Much to my surprise, someone bought my Aluminum PowerBook G4 1.25GHz for the “Buy It Now” price on eBay. I always wondered if anyone did that. That was this past Tuesday. Last night, four more things sold. I had two items that didn’t sell. I hate eBay, but I can’t think of a better way to get rid of the stuff I need to sell.

Oh, if the recent entry about The Cathedral and The Bazaar sparked your interest, you may also want to check out The Circus Midget and The Fossilized Dinosaur Turd. 8^)

Didn’t I just write about Sun and their relative degree of cluelessness when it comes to open source? Well, here we are again.

According to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s Java Community Process (JCP) embodies the characteristics of the bazaar model in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and The Bazaar, a seminal essay on the revolution in software development, more accurately than Linux itself. The absurdity of this claim lies in the fact that Sun and companies like it are built upon processes that are the very things that the cathedral model describes.

A recent Slashdot post led me to a Yahoo! News post where Eric Raymond is responding to the claim from Sun Microsystems.

At this point, part of the handful that read this weblog probably feel like I do when I find myself in a group discussing this year’s lineup for the bowl games of American college football. Here it is in plain English. A large corporate entity is claiming that a process of theirs actually embodies the principles of open, free collaboration in software development more accurately than the groups that developed these new approaches to software development. The details of the situation would leave you laughing at Sun in ridicule, but I will spare you the time and myself the trouble.

Sorry for the slackness with the writing; the work schedule lately leaves me pretty uninspired at the end of day, particularly when the end of the day is 8:00 or 9:00 PM.

I have listed seven items today on eBay. What an undertaking that can be! I first had to have a photo shoot with all the items, then pick out the photos to use, then template the descriptions to be posted. Only then are you ready to actually log in to eBay and start posting the items. The upshot is that by next Monday I will have made a considerable dent in my attempt to simplify the computing part of my life. When all is said and done I will have two Titanium PowerBook G4 1GHz units and the two Dell Optiplex GX200s I am using for servers. Now to sell some guitars…

Another Saturday afternoon at the Caribou by Emory University. Despite my heinous work schedule of late and a number of other pressing concerns, I decided to carve out some time to work on my Debian involvement today. That led me to start with the Debian Developer’s Corner.

You know that part in The Fellowship of The Ring where Galadriel is offered the One Ring from Frodo and she does that little speech where her voice changes and light shoots out of her body? The one where she says, “all shall love me and despair?”

Yeah, love and despair at once. That probably sums up my initial encounter with the documentation. I started with the Debian Policy Manual, then soon hopped over to the New Maintainer’s Guide in hoped of garnering some sense of accomplishment. There’s a reason that Debian is so rock solid. Its developers are quite diligent folks. When you first come to this mass of process, it looms before you like a smooth, monolithic obelisk that you somehow have to scale.

I am going to have to take this in manageable chunks; chip away at it bit by bit. I think I have gotten chilled today and am in the process of getting sick. Time to make for home and begin treating the coming sickness.

Slashdot has linked an excellent article by Jem Matzan about all things Sun. It includes interviews with Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun from the Solaris 10 launch party. If you want to see what I was vaguely referring to in the recent entry about Sun’s Java Desktop System, check out that article.

When I read quotes from Sun’s top guys like the ones in that article, I can’t help but think that they have this myopic field of view about what is really going on with Linux. But, it’s Friday, and it’s late, so I am leaving it at that.