Vilayattu’s Nilavin Nila is a shame
6:08am, October 27th, 2007
Links for 2007-10-26 [del.icio.us]
- » 10 Javascript Ajax Tabs
- Sewuma | The one stop sri lankan search engine
- PopBox! - Javascript Image Magnification
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- jobberBase - The Open Source Job Board Software
- CSS2/DOM - Styling an input type="file"
- Sewuma.com launched
10:00pm, October 26th, 2007
open source business love fest .. not!
I have started a new blog because I'm tired of not having comments at bloglines.com. I will continue to dual post for a while but please subscribe to my new blog at http://sanjiva.weerawarana.org/. This item is posted at the new blog too.
Looks like InfoWorld bloggers Dave Rosenberg and Savio Rodrigues and CNet blogger Matt Asay all think that open source companies shouldn't compete with each other but only with the proprietary companies. Dave Rosenberg started this line of thought .. soon after we published some performance data showing how the WSO2 ESB was faster than both Mule and ServiceMix. Just for the record, we did publish results prior to that showing that our ESB was faster than the leading proprietary one too (from the company which is in the news lately) but their license explicitly states "you will not publish performance results of our stuff" .. so we couldn't name them.
So, should open source companies compete against each other? In an ideal world, no. In the real world, they jolly well do. They compete for community, they compete for mindshare, they compete for press coverage and of course they compete for customers. Thinking that they do not, and should not, is totally naiive.
There was a time when there were lots of evil proprietary ones and exactly one open source alternative. Today, everyone's doing open source and its no longer that simple. Can you seriously say that Apache Synapse and Apache ServiceMix are not competing with each other? Or that Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF are not competing with each other? If nothing else, they're competing for the precious community; in both those cases the products are even in the same open source community. What about the big guys' open source products? Should JBossAS not compete with IBM WebSphere CE? Open source is everywhere and is simply an alternative business model for many- to say two open source products shouldn't compete with each other simplifies reality too much.
Dave, Matt & Savio all seem to think that customers only compare the evil proprietary products against one of our products. Hello? Are we on the same planet? Any customer worth their muscle will compare against all available options and take the one that best suits their needs. Why in the world would they restrict themselves to only one open source alternative? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Even if they are restricting to one, let's be real, we all want to be the one don't we? Otherwise how do I become the one to take money away from BEA instead of Dave? While it is indeed great if the fraternity of the open source brotherhood wins against the proprietary ones, its much better (for me) if in fact I win with my product instead of Dave with his. And if Dave doesn't feel that way I'm sure his investors will remind him that that's his job :). I don't think my investors would be happy if in a few years WSO2 has to go under because "open source won, but not us". They don't give a hoot about who wins against you- if you lose you lose. It doesn't matter if its an open source competitor or a proprietary competitor; its simply a competitor.
Now, when we do run into a customer that's only comparing us against a bunch of proprietary alternatives then that's a great situation and we love it. To do that, we need to win the mindshare battle against other open source projects to the point that the customer looks at us as the de facto open source winner in that space. Apache HTTP is in that mode. MySQL is in that mode. JBossAS is in that mode. Mule is in that space to a great extent for the ESB now.
So what is an upstart like us who has an ESB supposed to do? Give up and go home because a project that was the first and only open source ESB for many years has mindshare? Or go out and prove to the world that we have a better product? We have chosen to do the latter.
(I'm not picking on the ESB .. at WSO2 we compete in a bunch of areas, not just in the ESB space .. but ESB is an easy one to use because there are simply so many of them around.)
Does that make me a bad open source citizen? Hogwash. Competition is good for you. If its not us it'll be someone else. If your product can't be the best and if you can't deliver better value around the product (services, documentation, stability, comfort and all that stuff) then you will lose. And you deserve to lose.
Bottom line today is that if you are an open source company competing in a crowded space, then you have to compete with other open source products as well as proprietary ones. Certainly, don't focus on the open source ones only (as Dave and Matt and others are certainly correct that you are then competing for crumbs instead of the sandwich) but don't give in saying "ah you're using someone else's open source product? No problem then, we'll go away."
4:55am, October 26th, 2007
Curling
Want for curling it was hard in the beginning then it was fun..
well if you don’t know what is curling is read it here
12:35pm, October 25th, 2007
Sewuma.com launched
My Google Co-op CSE powered Sri Lankan search engine gone public with it’s own domain name Sewuma.com. It will search Sri Lankan content within given list of websites. Anyone can suggest a site using a basic form at the site. So enjoy the localized version of the globalized search engine.
9:08am, October 25th, 2007
Links for 2007-10-24 [del.icio.us]
- Completorrent | Search all torrents on the web!
divxtotal.com gamestorrents.com hoerspiele.to lister.torrent-galaxy.to torrentworld.de btchina.net tokyotosho.com torrentz.com btbot.com kurtubba.com torrentz.nu flextorrents.com orbdesign.net tracktrap.com torrentz.ws zoozle.org - chromaSYNTHETIC Journal » Blog Archive » Unobtrusive JavaScript — Use It!
10:00pm, October 24th, 2007
Patent Shame
Stefan points to a flaky patent application by Amazon and points out that its BS that the inventor is without shame for having filed such garbage.
I couldn't agree more. In my 8 years in IBM Research, I first filed a patent an year or so after I joined I think. They have a whole system in place to reward you with cash and plaques on the wall based on how many patents you file and how many get issued. And the system makes it easy to do it- hired lawyers do most of the work and all the inventor does is fill a form and then edit the draft application done by the lawyers.
