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LugRadio has a very interesting discussion in their current podcast about the role of a community manager, in creating a vibrant community around an open source project.

Patrick asks,

Why not OpenSuSE, instead of Ubuntu?

Patrick asks,

Why not OpenSuSE, instead of Ubuntu?

At Freelock, we provide a maintenance service contract to manage Linux servers. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide monitoring, system updates, application updates, and our help recovering anything that goes wrong with an upgrade. We’re looking at adding disaster recovery to the mix, raising the price to cover the cost of backing up all of the data and providing varying service level agreements on how soon we will recover your machine from a total loss. But for our base price, we only support Ubuntu and CentOS, with a preference for Ubuntu. So Patrick asks, why not OpenSuSE? Read my reply after the jump.

It's been a while since I posted here, but it's not for lack of things to write about. There's plenty going on, and I have several blog posts/rants/articles pretty much ready to post. Just haven't had time to get them up.

Computers and information systems are essential parts of every business today. Like accounting and legal, every business needs to invest in technology to compete. Technology is both a cost of doing business, and an opportunity to do more business. Most people I talk with recognize the necessity of having a computer, an email address, and a web site, but still look at the upfront cost more than other issues.

After spending some time working with dozens of businesses, I think it's time to take a step back and look at the big picture of technology in business. Let's take a reporter's view of the topic, and ask the basic questions: who, what, where, why, when, and how much?

A couple weeks ago, the EU slapped Microsoft with a $1.35B fine, less than a week after Microsoft had made a big fanfare about their new "open" policies.

Todd over at Napera asks,

PHP development is one of our specialties at Freelock Computing. I've written quite a few PHP applications, some from scratch, some starting with other people's code, some as extensions for open source projects.

There are thousands of languages out there, but only a couple handfuls are used for web applications. Of these, PHP is a runaway success. Yet I constantly see it criticized by developers of other languages, often for completely untrue reasons.

It's been far too long since our last newsletter. There's a lot more stories to tell, but today I'm going to talk about some of the reasons I haven't written in so long: our customers.

Open Source Consulting: Helping people get the most out of Free Software

Web sites are the most visible thing we do, so I'd like to highlight a few of the ones our customers have launched in the past few months. Our newest core offering is an e-commerce system called ZenCart, and we've had two of them launch in the last month.

Just ran across a new Open Source shopping cart system, Magento. We've been using Zen Cart for a while now, and it's great to see an alternative.

It's too bad the spammers are out to piss all over the public commons. Since I've started writing more regularly here, I've been getting inundated with pingbacks and trackbacks, and have to keep marking them as spam, a couple dozen a day.

Ok. Last post on the quality code series. One of the downsides of getting older is realizing you do have shortcomings. You know how when you're young, going into a job interview, the toughest question is the one about your weaknesses?