• It smells of a gold-rush, a way to make a quick buck. I was brought up with an ethic to go and do your day’s work, work hard, get paid, and play your part.
• This is inter-twined with rush to commercialise the Internet. This is not new, but it is eroding into the idealism of the early days of the Web when it was supposed to be the great equaliser in society, the open information platform.
• To scale, you really need to get investment, which means compromising and handing over rights to your business and ideas.
• I’m a software engineer, and solve problems presented by others. I don’t see myself as an ideas person, or at least don’t have the urge to act on ones I do have.

To make an analogy, startups to me are like young footballers who dream of playing for Manchester United or AC Milan or Real Madrid. Or indeed, even to play professional football at any level. How many make it? I don’t know, but I’d say less than 1%. I suspect the number of startups who are successful comes in at around the same percentage.

But in the last couple of years my thinking has changed. To counter the points above:

• Startups are hard work, well if you are doing it right they should be.
• If we strive to keep the Web open, then making money is fine. We all need to, right?
• If you are smart, you can negotiate a good investment deal. The sheer number of investors out there means choice. Or, bootstrap and scale at your own pace.
• Sometimes engineers come up with the best ideas, because they understand some of the real-world problems that need solving and find opportunity in that.

Image by King Molan via Flickr

I could name other reasons, with their counter arguments, but you get the picture. A couple of weeks ago I attended the Dublin Web Summit, very much a startup event. After not living in Ireland for over 10 years and being completely out of touch with the tech scene, I was greatly encouraged by what I saw. The tech sector is one of the things keeping the Irish economy afloat. But it’s foundation is foreign investment by large companies, usually American. Companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Intel have had a presense there for a number of years. Newer comapnies like Facebook and Twitter have setup their European headquarters there. They do so because of a young, skilled workforce and incentives provided by the Irish government including a low corporate tax rate.

Yet now, there is a realisation that this is not a solid foundation for the future. Large companies can move out at any time, pulling the rug from under you. People are starting to do things for themselves, setting up their own companies more and more. Irish people have always been resourceful but there is nothing less than a culture shift happening. There is a real energy. Even the government, who have shown before to be notoriously short-termist, have many initiatives to help small and medium-sized businesses. Yet more work needs to be done. For example, the bankruptcy laws need a major overhaul to shield entrepeneurs more from risk. I definitely like the direction things appear to be going in however.

In this spirit, I applied to be a WebFWD scout and have been accepted. The application form posed the question “Why do you think you would make an awesome WebFWD Scout?“. Here is what I wrote:

I have been an Open Source enthusiast and supporter all my career. I speak at Open Source conferences. In Slovenia, we have a thriving Web and Startup scene, and I attend events and keep up to date. I have mentored at Seedcamp events. Moving further east, I am a member of a group called New Europe Startups that covers Central and Eastern Europe. There is a real hunger here, something that has been observed less in Western Europe. This is something that can be tapped into for the advantage of the Open Web. I’m a firm believer that our future economic health will be based on entrepreneurial talent that challenges and ultimately usurps incumbents who have a stranglehold on many industries. Last but not least, I have faith in people which drives everything I do, and have a knack for connecting people to do interesting and I hope great things.

So I urge you all, if you have a passion and think you have something that will make people’s lives better, go out and start something, work hard, and keep dreaming.

Related articles

• Eastern Europe’s Startups After the Seedcamp: Zemanta, Brainient, Codility and UberVU Revisited (goaleurope.wordpress.com)
• Y Combinator Challenged By Growing Seedcamp (forbes.com)

If you don’t know what Mozilla and Firefox are all about, watch this video.

Watch with subtitles in some languages here.

Can’t see the video? Get Firefox! Alternatively, watch here.

if you can say that mouthful 10 times in a row. If you have never been, believe me when I say it a unique experience and highly eventful and enjoyable.

Image via Wikipedia

But my real motivation is to solicit session proposals for the Mozilla room. We’re leaning towards more dev talks and less l10n this year, but that by no means rules out a super hot l10n proposal. We are open to all aspects of the community, technical or otherwise. For example, John Slater has put forward a great proposal on ‘Building Mozilla’s visual design community’. We have still not chosen the speaker/topic list, so you still have time to put forward your proposal. To do so, go over the wiki proposals page and add in your idea, and the main FOSDEM page has more general information. If you have any questions, you can contact me via the comments or from this page.