I think I filed 7 US patents - and I believe most have issued. Most of them came off something called BML- Bean Markup Language - a Spring-like thing I came up with in '98 (with surprising similarity in language to Spring .. IBM had no interest in pursuing it so I dropped it after some years of fighting the system trying to get it beyond alphaWorks). Wow looks like IBM still has some BML stuff on alphaWorks! Google of course finds more material on it.
I'm ashamed of most of them because they're so damned broad its not even funny. Don't believe me? Check out this one - if you have a registry of type convertors and look 'em up then you read on that patent.
I was given the advice that these were "defensive patents" - if we don't file 'em someone else will and will waive it against us. So let's do it. Being in research the basic approach was file whatever stuff you came up with .. folks in other parts of the company had (and maybe still do; I dunno) a much harder time getting a filing approved but in research it was a breeze. I don't want to put the blame on the system only- I too was motivated by the reward system and to get plaques on the wall to become a celebrated "master inventor."
I did not file a single patent application in the my last 5 years+ at IBM. That I'm proud of!
2:48pm, October 24th, 2007
85th Old Boys Day Celebrations
The Old Boys’ Association of Sri Sumangala College, Panadura (SSCOBA) celebrating it’s 85th Old Boys’ Day on 28th October 2007.
The Old Boys’ Association of Sri Sumangala College, Panadura (SSCOBA), was established on the 28th of October 1922. It was the then Principal, Mr. Abeyseela Ginige, who initiated the establishment of the SSCOBA.
The first student of the College, Mr. M. Walter Salgado donated the land where the New Building was built in 1942, and many Old Boys at the time had helped in numerous ways in the development of the College.
There were dedicated Old Boys, who, at numerous occasions tried to make a more active and stable OBA. By 1981, the OBA had drafted a more comprehensive Constitution, which was very necessary for the proper functioning of the Association. By 1982, the Membership increased at a steady pace. This increase in Membership was mainly due to the tireless efforts of several key members of OBA. In 1985, Mr. Wilson Kahandagamage was elected as its first Old Boy President by a Constitutional amendment.
With amendments to the OBA Constitution, a Colombo Branch was inaugurated in 1986 with Dr. Malinga Fernando as the President and, later, the Kandy Branch was established in 2001 with Dr. Ananda Gunasekara as the Founding President. Subsequently, the Junior OBA was established for the Old Boys under 30 years.
At present, preliminary work is underway to establish SSCOBA branches in U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
Several activities have been planned to commemorate the Old Boys day scheduled for 28.10.2007 at the college premises. Some of the activities are mentioned below;
- Scholarships for needy Sri Sumangala students.
- Donantion of Books for the College Liabrary.
- Blood Donation Campaign.
- Health Camp to provide hearing aides free of charge for the needy people in and around Panadura Distribution of spectacles free of charge for needy after free medical check-ups.
- Meals for Home for the Aged, Moravinna Girls’ Home & Home for Handicapped Children (”Aruna Home for Children”) at Panadura on 28th October 2007.
- Inter-school “Do You Know” contest.
All old Sumangalians and well wishers are invited for the above occasion.
Events, old boys, Panadura, Sri lanka, Sri Sumangala College 3:44am, October 23rd, 2007
Exploiting the outsourcing partners
Out sourcing is a big business in countries like India and Sri Lanka is also playing catch up in the game. But in our desire to get into this game, we have overlooked one crucial factor. What happens when things don’t go according to the plan.
For most US or European companies, the main reason for going for out sourcing is the cost factor. But since of late, a new trend is also emerging. That is the exploitation of the out sourcing partners in Asia. These companies usually draw up their contracts stating that any legal action needs to be taken up in their countries. This immediately puts the out sourcing companies at a risk as litigation in US or Europe for a small company in Asia is a very costly affair. So it makes it sensible for these companies to absorb their loses and walk away from the situation.
The companies in Europe and US, knowing this very well, come to these companies and play a very dirty game of getting their work done cheap and at times for no cost. the out sourcing companies hoping to build lasting relationships go out of their way to delight these customers, which most of the time end up doing more than they quoted for in the first place. Then at the end, after all the hard work they put in, if the company in the west refuses to pay, citing some odd reason, the outsourcing companies are at a loss.
The downside of all of this is, although the governments and governmental agencies promote the out sourcing business as a major foreign exchange earner for the country, they provide absolutely no support in such situations, in terms of arbitration or escrow services. I think it makes sense for the government or the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka to step in and set up and escrow service with an arbitration panel to help the ICT companies in Sri Lanka who are engaged in outsourced projects to foreign clients.
But as the saying goes, once burned twice shy, these serve as lessons in dealing with foreign clients, so you can avoid getting into similar situations in future projects. Managing the clients is an art. And managing clients with a hidden agenda is both an art and a task that needs you to be two steps ahead of the client. I was
While we battle out our case with the clients who tried to fleece us, I hope the rest of the companies who are engaged in such projects, take the necessary precautions to avoid such pitfalls. And we are not going to easily let go of people who walk out on us with our intellectual capitol! Though they were very unethical on thier conduct, we are still trying to act ethically. But there is a limit to everything!
6:16am, October 22nd, 2007
Black box in data type property
I found this with one of my Script Component. See the image;
If I click on it, the entire window goes off. Im trying to find a solution for this because this has blocked editing the type of the output. If anyone has seen this before and has found a solution, please let me know.
9:55pm, October 21st, 2007
In Sweden
Came to Sweden. This time it’s nicer with red and orange colored trees .last time it was all white.
8:23am, October 21st, 2007
The Complex Chemistry between Brands and Customers - Some Personal Experiences
As always, an incredibly insightful piece by Irwing Wladawsky-Berger.
6:01pm, October 19th, 2007