Scott Kveton

It’s interesting to see that SunGard is going to be going private again.

OSU is a big user of SCT software such as Banner.

From the Computer World article they mention:

However, many analysts and users alike believe that the company will be broken up and sold off as separate businesses. Those individual spin-offs could include SunGard’s many software and processing businesses or its disaster recovery and business continuity services, which offer managed hosting of storage, data security, records management and disaster recovery. The company currently has operations in 60 locations.

The tough thing about this announcement is it raises some questions about the future of the SunGard product line. This seems like a great time to start exploring a plan B.

Love the comment on the latest slashdot posting about the Firefox 1.0.2 release: “have Mozilla sorted their distribution worries?” I would say in a nutshell, “yes”.

With this release of Firefox we have 11.64 Gbit of bandwidth across all of our mirrors and with Bouncer we can leverage every last bit quite effectively. Since the release late last night we’ve had just over 600,000 downloads of both the full download and the XPI update. The mirror network isn’t even breaking a sweat. During the 1.0 release we were in a world of hurt trying to serve out 1 million downloads in 24 hours; we’ll do the same in the first 24 hours with ease for this release.

Over the past month, the UMO developers have been working on doing a security audit of the codebase that supports addons.mozilla.org and pfs.mozilla.org. That audit is complete as well as some patches to ease the development of the application by single developers and solve some performance issues. These are in the process of being reviewed.

The security audit revealed several problems with the existing codebase. Most of these can be remedied but there is a lot of work to be done. The final word on the security audit is that v2.0 of UMO will most likely need to be re-written from the ground up.

We have brought up a new development environment with development, staging and sandbox space for developers. This is going to allow us to do much faster development and give the release engineering folks a solid foundation for testing of new features, etc.

Now that we have identified things we need to get cleaned up, we’re looking for volunteers to help make it happen. If you, or someone you know, is interested in working on the UMO project and doing some PHP development we can definitely use the help. In addition, we are going to be looking for people in the near future to act as moderators, QA and reviewers of user extensions that land on UMO. Application development is not required there but would be helpful. If you are interested in being a developer or moderator please contact me or join the development team in #umo on irc.mozilla.org.

Things I can add to my “I’ve done this in my lifetime” list is “marrying someone”. Last night, I was fortunate enough to marry Claire and Edin in Lake Oswego. It was such a joy and one of the most touching things I have ever shared with friends (nowhere as cool as my wedding or the birth of my child of course but still quite fun) …

Please share with me and saying congrats to Edin and Claire and feel free to peruse the pics.

Oh yeah, and a shout out to the Church of Spiritual Humanism for making it possible for me to marry them. I highly recommend them for all of your Internet-based ordination needs.

Have you ever watched the show Blind Date? It’s possibly the worst TV going but it has some pretty entertaining moments. The gist of it is, people come on the show and they match up “likely” mates with each other for a paid first date. This of course is all on TV.

The biggest problem that my wife and I see is that the producers of the show are just plain idiots when it comes to picking “matches” for folks. Then it occurred to me (because I’m the biggest dork in the world), why not have a match.com version of this show? You could have a checkbox that says “I want to be on TV and go on a Blind Date” … voila! Instant classic!

The genius of this is that you could then actually see folks that make sense actually going out instead of loser after loser …

BTW – if they do decide to do this, somehow I should get some royalties …

So it appears that Samsung has launched another foray against Apple’s dominance in the portable music player market. Yeah! Six more devices that will go totally unnoticed.

What does Apple have going for them? It’s more than just sexy players. It’s the entire package; Apple is to the music/computer industry as Nike is to the shoe industry. They are a marketing company; they sell easy-to-use hardware that is sleek and extremely well-designed.

One of the guys I work with just ordered a 12″ PowerBook. The purchase order was faxed out on Monday and he had the machine (from China I might add) by Wednesday. Wednesday?! Are you kidding me?! Score yet another one for Apple; supply chain management is spot on.

Okay, so for Samsung, how will they stack up? Their devices boast some great statistics; they have a wide-range of tools, etc. But, they just don’t have that sex-appeal that the iPod’s do … iTunes and Apple’s music store bring the full package to bear for end-users. Just putting some players out on the market doesn’t cut it any more; you have to have a full-blown strategy that encompasses the device and the lifestyle.

Samsung’s devices will sell but they won’t make a dent in Apple’s market share.

Why do people find it so hard to consider the thought of paying for open source?

I had a gentleman approach me from the Portland-area asking for some advice on finding a developer to do some custom Thunderbird coding most likely in the form of an extension. They had asked me because they knew I was doing some stuff with the Mozilla Foundation already and that I might be able to find someone pretty quickly as they needed this on short-order.

I decided to head over to irc.mozilla.org and join #thunderbird to just see if anybody in there had an idea of where to look. I asked simply “does anybody know where I can find a developer to do some custom Thunderbird work for pay? This would be a very short-timeline.” The responses I received were like “you obviously don’t understand open source” or “why would anybody pay for open source?!” Are you f*’ing kidding me?! People pay for open source all of the time. As a matter of fact, its a pretty lucrative deal.

