If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon.  What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

I brought it up in #morphix to Gandalfar, one of my trusted open source advisors.  We debated it shortly and he brought up several good points.  While this may happen, the scheme is likely to fall apart quickly.  The community is the resolver of situations like this.  If the community finds a bug and offers a fix for the problem, then the developer will find themselves in a political combat situation.  They would likely try to stifle the fix with some ridiculous excuses and/or start to censor discussion of the subject over mailing lists or on forums.  Speculation could be raised about the issue and ultimately, people could start to fork the project elsewhere, unless the license of the project disallows that.  In the long run, the community would resolve the situation by simply offering a new solution.

So while it could theoretically be achieved for short-term gain, in the long run the community makes the approach unsustainable.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, I think we all know that closed source entities often engage in this practice.  I could point out several examples that I have absolute knowledge of this happening, but I don’t think I have to.  I’m not completely absolving open source from this either – look at what “official distributions” do in some situations… Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell (SUSE) for example.  But in those situations, if you didn’t want to pay to upgrade the operating system and still resolve your situation, we all know that with the right application of effort and skill you could overcome it.

All in all, this whole thought process ends up with a positive note about open source.  If it’s broken, you can fix it yourself or work with others to make it happen.  The community – that incredibly large, global groupthink – keeps it all honest.

Or, you can put all your money and eggs into a closed source basket and find out you’re getting screwed when it’s too late.

It’s all about choice, right?

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This started when I read Paul Thurrott’s latest blog post, with which I could not agree more.

Then, I decided it’s time to blog about this and see if anyone had noticed:

(Click image for larger view)

Why would you have a SIM ejector tool in the 3G box if they didn’t intend you to use it? The EDGE model has a SIM ejector hole, but there’s no included tool that I can recall…

Can I start a rumor? We’ll see.

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There’s a lot here on the surface and a lot below the surface. Let’s scratch the surface first.

The announcements about Apple licensing ActiveSync are interesting. There was lots of speculation in this regard and greetz to those who called it. I myself lost a bet. I was thinking that Apple might actually thumb their nose at ActiveSync and employ webdav for Exchange 2003 (much like Entourage) or web services for Exchange 2007. Of course, that would not be a quick route to policy controls on the device itself (i.e. remote kill), so ActiveSync makes the most business sense both in time and money. It’s a good investment. I was just hoping they wouldn’t just… well, because.

But they did. Let’s analyze what this brings:

- Sync with email (effectively push email, but it’s not TRULY push email… ActiveSync, even on Windows Mobile, IS NOT PUSH EMAIL. It just appears that way).

- Sync with contacts

- Sync with calendars

- NOTICEABLY ABSENT: sync with tasks

- Policy control over device. The You Had Me At EHLO blog states that this is about at the Exchange 2003 SP2 level of device control, which means it’s not as feature rich as the Blackberry, but a good starting point.

Other items of note for enterprises:

- Cisco IPSEC and VPN clients

- Two-factor authentication

What’s missing? Well, you saw me point out that task syncing is missing… Merlin Mann is likely pissing himself right about now over that. But I noticed today that there were no federal government folks present and… here’s the bad news for those federal workers… Jobs never mentioned encryption of data at rest. Thanks to an OMB directive, encryption of data at rest is a requirement for a mobile device on a federal government network. Guess what device is the only one to meet that requirement?

If you’re thinking of a berry in the color of night, you’d be right.

You’d also be right if you’re thinking of the next version of Windows Mobile… 6.1, I believe they call it. Last I remember, that also had encryption of data at rest.

So unfortunately, this may leave the iPhone out of the federal government networks for a little while longer. Perhaps it’s an oversight that it wasn’t mentioned – but I’m betting that it was left out deliberately.

All in all, I wasn’t crazy about the iPhone before but I certainly am now. The fact that they’ve really turned it into a platform with an ecosystem makes this very, very exciting. One of the challenges of the OS X platform was the lack of an ecosystem. Now with OS X advances, the freely-available Xcode and now the freely-available iPhone SDK, Apple stands to really rock the world with an ecosystem that could quickly rival Microsoft.

To make sure they’re shaking things up, there’s that iFund thing. What a fantastic idea. Folks, when was the last time Microsoft paid you to develop applications for their platform? If you want to get into the Microsoft developmental mafia, you’re likely looking at an MSDN subscription ($2500 or so the first year, $1500 each year afterwards… PER SEAT!)… you’re looking at heavy software licensing costs and hell, they don’t even distribute the application or updates for you.

Apple is not only making the price of entry into their ecosystem dirt cheap ($99), the development software is free and they will distribute your applications/updates. Folks, this is a hell of a deal and I’m betting there are small businesses and garage developers everywhere getting excited about this.

