More thoughts on keeping Open Source Open

The announcement a few weeks ago about the Elastic/Kibana license change to the SSPL has caused a bit of concern in the community, as such changes do. One response that popped up was from Matt Yonkovit over at Percona who outlines why he thinks open is better. Percona themselves seem to be doing nicely as a database service organisation supporting both open and sspl databases. As Matt says, it's hard but still worth it. 

Empty threats

So Google is having a bit of a fit about a proposed Australian law that would force it to pay journalists for content that it uses to attract people to its website and 'threatens' to disable search in Australia if the law is enacted. Here's a news flash, Google is not the only search engine on the market so good luck with that one lads.

Draft Proposal to build FOSS capability for the NZ government

Background Assumptions

  1. Shortage of IT skills. What is really meant by this is that there are shortages of a specific skill at a particular point in time with public and private businesses being unable or unwilling to carry a training risk.
  2. Difficult for new entrants to the industry to get experience/skills. The size of the economy means that smaller public or private businesses are unable or unwilling to carry a mentoring risk.

Psst... Wanna buy a watch?

The term 'globalisation' may have become a euphemism for exploitation of foreign workers at the expense of your own labour force in some ways but once each country gets past that initial colonisation phase and starts developing their own markets you get to see some interesting technologies... in this case open source smartwatches. For those of you with a development bent there is the PineTime SmartWatch dev kit or if you want a ready to wear product you can get a P8 SmartWatch or go in with some friends and/or family members and get a three pack PineTime...