Open Source Forking is a Feature Acording to Linus...

Anil Dash wrote a pretty awesome story over at his blog called "Forking is a Feature".  His point is that people like Linux Torvalds have taken what used to be seen as a flaw and made it a feature.  Here is a sample of some of the examples in the article:

"Still, forks have had important consequences. Firefox (earlier Firebird and Phoenix) was originally a fork of Mozilla, the open source browser that had been mired in indecision for half a decade. WordPress was born as a fork of B2, a neglected early blogging tool."

The article is a great read and can help you when debating whether your company should do more with Open Source software. 

What is your favorite forked product?

Is Oracle the fastest linux kernel?

At Oracle World this week they announced the latest benchmarks of Red Hat's kernel with their updates/changes.  They claim to be 75% faster for Online Transactional Processing over the one built by Red Hat.  If you haven't heard of this before maybe you have heard of their name for this packaging of Red Hat it is called Oracle Unbreakable Linux.  For more information on this and other happenings at Oracle World check out this link.

Linux has won?

What?  Did we miss it?  Acording to this article that was the talk at Ohio Linux Fest. Brian Proffitt over at IT World makes some awesome points about not only why Linux hasn't won yet but that we really do not want it to.  Once we have won there is really no place to go but down.  Linux does have some things going with it that may let it avoid the fate of the technologies from the past.  Most notably is it's open source nature.  If anyone stops inovating all anyone else can pick it up and start with a fresh perspective.

So do you think Linux has won?

What does Linux winning mean to you?

If your a Tech and over 40 have you peaked on compensation?

Tech Crunch has an interesting article about the level of pay Silicon Valley Tech's get paid throughout their career.  The article explains that as you start your career you are willing to be paid less and work more.  You peak earnings potential wise at around 40.  From there until you retire you will likely actually drop by almost 17%.  What I thought was kind of interesting was that they linked to another article by the same author that talked about how the average age of a entrepreneur in Silicon Vally is 40.  The second article then goes on to say that the older entrepreneur's also raise more money.  They don't seem to make the plausible leap that the reason for the drop might be that the Rock-Star and higher paid techs are very likely to be the ones confident enough to be entrepreneur's.  That would then be pulling them out of the pool and lowering the average since they would now be counted as self employed or entrepreneurs and not technical.  The two articles are good quick reads and informative. 

Logwatch, an Admins best friend...

One of the best tools on linux is logwatch.  This little tool holds so much power and has more than once shown me that something or someone was trying to hack a system on the sitting on the Internet Directly.  While no tool is fool proof this one is reliable and can be tuned to show you just what you care about.  They have a great series going right now over at Linux Mag that explains some of the basics of this wonderful tool.  They also have other links to similar articles about taming your logs.