is no source code… and even no license at all.
They say they are having trouble with the CVS and so the small community around the project suggested the simple upload of a zip archive, together with the binary version.
Silence.
Someone decompiled it (CLI, as well as Java, is a bytecode and so can be easily decompiled to an understandable code) and put a link to a zip.
The authors thanked him.
I was wondering: should I (or someone else) open a new project and create a fork of this one, license it under a LGPL and care to make it usable both with the free Mono and M$ implementation of the CLI? Is that legal?
Anyway, this is probably the latest demonstration of the hype around “open source” and the way it makes focus away from free software.
What’s your answer? For me, it is: no, not always, but sometimes it is.
UPDATE:
I admit I repeatedly asked the developers for advice about the missing source code: the developers reacted in quite an interesting way that you can read HERE.
They tried to play the community for a fool and they are now searching for “legal advice”: too bad, another cheater has been shut down. Bye bye!
How much others appreciate your knowledge?
April 23rd, 2005
Something like 2 years ago, I changed my job and I was hired by an advertising company (will omit all names).
As I’ve always done, I try every day to learn something new and to share this fresh knowledge (could be a programming technique or a tool) with my colleagues and my tech chief. Goals are improving company base knowledge, improving software development and management quality and (why not?) improving my career. This lead some of them doing the same: they taught me many different things.
But not every colleague likes my behaviour.
Someone even plays me when I do that.
Of course I understand I’m speaking the wrong way: probably they think I do not really know what I’m talking about; probably they do not like the topics; probably they don’t have time; probably they don’t trust me as much as I think (or I should say “hope”?); and (let me say that, as I’m too proud of myself) probably they fear I could really change something.
Until now, I’ve spoken even if not asked to: I’ve just learnt something, I teach you what I’ve learnt.
But this friday, I was played for the last time, and the relationship between me and my tech chief is broken and un-recoverable.
I decided to speak only if ASKED, and I hope I won’t hurt somebody anymore.
Anyway, this is not the job I want, and I will leave them as soon as possible.
I hope I’ll find again a team who really likes to share its knowledge, as I share it every day and as I see others sharing it on mailing lists and usergroups.
Wire your mind to a p2p network.