ProLinux.de writes: Laut Andreas Constantinou, Gründer der Marktforschungsfirma VisionMobile, ist es jedoch ein Mythos, zu glauben, dass der Zugang zum Quellcode, fehlende Lizenzkosten oder die Anpassbarkeit dafür ausschlaggebend seien. Constantinou nennt stattdessen folgende sechs Gründe: Geringere Kosten und schnellere Marktreife, breitere Auswahl an Middleware-Komponenten, strategische Kontrolle, Skalierbarkeit, Qualität und Innovation.

If you speak German, and would like to know what this OpenStreetMap thing is about, German TV channel 3Sat has a 5 minute clip explaining it.

This complaint (legalese pdf) has been filed on behalf of two BusyBox developers which sue Monsoon for not providing the source code to the GPL’ed BusyBox program which they use in their products.

Apparently this is the first ever US lawsuit of this kind and the lawyers of the Software Feedom Law Center (SFLC) are handling the case. See their announcement here.

It’s going to be interesting how the thing plays out.

I was pointed to an application that does routing for cyclists in Göteborg. It’s quite a cool application. Try for example enter “parkgatan 7” as start/Från and “torggatan 1” as destination/Till and then click “Beräkna rutt”. Now, that is cool user innovation at work.

Das Neptun-Programm, das allen Schweizer Universitätsangehörigen vergünstigte Laptops anbietet, gibt die Geräte nun auch ohne Windows ab. Die beiden großen Universitäten von Zürich ( ETH und UZH ) haben ein gemeinsames Programm namens Neptun, das es allen Studenten und Mitarbeitern der Schweizer Universitäten ermöglicht, Laptops zu vergünstigten Preisen zu kaufen. (von prolinux.de)

In July, I went to the StateOfTheMap conference, a come together of the openstreetmap project. When I complained that some of the services were not reliable enough, I was asked whether I would take sysadmin responsibility of one of the servers to help make things better. I didn’t say NO loud enough, I guess. So I am system administrator of this box.

I am happy to say that things run much smoother now on that box (not all of that is due to me. OJW, for example deserves the lion share for that) and things like the tiles@home service were running happily.

Now that a lot of data is being added to the maps every day, a new bottleneck appears: the computer delivering the map data which are then being drawn by the t@h clients can’t cope with the amount of requests.