I started three different placeholders today that I thought might be post-worthy, but since it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to cram them all into a single post.
You understand.
Free does not mean open source.
Eddie tweeted a link yesterday that caught my eye called “20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source Company“.
Interesting article and definitely much closer to true now that the Sun acquisition has closed.The problem is that several of the 20 reasons listed are not open source, e.g. Oracle Express Edition 10g. Yes, XE is free. No, it is not open source.
Open source means the source code is available to anyone to use and modify, under a free license. To the best of my knowledge, XE’s source code is not available. Is it?
So, open source is free, but free is not necessarily open source. Although I can understand that calling something freeware has a seedy connotation.
I love open source and use a lot of it, and one of the main reasons why I’ve been geeked about the Sun deal is all the open source it brings to Oracle.
Welcome people of Sun.
While we’re talking about Sun, we welcomed them into the fold this week. Yesterday, I started to see Sun groups appear on Connect, and our traffic numbers spiked yesterday and today.
Sun had a large social presence internally and externally, where many employees blogged and tweeted. Jonathan Schwartz followed an open policy, which fostered a lot of open communication from and among Sun employees.
They seem to have taken to Connect, and I’m noticing an interesting trend. They post a lot of status updates. I can’t tell if this is by design or whether they’re accustomed to a publisher without any post types.
Most Connect users post questions, notes, links and media (all explicit post types), i.e. it’s a structured experience. Rich and I have discussed removing types in favor of hashtags or something similar to speed up posting, but I’ve always thought people would miss explicit types.
Maybe they wouldn’t though. For example, several of the status updates I saw today were questions. So, either our UI is failing at obvious, i.e. the question post type can’t be found easily enough, or post type doesn’t matter.
It might also be that most Connect users interact through groups, not from the Home page. We don’t offer status updates inside groups.
It’s possible I’m over-analyzing too. I do love behavioral patterns played out in software.
Conference call roulette is not that fun.
Chat Roulette is making the rounds, as is the Daily Show’s lampoon (h/t TechCrunch), which is worth the 6 minute investment.
I had the enterprise version of Chat Roulette today, con call roulette. I dialed into a call and found it was already in progress. And the topic was completely unfamiliar.
This happens every so often because we tend to use the same passcodes for meetings. So, if you’re hosting back-to-back calls and the earlier call runs over, you might provide con call roulette to attendees of the later call.
That ever happen to you?
Anyway, happy Friday.