Enjoy the holidays, over and out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The annoyances of proprietary Firefox extensions

While technologies are more prominent than ever, still today the benefits are still largely misunderstood by a large section of the business community. So if you need help in marketing your OSS project, or know someone who does, I’d recommend Sandro Groganz who is setting up a consultancy in this field.

Read all about it!

I’ve known Sandro for a few years,. He has a proven track record, and regularly writes on his blog and wiki about this topic.

Survery finds 36 children’s cereals cannot be rated healthy.

No surprise there, and you don’t need to read the whole article to know which types of cereals they are talking about.

I like his writing and have read most of his books. If I get the urge I’ll give you my thoughts on it post-read, but for now you can find out more on the official book site, a clever pastiche in the form of a desktop. Also related is an interview with the author on Bloomsbury.

This touches close to home for me. 15 minutes drive from where I live is a nuclear power station, the only one built in the former Yugoslavia. Sure, some locals have spoken out against it, but for the most part there is a resignation to having it around. It is touted as being built to the highest standards, bla bla. But I think we are kidding ourselves into thinking that such an accident can’t happen again, at any nuclear facility. And the issue of waste, what do we do … dig a big whole, cover it over and forget about it. With the current global energy crisis and efforts to wean ourselves off fossils and oil, nuclear is coming back into fashion. That’s worrying. Surely with all our collective knowedge we can come up with better. Wind and Solar power are a good start, but we need to be researching other clean alternatives.

I lived in Dublin most of my life. Ireland is a nuclear free state, and proudly wears that fact on its sleeve. But even there, the issue is unavoidable, as the east coast is directly down wind from Sellafield (a large waste leakage happened as recently as 2005) and other plants in Britain and France. It’s a small world after all. Everywhere is down wind from somewhere. Why should you care? Why shouldn’t you?

DAY 2
Tuesday morning started for me in the ‘Using’ track with an interesting talk by Peter van der Linden on his adventures in partitioning and multiple installs. I thought I was doing well with a 3 distro boot system, but Peter got up to 33. Then he admitted that he uses Mac as his default desktop! Mac uses the EFI specification for booting, more details of which can be found here. Geoffrey Moore‘s keynote was next up, and the focus here was firmly where Desktop Linux fits in the business world, or more specifically into the broader product life cycle. Perhaps rather shockingly to the audience, Geoffrey said that Desktop Linux is becoming less and less relevant. The real innovation these days is in areas such as handhelds and VOIP, and users are choosing these devices more and more over the PC. We’re moving towards a more ‘cloud’ (Internet) based architecture, with multiple devices having access to the data. And a point raised in this talk, mirrored in other talks, is that the lack of standardisation is natural to Linux. Microsoft should not be used as a reference point, and diversity is its strength.

I then went to see what Michael Robertson has been up to lately. Michael is the founder of Linspire (formerly Lindows), but these days is focusing on other ventures such as SipPhone, ajax13, and mp3tunes.. The main focus of this talk was the ‘ajaxX’ group of applications that have been appearing lately, including ajaxWrite and ajaxTunes. The basic idea is to move traditional applications off the desktop into the ‘cloud’ using AJAX technologies. The underlying platform here is the browser, and currently they only work with Firefox (the Mozilla ‘platform’ is something I advocated in my talk, and this is one example of it). When asked if other browsers would be supported, rather than committing to that, he put forward his preference for Firefox to be more widely adopted because it’s a better browser. A laudable goal, and something that many of us support. Whether it will happen or not is another story. The ajax13 applications are free, so the real revenue model will come from storage offerings. I gave my talk in the afternoon, and then to wrap up the day I went to see Tim Griffin talk about some of the nice things his company Userful is doing with multiple-user desktops.

IN CONCLUSION
To sum it up briefly, I’d say that the general mood at the conference is that Desktop Linux is in a very healthy state despite low adoption rates. Some of the things preventing greater adoption include lack of standardisation across distros, incomplete hardware support, a shortfall of enterprise applications, and a perceived geeky image. These are being tacked head-on in some circles, but the great strength of Linux is and always has been its ability to adapt. It always finds niche markets. Linux should not be competing, but innovating, evolving and focusing on its strengths.

