Category Archives: Open Source

FRA Airport

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So here I am, ready to board my flight to Washington for EclipseCon 2012. Will be interesting: A new venue, new city (never stayed in the area before). I have a free day tomorrow, so I should check Anne Jacko’s About Washington page tonight. My current favorite is the Smithsonian, but I’m not sure yet. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that looks interesting. I’m just not sure what security will look like after the events in Toulouse earlier this week.

One of my favorite talks will be the Ford/BugLabs keynote. While the example in the the press release sounds rather uninteresting, I believe that the experiment can produce a whole bunch of cool gadgets for the car. One issue will be how much they open up the car’s infrastructure to be tinkered with: This is where the interesting information is! A cricket radio doesn’t really get my interest so much – why wouldn’t I use the normal radio?

As with every Eclipse conference I don’t expect that I will attend a lot of sessions. But for sure I’ll try to attend as many sessions as possible around the safety critical tooling topic. And I hope to also catch up on what is happening in CDT – as much as I can actually understand it.

Other than that, many chats, many people, many beers.

Chess In Paris

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Just came back from Paris, where I’ve spent the last tow days. We were invited to present Polarsys to the Chess, an Artemis funded research project.

I came across quite a few of these projects lately, some of them funded by the EU, some of them funded by Artemis, ITEA or some other agency that I knew or didn’t know. And all of them seem to do some sort of the same thing. At least that what it looks like to me. When I ask, they try to explain to me what makes them so different.

Anyway, many of them seem to spend considerable time on stuff that others have already build or are in the process of building. Some platform components here, some persistency frameworks there. And neither I nor they know if they can use the other project’s results, because they just don’t see them.

If I’m right with my assessment, then we look at a huge waste of taxpayer’s money here. How could this be stopped? Really simple: The funding agencies just need to tell them that they need to develop in open source. Creates visibility as well as accountability. Or is that a problem?

The Shared Pasture And The Butcher

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The small village in the mountains had a problem. While the farmers had to work hard to do the fields, they had no space left to have their cows out during the day.

So the solution they decided on was that some of the public wasteland of the village was turned into a pasture where they could all have their cows grassing during the day before they had to take them home to the farms.

That was a brilliant solution: Not only had they all shorter ways everyday with getting the cows in and out, but they also could share the cost for a boy watching the cows.

They also decided that they would get together regularly and see what  they need to do keep things going, and they also decided that they would share the cost for the boy and the work around the pasture.

All worked well, and all the farmers were quite happy. But after some time the butcher of the village came along and said that he would like to see that the cows should be treated differently to make the meat leaner. But since he would not own cows he didn’t really feel that he should participate in supporting the shared effort of the others.

The farmers talked about it for a while and then came to the conclusion that the butcher should pay the same as they would for the common. While he was not directly using the pasture he was still a beneficiary of the improvement, and he also wanted to give direction on how to use the pasture.

They wet back to the butcher, and after some discussions he understood that it would be to his advantage if helped to his business if he would help to improve the common.

Everybody  in the village lived happily ever since.

Also check out Elinor Ostroms’s work.