Be the signal

Local chief information officers at a Sydney conference this week were more interested in talking about open source and standards-based software than Microsoft’s new operating system.

“Frankie Laine, the big-voiced singer whose string of hits made him one of the most popular US entertainers in the 1950s, has died aged 93.” — Sad day for Red Hat fans.

Amusing video of the Builder AU team playing “Sucks or Scores” during linux.conf.au 2007.

This one’s doing the rounds, but is entirely worth it. Despite the “X projects on SourceForge” blunder, there are a lot of great insights here about evaluating the health and relevance of Open Source projects.

Utterly righteous screed from Federico about font settings — GNOME’s in particular, but the same mistakes are horribly prevalent everywhere but Mac OS X. More concrete that needs tearing up.

Andreas deliciously describes something I’ve been musing upon lately as well — Debian is the ultimate place for FLOSS research: It’s significantly more representative than any other distribution, and more relevant than 99% of SourceForge.

Surprised to appear on Luis’ list of Open Source thought leaders, considering that we’ve not been doing very much in the way of thought leadership while riding the linux.conf.au juggernaut. Gonna hafta earn it now.

Happy, happy, happy!

Jaq did this monologue almost word for word at our Seven meeting the other night. Except the bit about the sales. And the total cost of ownership. But everything else was totally there.

“Pia argues that businesses can help themselves by promoting general knowledge of FOSS amongst the community and customers.” — Tom Worthington covers Pia’s recent presentation at FOSSACT

“It is amazing just how active Pia is in the community & life in general, so taking time out to speak to the group is much appreciated, thanks Pia!” — FOSSACT summary of Pia’s presentation, plus link to her slides