Mon, 07 Nov 2005

Random stuff from the weekend:

• More than 30% of American teens have created and shared work over the internet. This is a huge trend, and a great one for society. If we’re all creators the world is a richer place. (Interesting details in the article on copyright awareness.)
• Yochai Benkler has a new paper up on peer production of educational materials, which has been an interest of late because of my work on h2o. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m excited to get to it tomorrow or Tuesday.
• Have gotten quite a bit of feedback on the resume suggestion. Will post the best (and probably a first cut at the latest resume) in a few days. Still waiting for the Killer Advice, though, so keep sending them ;)
• I ate like a king this weekend. I’m so spoiled.
• As many know, before I left Novell, I agitated for the company to focus on one desktop, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend I’m not pleased by Novell’s recent announcement. While I wish it hadn’t taken layoffs for it to happen, as a stockholder I’m pleased that the company has chosen to reduce duplication and focus on really kicking ass at one desktop instead of merely being good at both. I’m also pleased as a stockholder that the company has (apparently) chosen to work with Sun and Red Hat on building a common platform for ISVs instead of continuing to fragment the all-too-small linux desktop market. With my GNOME hat on, the implications of the announcement are more nuanced and less uniformly positive. I’ll leave that analysis for another time, but suffice it to say that the KDE community is vibrant and strong and this announcement will not change that in the least. Whatever Novell and others at the corporate level do, at the community level, GNOME and KDE need to continue to work together where it makes sense, like freedesktop.org and accessibility, so that our users benefit from interoperability, and to compete vigorously where we have true, meaningful differences, so that we each improve. That will continue to advance Free Software- which is after all what we’re here for.