Me over on CNET

I just moved over to CNET for my main blogging activity. Please join me there, as it's lonely over there right now without Dave.

Random babble

I'm on a flight to London right now, and eating every calorie they will give me. Flying coach sometimes feels like a matter of life or death: I have no idea when my next bag of Sun Chips will come, so I'm forced to ask for the full can of Fresca (Drat! No calories there!), eat a brownie I'd normally discard, and I actually caught myself looking at my sleeping neighbor's unopened processed cheese "snack" to gauge whether I could get it off her tray without her noticing....

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It's now Monday morning, and I'm waiting in Canary Wharf for my meeting. Here in reception, one of the chairs is covered in sweat. I guess the person who had been waiting was a bit more nervous than I am. I'm visiting an existing customer, not trying to get a new one.... :-)

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On the Tube to Canary Wharf this morning, the man next to me was working on a proposal for Sharepoint at his large investment bank (starts with a "B"). I normally don't look at others' screens, but the train was so packed that I could hardly look elsewhere. I meant to give him my card and suggest the solution to his problem (apparently, how to avoid paying his soul to Microsoft for B's software needs) was to go open source, but I didn't want him to know I had been staring at his computer screen....

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On a more personal note, Joe Morgenstern of the WSJ turned me onto The Frames in a recent movie review he did of Once. I won't see the movie because it's rated R, but the music from it is fantastic. "Falling Slowly" is an incredible song. Buy it on iTunes.

Speaking of good music, I was listening to The Magnetic Fields song "Yeah! Oh Yeah!" on my flight. I don't like most of their songs, but that one is great. Also "100,000 Fireflies" is a great song....

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Enough rambling. Time to get back to work. No sweat on my chair.

You've got to admire the cheek...

Alfresco received the following email the other day:

Dear Alfresco:

We are in the process of creating a new Java-Based Web 3 compliant Open Source CMS- xxxx. It is our intent to use an Open Source Java CMS code base for part of our effort. This note is to inform you that alfresco is one of the CMS applications under serious consideration for incorporation into xxxx.

We are obviously interested in working closely with any team from which we fork code. If you have interest in discussing our efforts or intentions, please contact me directly.

I'm not really sure how they expect us to work closely with them. It's not that we disapprove of forking - the code is GPL. That's one of the essential freedoms of open source, in my view (as influenced by Brian Behlendorf).

But we don't have much time to assist people in forking our code, beyond initially writing it in such a way that it is highly modular, customizable, etc. We're a business. We have a strong and growing roster of OEMs who happily pay us to work with our code, like Ricoh. Do we work with others that don't pay us? Of course. But with finite resources, we're always going to devote them to those that deliver the highest customer value.

This fork, unfortunately, probably doesn't measure up on that scale, though we'll see.

Off-topic: The things we can be versus the things we can do

We had some trauma tonight in the Asay home. (No, not the fact that the "hip" radio station that I was listening to has started to promote itself with "Not the music your 17-year old nephew listens to!" - I thought I was listening to some of the music my 17-year old neighbors like....I'm old.)

No, this comes back to soccer (of course). My daughter, Scout, tried out for a team and didn't make it. Worse, her best friend did make it. So now they're stranded on two separate teams, despite playing the last three years together on the same team. She was devastated and I, in turn, was devastated for her.

As we talked, however, a principle emerged from the many failures I've had in my life:

You can do very little to change how others perceive what you do. The best you can do is to focus on being a good person.

It may well turn out that Scout is not the next Mia Hamm. I'm actually glad of that, because school, church, family, and friends are the most important things for our family. Getting a college sports scholarship is actually the opposite of what I'd wish for Scout. It would get in the way of school.

Scout should focus on improving her game, but not at the expense of friendships, school, family, etc. To the extent that the coaches judge her ready to play on the other team a year from now, all the better. But, if not, she can still judge herself as a quality person that is smart, funny, and kind. If she can nail those attributes, I won't care if she ever plays another game in her life.

As long as she'll watch Arsenal play alongside me. The family that agonizes over Arsenal together, stays together. :-)

Anyway, sorry to get personal on the blog. This momentary setback for Scout made me think really hard tonight about what's important, and what's not. I've been very blessed these past few years to be so involved in the rise of open source. But I'm not naive - it could be gone tomorrow. If it were, the only things - and the best things - to hold to will be my family and friends.

Something to think about, as we're all repeat offenders in the failure department.

Panic on the streets of Salt Lake City

Scout (my eldest daughter) told me she was going to have some friends over. When I looked out my office window (also known as my bedroom), I saw this (see right).

Right before I took this picture (using my Mac, as my wife has our camera somewhere) a girl called from Scout's class to see if she wanted to come join a party full of other girls. Nope. I hope this isn't a sign of bad things to come....

Why can't she have girl friends? There are 7 guys here. Nice odds for her, but she's just finishing up fourth grade. Grr....

And I thought I was worried about Microsoft's patent FUD.