From the Belly of the Beasts Archives, page 8

The posts in this category originally appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts between May 2005 and June 2006, my contribution to a group blog run by O’Reilly’s now-defunct Online Production Group.

Which LDAP directory will help pull us out of Iraq?

Last night, someone left the following comment about our latest O’Reilly poll question Which LDAP directory do you use on Linux?

Voting on When to pull out of Iraq
First time wanted to vote on tonite’s question Cannot find anything on web site. very frustrated can you help? sitw is undfriendly if the question of the week is not readily visible. Upset with events

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Requests for OSCON 2006

Mitchell Baker: I’d like a series of discussions on the interface between open source projects and commercial organizations.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Has Web 2.0 jumped the shark?

Tim Bray: I just wanted to say how much I’ve come to dislike this “Web 2.0” microslogan. It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right.

I would tend to agree. One could argue that it’s a useful shorthand for an abstract concept, but calling everything Foo 2.0 will soon seem as unfashionable as naming a product after the year it was (or had hoped to be) released.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Free as in Beer?

Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen are trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world’s first open source beer recipe.

It is called Vores Oel, or Our Beer, and the recipe is proving to be a worldwide hit.

The idea behind the beer comes from open source software. This is software whose code is made publicly available for anyone to change and improve, provided that those changes and improvements are then shared in turn. BBC News

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Straddling the fence between open source and Microsoft

Uh-oh, looks like we have some work to do:

Next… for some odd reason, I’m feeling more and more MSFT-Patriotic as of late. One thorn I’m really beginning to get tired of, strangely enough, is O’Reilly media. Ever since I was a long-haired Unix geek I relied on O’Reilly. But I’m just getting tired of their begrudging support of Microsoft while at the same time snarking at us from their blogs and conventions. Annoyed with us? Then do us a favor and don’t go publishing anymore Microsoft-centric titles and make money elsewhere. As soon as I can find a reliable publisher that does as good a job of editing and producing texts, I’m switching. I really regret ever dollar now I spend towards buying an O’Reilly book when there’s not a quality alternative. —Mini-Microsoft

All I have to add is it’s not necessarily a requirement to love something in order to support it. That would be preferable, but it’s not always an option.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.