DAY 1
Geoff Perlman, the CEO is REAL Software (not to be confused with REAL Networks), summed up the Linux adoption problem as having its roots in a software drought. This is improving every day of course. Windows solved the problem with VB a long time ago, and Mac suffered a similar problem around the time of OS10. Geoff’s threw his REALBasic solution into the mix, a space shared now by others such as QT, Mono and of course Mozilla. It has most of what you’d expect from a modern toolkit, and one nice nugget is that you can build an app for the 3 target platforms from any platform version. Jeff Bailey gave a run-down of where Ubuntu is at. He talked about the online development and collaboration tools to enable the community to be as much involved as possible, and mapped out upcoming releases. Dapper Drake (6.x) is coming up in June and the plan is for this to live as a stable distro for enterprise deployment. Edgy Eft will show up not long after and live in parallel to host some of the more cutting-edge technologies that Ubuntu wants to try out. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony gave an amusing talk in main session, comparing software to food. On the left are the vegans (GNU/Linux and the GPL community) and on the right are the junk food addicts (proprietary software). He believes most of us live in the middle, preferring a balanced diet (Open Source where possible, with the twinky treat thrown in every so often). This kind of sums up Linspire’s approach to it’s OS, which always wanted to move beyond the Linux geek audience and into the home of all PC users. Kevin then announced the new free version, calle Freespire, due out in August. Doc Searl‘s gave his take on where Linux lives in today’s world. It’s a species and always has been, adapting effectively to the environment it finds itself in. In many areas, Linux has surpassed other operating systems, and the real issue nowadays is not device support or catching up, but rather continue to create “conversations and markets” outside of traditional spheres such as corporations and governments. Doc gives some of his thoughts on the conference here. You might have read about (or seen) Nat Friedman‘s antics doing the conference circuit showing off Novell‘s upcoming Desktop 10.1 release. It does live up to the hype. At the height of the wizardry, there wasn’t a jaw that hadn’t dropped in the audience. With XGL window effects and an excellent desktop search based on Beagle, these are just some of the bag of tricks.

Day 2 to follow, once the jetlag has worn off a bit!

Hype comes and goes. Bubbles fill up and burst. In the end, the cream of the crop will rise to the top. Any other cliches anyone?

Here’s a couple of interesting pieces I’ve come across recently related to Ubuntu:

1. Review on ZDNet UK, as part of a wider face-off of Desktop Linux for small business.
2. A great account on the O’Reilly Network by Jeremy Jones on his experience installing and configuring Ubuntu on his laptop.

But is this strain of the virus, and other ones such as SARS, natural in origin or man-made? Did it jump accidentally, escaping from a lab somewhere? Or was is released on purpose? These are questions that may or may not have crossed your mind, but if you want an interesting take on it and the surrounding media frenzy, I recommend you to read this article from the Centre for Research on Globalisation:

The Avian Flu Fright is Politically Timed – A Public Health Warning and Political Essay

If there is any truth in it, it is probably more menacing than the virus itself. What theory do you belive in? Personally, I don’t disbelieve anything right now simply because I am not a biological scientist and am not equipped with all the facts. While it is wise to be aware of public health advisories, if there is one thing that the article linked above should tell us, it is to question authority and think for yourself.

The title refers to folks with sickness and diseases blogging about their condition, rather than a guy with a broken leg sitting up in the hospital bed with a laptop (which I would probably do if I was stuck in hospital – I somehow doubt most hospitals are getting high speed internet connections when there are many others things fighting for budget money).

There’s an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about this particular topic, folks blogging about their medical conditions. It leads in with the story of Amy Tenderick, a mother with Type 1 diabetes. I have to say that talking about my disease alot on my blog doesn’t appeal to me. For one, people reading it would want to hear another song after a while, and secondly I would just get too caught up in myself. Yes its good to talk about it, get help and educate yourself, but there are other things in life. But in the end, what’s the difference between talking about that, and having a blog about say recipes, or PHP programming. Different strokes for different folks!

However, to say that this is the first of its kind is a bit misleading. After looking around, it appears operations like this have been happening for a few years, in Russia, the UK and probably elsewhere. No doubt the process needs much refinement and testing before it has a chance to come to the mainstream.

As someone who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes only last November, I’m keeping a close eye on developments like these. I’m lucky in a way because millions if not billions of hard currency is being put into diabetes research every year because it is so widespread. There’s a market for drugs and cures, so to speak. If I’d caught a rare disease, no doubt it would be different.