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Installing Debian? Whether you want something graphical and newbieproof, or you need the latest PERC4 raid drivers for your new Dell Poweredge Server, you can find the Debian install you need here.

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Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and current CTO of CollabNet, a firm that hosts systems for collaboration in engineering teams distributed around the world, has an interesting interview at Netcraft. I went there just to use their handy "What's that site running?" tool, but really enjoyed Behlendorf's comments on open source software development, the SCO case, and his own company's experience with offshoring:

At the beginning of 2003, there was much discussion around the executive staff about outsourcing and/or offshoring. We had a dedicated and productive engineering staff in the U.S., but the amount of stuff we *wanted* to do was huge—and customers were demanding new features constantly. I was skeptical about the model where you hand someone a spec and magically they write code for you. While looking at this we met with a company named Enlite Technologies, who had a collaborative project management tool for the electronics-design market, and who had the majority of their engineers in Chennai, India. We were considering outsourcing some work to them, but I really liked the founder (Gopinath Ganapathy) and the team he'd formed, and I wanted something much closer and more, er, collaborative—so we decided to merge. Our products were complimentary, they had a great team in Chennai, and I figured that it was time for us to become our own best-use case in showing how our product could be used to build worldwide engineering teams, as many of our customers had done.

Since that point in time, we've integrated the two teams very tightly. Engineers in each location are spread across the combined codebases, and they know each other on a first name basis. We were the subject of an article in Salon about this. No doubt the topic is controversial, and there are huge challenges to making an offshore or outsourcing model actually work.

The open source model has a lot to do with making that possible. …

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What Free Software hackers need to know about Microsoft's competition strategy.

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Here are the slides from a talk about the growth of LiveJournal from single machine hobby to 60-machine supersite. Very technical, very Perl, very interesting.

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Wowsers, did he just imply that Microsoft will open source their software? Inevitably?

That's probably been my closeted opinion for a few years, but jeeeezus, here it is in Fortune. Kinda mind-blowing.

I was reading a post by Cesar Brea who notes the coolness of the Event Share Framework (ESF) for RSS. ESF allows blog/news feeds to include data about events—start time, duration, location, and so forth—and can be easily integrated with calendaring applications. For example, you could subscribe to a calendar feed of events in your workplace and have them automatically show up on your Outlook calendar.

Cesar notes some ways to increase the value of sharable calendars:

Imagine a site called calendar.com that aggregates RSS-ESF feeds (the domain name is taken, btw, even though no live site's up). Think Google for events. Search by where you live / travel, time/ date range, keyword. Find person/ organization with events you would like to go to/ attend remotely. Subscribe and get future events and updates sent to your Outlook calendar / PDA calendar automatically. As a person trying to schedule your next cub scout pack meeting, check calendar.com to see when a good date would be based on "related groups'" calendars (e.g., other organizations in your town, like school, church, sports leagues, etc.).

The question of finding "related" calendars is interesting. Note that Cesar suggests exploiting existing physical communities for this information. Of course, with most of my friends carrying out data entry for Friendster, why not just reuse that data? Duh, because it's locked in Friendster.

Friendster, which has the social network data but only primitive communication systems, ends up being a big collector's game.* If Cesar's hypothetical calendar.com could get at that data, it could easily support a scheduling wizard that crawls your social network and suggests times for potential events based on likely interested people, or suggest attendees for an event based on their availability and interest. This is of great value for the user. It would be a good reason for Friendster to create simple APIs (subject to user control so that privacy can be controlled). In fact, if there were useful services like these, I'd happily pay Friendster to make my data available (of course, I am more of an online exhibitionist than most).

Friendster, Inc. probably doesn't believe that's a viable option because it opens up their most valuable asset—the network data of millions of users—to the competition. On the other hand, it also vastly increases the value of that data because it can be used in novel applications that Friendster, Inc. will not be able to invent and implement. Opening up but controlling an API, inviting innovation from small vendors, and then taking over the biggest markets is a good way to make money. It's the Microsoft model. Maybe Friendster should give it a shot.

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* Here's a goofy idea for a metric of the value of a social network service like friendster. Simply run a survey to determine what percentage of users have gotten laid thanks to using the service. Call this the score score. I'd imagine friendster has a pretty low score score, like .001%, but livejournal much higher, perhaps 3%.

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