(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
July 31, 2024
Last month, the Ansible Forum had a discussion about potential changes that might be implemented in AWX. One aspect that immediately hit me was the decision to move from SemVer to CalVer. More specifically, what struck me was the focus on this change in the initial post and in the comments. Since it took me a while to formulate a whole reasoning behind my perspective, I created this blog post to explain my thought process better.
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October 10, 2022
Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies. This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things. At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies.
I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not. Suppose the producer of a product goes out of business or, for any reason, will not do additional business with you. In that case, you lose the ability to buy that product and, sometimes, even use it completely. This limitation does not apply to a technology since you should be able to access it, regardless of the specific vendor.
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October 18, 2018
A couple of days ago, Eliot Horowitz, CTO & co-founder of MongoDB announced that MongoDB is moving from the AGPL to the SSPL license.
The SSPL is a new license, just created by MongoDB. In the post, Eliot points out that they created the SSPL starting from the AGPL, and he affirms that the new license guarantees all the freedoms the AGPL does. I firmly believe that the SSPL is not a FLOSS license since it limits the possibility of the cloud providers to provide an “as a service” version of it. This case might seem trivial and an edge case, but the complete freedom of usage is one of the FLOSS movement and licenses pillars.
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October 26, 2013 - Vignate, IT
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December 6, 2011
Gordon Lyon (also known as Fyodor), the creator of Nmap, sent an email yesterday to the Nmap mailing list pointing out that the C|Net Download.com website is altering Nmap downloadable files injecting malware into them. It’s also possible that other files delivered by C|Net Download.com are also subject to the same problem.
This event is a very problematic one since it will create a complete loss of trust toward Download.com. It also reminds us of a critical aspect of security: all chain steps need to be secure and trusted.
Read More October 22, 2011 - Pessano con Bornago, IT
Read More May 13, 2008 - Sebastopol, US
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November 4, 2006
On the 2nd of November, Microsoft and Novell announced an agreement to share some patents, cross-marketing, and collaborative development.
The deal is very recent, and it is difficult to say what exactly it includes and what consequences (if any) it will have.
From the information currently available, it seems there are multiple parts to the deal:
I find this deal not favorable for the Open Source community for many reasons.
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April 23, 2006
About one year and a half ago, I tried Fedora Heidelberg (Fedora Core 3), but it did not last too much on my machine because I was eager to test Ubuntu Warty Warthog.
Fedora Bordeaux (Fedora Core 5) got released about one month ago, and I immediately installed it. It has been a month now since I’ve installed it, and I like it. I feel that I’ll be using Fedora for a long time because I found an environment that feels right to me for the first time.
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October 25, 2005
Last week, OpenOffice.org 2 was released. This is a major release of the office suite, but I think it’s also a major accomplishment for the project. There are two main aspects I think make this release very important.
The first aspect is the default use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to save files. I believe that the future of office documents should be the ODF format, even if most probably it will not. Currently, the de-facto standards are the Microsoft Office ones (doc, xls, ppt), but those are not official standards, and therefore interoperability is very hard if not impossible. I hope that we will have official international standards for these kinds of files over time and that everyone will use them. To achieve this goal, I see as an excellent first step this default setting in OpenOffice.org 2.
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