Ionrock Dot Org

It is funny to find that you are more pragmatic and practical than you once thought. Now that I am working (full time and everything), my passion for Linux is not what it used to be. I am not sure why this is.

I think part of it is getting my job and seeing some of the difference between Novell and WebWorks. At Novell, everyone that I worked with came from Ximian, a venture capital funded company that never really had a "profitable" product. This is not to say that Ximian didn't accomplish things. They accomplished amazing things. The problem is they didn't make any money doing it. WebWorks, on the other hand, has always been in the black. True, WebWorks hasn't taken off and isn't a Google. But, it has worked hard through hard times to continue to grow and increase profit among its respective field(s) and is now the leading help system vender.

This applies to Open Source because there are many things WebWorks could release that would be beneficial as an Open Source project. The problem is releasing our technology as Open Source doesn't help us get anything done and if we don't get things done, we don't make any money. This is why my faith in Open Source is somewhat fleeting.

I should point out that this is specifically directed towards Open Source as a business model. Open Source software like GNOME and Linux are amazing. I use Windows at work because I have to and the free tools I use everyday are the only way I get things done. We use Python, Eclipse, GVim, Emacs, and Firefox exclusively. We recently started moving our projects over to a Debian box running Subversion. None of this would be possible without Open Source. In fact, I would never have become a programmer had it not been for Open Source software.

With that said, it still doesn't make sense to build OSS for a living. It is viable to use it everywhere you can, make good changes/bugfixes and help OSS development.

I'm done ranting...

In other news, I haven't had a chance to work on TourManager much this weekend, so hopefully I will get a few stolen moments this week to make some progress. I am using TurboGears for a project at work so hopefully, I can get acquainted with it enough to be more productive.

I should say that after using Rails, some of the Python based frameworks are kind of tough. The upside is that the Python frameworks are doing things that is impossible with Ruby. They all seem to use massive amounts of tested an established project sucessfully in a way that allows anyone to put together similar systems. This is the essence of Paste and WSGI and it consistently makes the slightly rougher edges of Python frameworks worth the learning curve.