what are we doing today, brain?

After some annoying issues, we finally have the balloons and stickers being shipped out to all the SFD teams. Check them out below I’m a little disappointed with the stickers, but all in all they look great! All teams will be getting about 20 of both. Next year we’ll be getting loads more!

• South African Government’s OSS plans revealed
  “All new software developed for or by the government is to be based on open standards and licensed under an open source licence where possible.” - Using, developing, training and promotion of FOSS by the South African Government. Interesting stuff!
  (tags: southafrica foss opensource government)

• Surprises Inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
  This is old, but interesting. “The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can’t do, and the GPL sounds like it was written by a human being who wants me to know what I can do.”
  (tags: microsoft eula gpl opensource Windows vista DRM license)

• Jive goes head-to-head with Microsoft’s SharePoint
  “Jive goes head-to-head with Microsoft’s SharePoint” - ZDNet - Sharepoint is the new lock-in for Microsoft, and it’s great to see competitors hopefully giving people reason to pause when considering the Microsoft Sharepoint slippery slope. Note - Clearspa
  (tags: microsoft sharepoint jive)

Sharepoint is scary. People that use it quite like it and are blissfully unaware of the sticky technology and licensing trap they’ve allowed into their environments. It provides some useful functions that could be found in many applications or bundled applications, however the trap is that once you deploy it, Microsoft have you pretty much under their thumb. You have to use their technologies, you have to use their office suite, their operating system, their data formats. It is very hard to move away from.

There are loads of articles written about this. I’ve put only a few interesting ones below:

• The Future of Lock-in, Microsoft’s two faces of SharePoint & While you were sleeping (The Sharepoint trojan horse) - Matt Asay
• Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - Wall Street Journal

So Sharepoint is something that needs careful consideration. What are the alternatives? I don’t profess to be an expert in this space, however I’ve put a list of useful applications below that give you loads of great collaborative functionality:

• Alfresco - Enterprise Content Management (interesting article
• Clearspace by Jive (not Open Source, but looks interesting)
• O3Spaces - document centric collaboration
• Metadot - Open Source portal server

Plus of course all the other applications that are great for collaboration including Wikis, chat applications and loads more.

So over the last week I’ve been on the road with IBM and Red Hat on their Linux on the desktop roadshow. It has been pretty interesting! I am speaking about Linux and Open Source generally, how to create a strategy and providing a vendor neutral perspective to balance the Red Hat and IBM perspectives. Microsoft have really shot themselves in the foot with Vista, it is making loads of quite conservative IT buyers look at Linux seriously

The events have been pretty good and I’ve had a chance to catch up with friends all over the country Tonight is dinner with some of the Linux SA crew, and then tomorrow is dinner with PLUG in Perth.

Brisbane was fun, I saw Elspeth and Stephen Thorne which was great! In Melbourne I stayed with Donna and Peter who are always fun, and had a lovely dinner with a few extra friends. Unfortunately both taxis I took in Melbourne had really racist drivers, so they got an earful.

While I was in Canberra I stayed with Rusty and Alli in their beautiful “new” place outside of Canberra. Check out the photos below! They have horses, dogs, cats and bandwidth!

• Bleeding Edge: Electing Ubuntu Linux
  “And for those Windows programs that we can’t replace … well, we’re going to allow Bill to continue to run a small corner of our IT commonwealth, which we call Tasmania.” - Bleedingedge.com - Hilarious
  (tags: opensource microsoft)

• The Escapist : OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1
  “I am a girl, but girls do not exist on the internet.” - Really interesting article about being a female online gamer, and the weird stuff you have to deal with. I totally can relate
  (tags: WhitneyButts gaming women geek)

I am participating in a Red Hat and IBM roadshow about Linux on the desktop. We’ll be visiting Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth (Perth is a private event only), so if you are interested in either coming along to the event or catching up for a drink afterwards, check out the schedule on the invitation below I’ll be talking about Open Source generally, the business benefits, case studies and how to go about creating a strategy for Open Source deployment. Red Hat and IBM will be focusing on the Linux desktop, which is excellent timing.

Red Hat, IBM and Waugh Partners road trip invitation.

The evening of every event it would be great to catch up with the FOSS communities in each location, so please just add a comment or email me if you’d like to catch up

Dates:

• 14th August (tomorrow) - Brisbane
• 15th August - Melbourne
• 20th August - Canberra
• 21st August - Sydney
• 22nd August - Adelaide
• 23rd August - Perth (private IBM/Red Hat event, but open for drinks in the evening!

Sorry about the short notice! Registrations are here.

Phil Harper has just released the SFD07 version of The Open CD, a great FOSS CD with software for Windows. Nice work Phil! SFD teams, or even just interested individuals can download and burn it for SFD or any other useful outreach event

The artwork (a nice black and white label) is included in the iso.