June, 24, 2001 archives

with my $25 amazon gift certificate (from signing up for online payment with at&t), i purchased glyn moody's rebel code: linux and the open source revolution, a history of linux and the modern open source phenomenon (as the subtitle might have suggested). it's very well researched, and a pretty good read, if kind of quote-heavy. (it gets a little wearisome bouncing between quotes and prose.)

one thing that stuck out at me was the characterization of microsoft in the second paragraph of the prologue—to the best of my knowledge, microsoft is an offices-for-everyone sort of place, not a cubicle wasteland. (it just struck me as a misapplied stereotype.)

one story missing from the book is of the first guy who tried to take linux commercial. i remember there was this guy who wanted to basically take over the reins and turn it into a business who got flamed out of existence on the early alt.os.linux newsgroup. i'm pretty sure there's at least some reference to this in the old linux-activists mailing list archives, but i can't find it now. i wish i could find old archives of the alt.os.linux newsgroup.

this silicon valley roundtable including microsoft's craig mundie is shaping up to be fairly interesting. of course, there have already been digressions into the minutiae of microsoft's latest end-user license agreement, and there's no one there really representing the "pragmatic" side of the open-source world (that is, the non-gpl crowd.)

well, over the weekend i finished the piece i was writing for mr. cook, and it went up with a couple of other things i had written.

the new piece was better before i lost my final revisions, and i just wasn't able to recreate the improvements.

arvind apparently hasn't heard that you don't mess with texas.

mr. cook needs content. if you've eaten at a restaurant in los angeles or san francisco, write a review and send it in. (or contribute to the other areas. restaurant reviews just happens to be one section that doesn't have any contributions yet.)