I really, really think Microsoft is in trouble on many fronts. It’s going to be hard to stop this kind of excitement. I don’t even intend to develop apps for the iPhone or the Mac and I’m excited.

Truly, there was an earthquake today in California. It may have been a subtle earthquake for some, but I felt it quite strong here on the other side of the states. I’m excited about computing again – and that’s something to cheer about.

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Apple, Mac, OS X, iPhone

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On a system that uses Postfix 2.2.9 on SLES 10, Postfix started acting quite wonky on February 29th, 2008. In a standard Postfix+Amavis+ClamAv setup, you actually have two Postfix daemons – one listening on port 25 (duh), the other listening on port 10025 waiting to get mail handed off from amavis+clamav.

Well, it appears that the second daemon gets quite confused about the date on Leap Day and logs everything with March 1st plus four hours. While this seems benign enough, if you use some statistics generator like pflogsumm.pl to generate some numbers for management, your hourly totals quit working.

We had not one byte of statistic data for February 29th as a result. That’s a shame, but it was one of many odd tech-related things that happened that day that I won’t soon forget.

Our power even went out that day.

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e-mail, Postfix

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Jeff Jones, who makes a living for himself as a security consultant, has released a scorecard for operating systems as they stood around July 2007.

Not surprisingly, the charts are fodder for everyone to bolster their arguments about which OS is better, which therefore just doesn’t prove much at all… except perhaps the definition of the word “futility.”

A wise man in a poopy-brown robe with a coffee-colored tunic and a glowing blue line all around his silhouette once said, “…you’ll find that many things depend on your point of view.”

Oh yeah, that guy carried a big, glowing sword that slices through flesh like butter.

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Couldn’t have said it better myself. I like it when I agree with people who are paid to analyze this stuff.

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We spoke a little bit about issues with Entourage that plague our mail system, but I turned the conversation to something a little more positive. He was one of the first DirectX developers back in the Windows 95 days. That made him a hero for me. It was great to meet him.

I asked Emma, our guide, if she knew of Nadyne who wrote the Love Letter to Entourage post on Mac Mojo. Indeed she did… and she was present! So the last part of my visit with the MacBU was spent talking with Nadyne. Nadyne is a user experience worker in the MacBU. We discussed Entourage interoperability troubles and she promised that they understood the issue quite well. Here’s to hoping that gets better.

We also discussed that Love Letter to Entourage post and she says she knew what she was in for when she posted it. I’m glad she did, because she was raked over the coals (even by yours truly, a bit). Meeting her in person makes me feel much better though.

Here’s to hoping the MacBU is listening and making it all better.

On tap today: some sessions on Podcast Producer (COOL STUFF!) and Quartz. Leopard rocks, hard. Seriously.

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Today we ate/socialized with Whitey and Vo0 at Cheeburger Cheeburger in Providence. Funtastic time! Thanks for the Christmas gift, guys! I can hardly wait to play it! I’m glad you guys are back in town and enjoying it so far. This town has become so much more interesting lately – and it’s only getting better. Besides, you’re just keeping with the trend of everyone moving away… then coming back… heh.
2006 was a stellar year for me and my family career-wise. It’s been fast-moving, crazy, full of advancement and excitement. The downside? I’ve worked far too hard. Probably my New Year’s resolution would be to stop working so much and do other things like… spend more time with my son and daughter… read books more often… write more often… exercise more often… do all of those things to better my personality. I’ve spent a lot of time bettering my career. It’s time to stop and better my personal life for a year.

I’ve planned several adjustments at the workplace to help that out. It starts with moving my office to a new location – one that can afford me some time away from the operations side of things. I know myself – if I’m near it, I won’t keep my hands off of it. I need to stay hands off. I need to be doing Powerpoint charts, Visio drawings, etc.

At home, I need to be learning more about Linux, PHP/MySQL, learning Chinese, buying Macs, reading and writing, photographing, videoing and creating. I want this to be the year I regress back to my artistic side.

Lastly (and this is where I need your help, Jennifer and everyone else)… I need to be exercising. Vo0 has lost 55 pounds or so… I should be able to do so too.

Let’s have a great year!

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The problem with webdav is that while webdav is meant to be a standard, I’ve rarely met a client that handled it properly.  I would also point out that some of these problems were not implementations with the client, but implementations with the server side and the relation to the client.

The new model in Exchange 2007 is to deprecate webdav support in favor of web services (via SOAL/XML, etc.).  This is a boon for clients because it uses a standardized model to feed data and the response is just XML.  How badly can a client screw that up?  That means the server-side is no longer an equation in poor Exchange support.

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One blogger talks about it here.

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