The most frustrating part about that is thinking that by paying for software … or more importantly paying for a software innovation that will then become open source you are somehow tainting the code; it’s not pure or something. That’s just crazy talk. Open source has a great place in business and that place is in paying for innovation. The business is the innovation.

Companies that truly grok open source understand that paying for the development of an open source project is a good thing in the long run for their organization. Especially when their organization’s “main thing” is not developing software. If others can realize some joy from it, or even develop it further, then that is good for the company/organization that makes the initial investment.

That said, if anybody got this far on this posting and might know somebody that would be willing to get paid to innovate, drop me a line and I’ll get you in touch with some people that need a Thunderbird extension …

I was lucky enough to moderate a panel this morning at the CIO Summit which was being held in conjunction with Innotech in Portland, OR. The panel discussion was titled “Charting the Future of Open Source” and our panelists were top-notch:

• Jason Matusow, Program Manager of Shared Source, Microsoft
• Tim Witham, CTO, OSDL
• Daniel Frye, Vice President of LTC, IBM
• Matt Asay, Director, Linux Busines Office, Novell

Now, it’s pretty tough to do much of anything in just an hour and I’m pretty sure we didn’t exactly chart the future of open source, however, there was some great discussion and I learned quite a bit about moderating a panel such as this:

• Avoid drinking 4 cups of coffee before moderating a panel; you want to avoid coming off looking like Beavis.
• Know when to say when; you can beat the TCO horse only so many times before people will get bored of it.
• Engaged audiences are the best; we had fantastic questions from the CIO’s in the audience like PSU’s Mark Gregory and Oregon’s Department of Human Services Bill Crowell.
• I had to dock a few points off of folks scores for shameless plugs of their products or initiatives; myself included.

There was one particular discussion that occurred around communities and innovation. Jason was arguing that innovation simply cannot come from communities; there is no financial motivation for them to want to innovate. Matt somewhat agreed there and said that even the innovation that we’re seeing across “communities” is really just focused around a few key developers.

Looking at the Firefox phenomenon and more importantly its impact on Microsoft has to make me wonder though. Here is an application that was spearheaded by a few individuals that wanted to make a better browser. Microsoft had all but given up the browser game because they had completely dominated it. What is the incentive for them to innovate? Along comes Firefox and its grassroots efforts and 37 million downloads later, Microsoft has had to changes its tune. So much so that last month they announced that IE 7.0 would be decoupled from the Windows operating system and would be released well before Longhorn. The innovations around Firefox are what helped force Microsoft’s hand. The community around Firefox is what will set it apart from anything that IE can do (because you know pop-up blocker and tabbed browing are the first things that will get implemented in the next release).

Dan was his usual solid self. When asked a question about options for consolidating databases in the near future (instead of having so many today) he simply replied, “You will always have choice. That’s it.” Dan is a rock and he has done a tremendous job of not only “getting it” but helping IBM to do the same.

All in all it was a good panel. I would have loved to talk some trash during the panel but thought I should just let the other guys have the floor; nobody was there to see me … haha …

Say what you will about her, but Martha Stewart, at least in my book, personifies leadership.

We all know that she’s back to work after 5 months in prison. I give her props because she did something that no other person under scruitiny has … she took her lumps and went to jail instead of continuing to fight it out in court (yes, she is still fighting it but simply to clear her name). She still served her time for something illegal that she did.

This all stands in stark contrast to some of the other jackasses in the news that refuse to admit when they are wrong.

Yeah, Martha was a cut-throat business woman. Yeah, some of us found her annoying, etc. But, at the end of the day, she did the right thing and I believe the market will treat her well because of it. She is back at the office, doing her job, setting the tone and getting her company back on track.

I set a reminder in my calendar for March 7th, 2006; I’m betting that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will be back in the black by then.

And all of this because she chose to lead.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; I have the best job in the world.

I had a chance to meet up with some folks from the Meyer Memorial Trust as they wanted to learn more about what we’re up to here at the OSL. The Meyer Memorial Trust is the legacy of F. G. Meyer.

The MMT is a foundation that helps support non-profits in Oregon and Southwest Washington. They often come across proposals for money to fund software upgrades or solutions at these non-profits. The board of trustees never really felt right about just funding more proprietary software for a non-profit … they wanted to help change an organization and help others at the same time. Enter open source.

By partnering with FreeGeek they have been able to start to realize some of the open source goodness (to which I told them that was known as “drinking the koolaid” in the FOSS world — although now I’m most likely open to litigation from the Kraft Foods Corporation).

Moving forward, the Meyer Memorial Trust wants to continue to do open source goodness and to that end they are requiring all technology/software grant proposals to have at least considered open source. And why wouldn’t they? I think this is a fantastic idea … not only that, they will most likely start to see trends in the needs of non-profits and be able to identify projects that could help N non-profits. Cost savings there can free up dollars to help these same non-profits move forward and not get caught in the “hamster wheel” of proprietary software subscription.