29 Oct 2009
If you haven’t read Paul Bissett’s take on the Goog’s entrance into the data collection and LBS businesses, you must, he’s nailing it. Start with “GOOG = BORG, and I Mean That in the Nicest Way”, and then do “Google Will Open Source National Parcel Map”.
25 Oct 2009
I found the keynote by climate scientist Andy Pitman at FOSS4G very interesting, on a couple levels.
Firstly on the climate level, he started off with a graph of some of the predictions from 1990, when it was becoming clear that climate change was something that policy makers needed to Do Something About. At that time, the scientists put together a range of scenarios, places we would be based on different policy responses, ranging from radical changes in energy production and efficiency to doing SFA. And amazingly, we have managed to do worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned in 1990. With the polar ice on the way out, and glacial (hah hah) progress in getting policy change China and the USA (the only two that matter, if they lead the world will follow), it was very sobering to see just how poorly we are doing at averting the very predictable end of our civilization.
Secondly on the open source level, he was very clear that open source technology (C, Java, etc) and open source programmers (knowing nothing about climate science) probably couldn’t be directly useful to the modelling effort. But he did think that the modellers should aspire to a more open source ethic in their science. Most of the models are closed source, and there is little of the open source ethic of communications going on. My main concern about an open source climate model is that the politicization of the whole discussion would destroy any efforts at community building. One of the things projects have to occasionally deal with is “poisonous people”, and an open climate model would have to deal with orders of magnitude more of those. It’s draining and distracting from the real business at hand.
I hope the climate modellers can figure out how to square the circle of more openness without poisonous people, but in my mind modelling is icing on the cake at this point. We know we need to de-carbonize, it’s obvious that changing the chemical balance of our environment, whether locally with things like PCBs or DDT or globally with CO2 is a dangerous crapshoot. At this point, we need the force of will to do it.
(BTW, I think we should be taxing carbon at the source, not taxing emissions (too many tailpipes) but extraction. It’s not carbon per se that is the problem, it’s extra carbon, the kind we dig and pump out of the ground, that is baking us. Fewer points of taxation and control, easier to enforce and manage, let’s tax oil and coal and natural gas at the point of production (or, if exporting jurisdictions refuse to do so, at our borders.)
23 Oct 2009
Lots of people here have been asking if my keynote is going to be posted online. So, here it is (31MB). Be forewarned, it’s a big file. There is also a handheld video available on YouTube. There was a professional video shot too, and hopefully that will go online at the conference site in the next month or so.
12 Oct 2009
In the spirit of beer commercials and sports highlight shows, Slashdot’s editors blithely follow a post about sexism in open source with, just 45 minutes later, a post on a Marge Simpson spread in Playboy.
Let no one say Slashdot does not know its audience. At least, the audience they have, not the one they’re missing out on.
12 Oct 2009
Matt Asay (the most prolifically correct person writing on open source today) takes a look at PostgreSQL in his posting today (Is it Postgres’ Time to Shine?):
Postgres [could be positioned] to take a bigger share of the enterprise Java database market – not because it’s cheaper than Oracle or more open than MySQL but because it’s a great database in its own right.
Hear hear! But Matt is too kind: PostgreSQL usership will grow strongly over the next couple years and much of the growth will trace directly back to its competitors weakness. MySQL’s continuing community turmoil after the Sun/Oracle acquisition, and Oracle’s continuing pricing problems (in that, they keep going up and up and up, I have yet to meet an Oracle customer who didn’t start our conversation by gasping at ever increasing maintenance costs).
Being an excellent, superior, database is a good start, but having your competitors self-destructing never hurts.
