Patrick’s Blog(2)

Free Software Magazine (free subscription here) has a nice analysis by Tony Mobily of Vienna’s failed migration to GNU/Linux. I did not know that Vienna’s IT Department was trying to create there own distribution called Wienux based on debian. I totally agree with Tony that this was a major mistake. Why didn’t they just take CentOS, Fedora or even Red Hat? Fedora is the stepping stone for the next RHEL release and largely sponsored by Red Hat, CentOS is the free version of RHEL and Red Hat is the leading Enterprise Linux vendor. All three distro’s are sound technical choices and when it comes to support and long term viability RHEL is a safe bet too. It would be interesting to learn more details about Vienna’s Wienux decision. My take is that the “techies” got too much leverage and were not properly directed by project management. As a result things spun totally out of control and the decision was made (or pushed) to create Wienux. So all in all I don’t think that Vienna’s migration was a failure from a technical point of view. It was a failure of Vienna’s ability to control the technical direction of the project, validate technical decisions and perform periodic due diligence on the technical and business parameters. And that sounds more like a Program Management and Project Management issue to me.

Congratulations to Jeroen van Meeuwen (aka Kanarip) for receiving the 2008 RHCE of the Year award. It’s good to see that his extensive contributions to the European Fedora community are recognized. Nice going Red Hat!

No less than 15 years in the making the final release candidate for Wine 1.0 (RC5) is scheduled to be released this Friday with Wine 1.0 to follow in a few days. What an amazing accomplishment! Congrats to the WineHQ developers.

Update June 17, 2008: Wine 1.0 has been released. Read the article over at WineHQ.

It has been 5 months since Nokia released the 15.0.015 firmware for the N95 8GB. Isn’t it time, Nokia, to come up with a 2x.x.x release given the issues in the 15.x.x release? How much longer do we have to wait? Or are we, your customers, no longer important now that we have forked over the substantial amount of money for the N95 8GB?

With the imminent release of the iPhone 3G you really need to step up your efforts to keep your N95 customers on board. I know this N95 user will definitely test the iPhone 3G when it becomes available in one month. And given the way you, Nokia, handle the N95 why would I expect anything else for the N96?

A while back Phoronix reported that Via would jump on the Open Source bandwagon. Well, think again. Xavier Bachelot posted today that “via can probably be considered dead” and that “they are still ‘collecting the idea inside the VIA Linux group’ and they still don’t know what they ‘can do for the first step’”. Way to go Via…