Its the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
Today is the last day of trading for Dominux Consulting. Finished, done, shop closed, shutters down.
I started with Notes back in 1995 age 20 at my first job. I was doing general IT support and one day I was given a box with some floppy disks in it (Notes 4.0 I think) and told to install this thing on a server, roll it out to 80 people while relocating the company to a new office 40 miles away, the final instruction was “When you have done that, tell us what it is”. Very quickly I realised that it was not just an email platform. I had it doing web browsing (we didn’t have a TCP/IP network so it was a great way to get web pages over a Netware IPX network) and NNTP news fairly quickly and then the company bought in a Quality Management System, which we customised quite heavily. After a while I figured that programming was much more fun than answering the phone (I am still pretty dreadful at answering the phone) so moved on to work full time as a Notes programmer, I then spent 15 years working for various companies including Dominux Consulting, my own little one man band. That brings us to today, in 2010 and the end of the line. I have now dissolved Dominux and I am now working full time on Free and Open Source software at The Open Learning Centre. The work is very much like it always was, writing great applications, on a solid and professional platform to solve business problems. The platform has changed somewhat though, I now use Alfresco for document management, Joomla! for web content management, Wordpress for blogs and blog-like websites including the very cool votegeek.org.uk with all these running on the Free and Open Source Ubuntu operating system. I think in future I will end up doing more work on applications based on CouchDB which is installed on Ubuntu by default and rapidly becoming the preferred back end for opportunistic application development, the type of little application that Notes gets used for. I find it interesting that for many years I have been told I use the one crazy database in the world that doesn’t even support SQL, but we now have a crop of NoSQL databases with a reputation for simplicity and scalability. The “Not a Real Database” marketing problem has been solved in style by the likes of CouchDB, but Notes and Domino are just acknowledged as something people used to use that has a NoSQL architecture. Notes might not be dead yet and this might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but both are coming close, it is pretty hard to be certain about either.
Naked Computers
We have a policy at our company to only purchase computers that come without Windows. We don’t like it, we don’t need it, we don’t want it and we certainly don’t want to be forced to pay for it. This restricts the vendors we can purchase from down to a very short list. Plenty of other people are in the same position as us, it is really quite hard to find a good selection of vendors who will allow you to just buy a computer. I am not interested in the whole refund malarky, I don’t want to jump through hoops to get a refund on something I don’t want to buy in the first place.
To help the community find and purchase these scarce pure and unadulterated computers we have started a directory of suppliers at nakedcomputers.org. If you know of any supplier, small or large, who will sell a naked computer then let us know about it, or register on the site and add them yourself.
If you are a supplier and want to get on the list it is very simple, just add a naked computer to your range and tell us about it, there is no cost to a normal entry on the list but we might add some kind of enhanced sponsored option at some stage.
I was gone and now I appear to be back
The Dominux domain kind of changed into a scummy link farm for a month or so. Sorry about that and I hope nobody clicked any links. I have no idea why it happened, or why it has come back, I am not entirely certain my ISP is still in business and I am struggling to contact them and transfer the domain elsewhere. This has just been a surprisingly minor irritation to me and further underlines the point that I don’t really do Dominux stuff any more, The Open Learning Centre is where I have to spend my time and energy now.
So Bill had a good rant yesterday
And few people can rival Mr Buchan in a fair ranting contest, so I won’t comment much other than here it is, and he is mostly right.
This did put me in mind of something I have been pondering for a while. You see IBM business partners do have several ways to say things to IBM. We can email folk we know directly, as Bill was doing. In theory we can use Sametime but in practice not really because the gateway is still on a somewhat broken Sametime 3.1 server until the IBM change freeze ends (ever known an organisation with a change freeze that lasts four years solid?) We can also post in a private Notes discussion database called the Partner Forum. In this forum there are special forms for reporting possible bugs, and there are ways to report suggestions for improvement. The rants in the partner forum over the years have been on occasion rivalled any seen in the blogosphere. The good ideas for improvement have been more numerous and detailed than those in (the excellent) IdeaJam. Some partners are brought in a little closer as design partners, ostensibly to be listened to, but in practice just to be told what IBM are doing a few days before Vowe finds out. The rants here are even more juicy. All jolly good, but not very effective.
So does a public rant work then? Well I used to think so but I am not so sure now. It certainly feels better, but is probably going to be ignored too, just like that rude Mac blogger who ripped into the rather pathetic IMAP support in the Notes client.
So polite constructive words or flaming rants in private or public don’t work. So who is in control of this relationship then? Who is out of control? Who has the freedom to make improvements? Who hasn’t got freedom? How does it feel?
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The software I like to work with gives me Freedom. It gives my customers Freedom too. It frees up some of their budget too, which is never a bad thing. Yes I still use Domino from time to time, because some of my customers still have it. There are still a few things that Domino does quite well, but there are more and more things these days where there is just no need whatsoever to be using proprietary software.
So as I continue to ease my way out of the yellow bubble I think I will share some of the things I have previously posted in the partner forum, not that I expect IBM to pay any more attention to them here than they have already, but to just throw them out for comment and perhaps to save anyone else the bother of wishing for them.
