FOSS Hole

There has been some heated discussion on the Wikipedia Hans Reiser article. It’s about including a link to the ELER comic about Nina Reiser’s disappearance. Nobody there really seems to quite grok the strip.

Five months on and maybe this is a good time to explain that the strip isn’t about what a lot of people might think it’s about. It’s not actually about Nina Reiser’s disappearance, it’s more about the reactions to it. Immediately after the news hit, even with scant information provided mostly by sensationalist local media, there was widespread suspicion of Hans’ involvement. I doubt you’d find many people who didn’t have the thought cross their mind, however fleeting.

The strip doesn’t say what people think it does. Reiser isn’t showing any obvious signs of anxiety (no “umming” or “ermming”) and there are reasonable explanations for everything you see (Lime is used to speed up composting) yet commenters came from far and wide to complain about us suggesting what they thought we suggested.

As one clued-in commenter defended: “If you read accusations in to this comic, they are simply pouring out of the twisted depths of your own subconscious mind.”.

I’ve just deployed a slightly fancier shop app. It brings the basket logic away from PayPal and back into the site, only the checkout now goes to PayPal. This allows us to handle delivery costings a bit better, which we’re going to need for some new products we have planned.

Also, we now offer another delivery type: World Surface mail. This is far cheaper than Airmail but can takes a good few weeks. Worthwhile if you don’t need your order urgently. Good timing too because the delivery costs just went up (in-line with our postal service, Royal Mail).

We’ve now added two new t-shirt designs: Bruce Schneier and Che Stallman. Plus stickers of those and Knuth design.

A guy called Rob Weir responded to Miguel de Icaza’s blog about the standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open format.

What amused me was Miguel’s response to this, and then Rob’s follow up.

Miguel writes:

I actually *wrote* a spreadsheet and I actually *know* how the formula implementations came to be.
…snip…
Other than trumpeting ODF, have you actually contributed *ANY* code to OpenOffice, or you are just another armchair general?

Rob responds:

I prefer to let my words and logic stand for themselves. A resume is a poor substitute for a sound argument.

But if you think it makes a bit of difference, I joined IBM as part of their purchase of Lotus, and over the past 17 years I’ve coded on SmartSuite, Lotus Components, eSuite, K-Station, Portal and Workplace, among some of the more notable projects.

Along the way I’ve done a good deal of file format work, with SmartSuite formats, with the legacy binary Office formats, with ODF and with OOXML. I also was part of the team that made the Xalan XSLT engine and contributed that to Apache. So I have some basis for my opinions, based on practical experience as well as clear thinking. You are free to accept or reject either or both.

Linspire’s CEO Kevin Carmony responds to Eric Raymond’s Goodbye Fedora hissyfit.

Applying the usual CEO-compression algorithm, it translates to:

1. Eric Raymond doesn’t work for Linspire
2. We didn’t know he was going to do what he did
3. It didn’t help us
4. It really didn’t help us
5. Eric Raymond doesn’t work for Linspire

In summary: “he’s so gone as soon as we can make it all quiet”.

Where will ESR take his one man rage circus now? Will Novell take him?