Wow what a week it was. I attended the Open Mind conference and it took me a couple of days to recover even so I could just blog about it! There is no way to blog about everything that happened, so I guess this will be more like a long list of namedropping :-)

(But, unlike me, Zak Greant seems to possess a brain that can produce typing and listening at the same time so go to his blog for more detailed commentary on the conference. My collague and friend Paul Sladen also wrote on LWN about the COSS.fi summer of coders.)

Years ago a company called SCO filed a lawsuit againt IBM for "stealing" code from "their" Unix and placing it into Linux. It was big news then, but most people haven't cared for years. Of course all of this was just a sham of the SCO management. It's been shown for some time that actually nobody stole anything for Linux, and in any case SCO didn't even own Unix in the first place. Recently SCO finally filed for bankruptcy, putting at least some kind of end to their misery.

How many open source developers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is 17. It takes... 17 to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadedness of the light bulb architecture; 17 to argue about a new model that encompassess all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that light bulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the light bulb, and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being.

This blog is supposedly at least partly about Open Source business models. Here is a LinuxWorld interview with Matt Asay about many interesting actions taken in running Alfresco as an Open Source company. While this is a must read for anyone doing Open Source business, I'll summarise the key points here. (The article is rather long, but again, everything is worth reading.)

Uh oh. Summer vacation is over and I've been working for 8 days already. Honestly I preferred the holiday :-/

As you may or may not know, my current job is being a manager at Sesca Technologies. In short that means I get to sit in a lot of meetings, look at my budget in an Excel sheet and lots of other interesting stuff... NOT! I don't get to do any of the interesting stuff anymore, such as programming and all the other things I used to enjoy.

Conveniently for the start of my holiday we received a new HP nx7400 from LinuxComp.net. Outside the US it is still impossible to by those Ubuntu Dell laptops, so this one comes with Windows XP forced upon me, BUT it also comes with Kubuntu 7.04 out of the box, courtesy of the great service by LinuxComp's Jukka Hellen!!! (As you might remember, there is already one LinuxComp Kubuntu laptop in the family, so we already knew we would be satisfied with Jukka's services.)

I'm now one week into my summer holidays. Jee!

We spent some days at my (and also my wife's) parents in Pietarsaari. In the picture here I'm taking a swim in a small sandpit. The water was warmer than I expected. (Next day we went to the beach by the sea. No swimming there, it was still freezing enough to hurt my feet!)

Reader Tomi Nousiainen sent me this sunny and relaxed greeting for Midsummer, which he allowed me to share with all of you.