Wild Webmink

Yep, it’s been quiet here. I have been experimenting with federated web sites of various flavours and most current activity is on one of them. Try:

• Mastodon (that’s Twitter-like micro-posts): Meshed Cloud
• PixelFed (that’s Instgram-style photo sharing): MinkPix
• Plume (that’s for blogging): Minkiverse

If you’ve any Fediverse account, those all support the ActivityPub standard and you can follow and respond to any from any.

For a full list, try my new hub page at webm.ink

Filed under: Links, MinkCast, Social Media, Tweets, Webmink | Tagged: Fediverse | Comments Off on Fediverse Sites

I discussed Ubuntu Phone with Canonical Mobile Product Manager Richard Collins (who you’ll recall demoed Ubuntu for Android for me). Here’s the video:

For my full discussion of the news and its prospects, see my InfoWorld column today.

Filed under: InfoWorld, MinkCast | Comments Off on Ubuntu Phone – Nick Of Time?

I interviewed Monty Widenius and Andrew Katz about the new MariaDB Foundation.

There’s more in my column for InfoWorld today.

Filed under: InfoWorld, MinkCast | Tagged: MariaDB, MySQL | 1 Comment »

Here’s my interview with this month’s Oracle Java Magazine about the forces driving open source and the need for open source skills.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlOOEFDnRH8]

Filed under: Java, MinkCast, Open Source | Comments Off on Driving Open Source

I recorded a short interview explaining OSI Membership while I was at Open World Forum.

[youtube http://youtu.be/c0c5IsST_9w]

Thanks to openworldforum.tv for the opportunity to tell people how to join!

Filed under: MinkCast, OSI | Tagged: OWF12 | Comments Off on About OSI

After the Community Summit at Open World Forum, three of the speakers – including me – spent 10 minutes discussing how cloud computing impacts the open source community.

[youtube http://youtu.be/qpVIJAdRTXc]

Far from making open source irrelevant – an idea that only works if you see software solely in terms of proprietary packages sold by software vendors – cloud computing will drive ever more companies to participate in, and eventually contribute to, open source communities.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, MinkCast | Tagged: OWF12 | 2 Comments »

Despite Oracle pulling out, OpenSolaris lives on as Illumos, which is a loose-knit open source community with multiple downstream projects. One of those is the new OmniOS operating system built by consulting company OmniTI.

OmniOS is described as a “JEOS” (Just Enough Operating System), the smallest possible subset of Illumos that’s able to self-host (that is, act as a build platform for itself with no external dependencies). As such it’s the perfect starting point for the sort of devops programmers building a high-integrity platform who would in the past have started from Solaris and removed code until they had their perfect platform.

OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle joined me for a discussion about OmniOS, its uses and its relationship to IllumOS.

[youtube http://youtu.be/9h817UTOxmk]

Filed under: MinkCast, OpenSolaris | Tagged: DevOps, Illumos, OpenSolaris | Comments Off on MinkCast: Explaining OmniOS

I interviewed Jean-Manuel Croset, CEO of Mandriva S.A. about his plans for the future of the company and its products, together with Charles-H. Schulz, Mandriva’s director of community.

[youtube http://youtu.be/l3g5vS7FA4I]

Filed under: MinkCast | Tagged: Linux, Mandriva | Comments Off on MinkCast: Mandriva Rides Again

Shane was very moved by the aftermath of the big earthquake in Japan last year. He decided practical action was needed, and with others founded the OpenRelief project. They quickly created a prototype autonomous robotic data-gathering drone design and have just started experiments with it. I had the chance to interview him today – hope you found the video informative.

Update: I’ve written more in ComputerWorldUK, take a look.

Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, MinkCast, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Japan, OpenRelief | Comments Off on Introducing OpenRelief

It’s easy with LibreOffice. Send people attachments you can be sure they can view, but which can also be edited with free, open source software.

Here’s a how-to video that explains how to make Hybrid PDF files – that’s a normal PDF file, but with the ODF source of the document embedded so that anyone with LibreOffice is also able to open and edit it. Both ODF and PDF are widely implemented open standards, so you can be sure that there’s a choice of free and open source software for editing and viewing them and that they will remain accessible in perpetuity.

[youtube http://youtu.be/EuVZcygoZsI]

The instruction sheet I edit in the video is available for download. Naturally, it’s an editable PDF!

Filed under: LibreOffice, MinkCast, ODF, Standards | Tagged: ODF, PDF | 2 Comments »