For years we’ve been trying to educate the world about the benefits and the ideology behind free software. We’ve been working hard to enlighten as many people and companies as possible, but somewhere along the way I believe we forgot our goal. Our goal was to get Linux, free software and open source into peoples homes, offices and even the data centers and believe it or not, WE ARE HERE!!!

Open source has gone into a new phase and whether we like it or not the rules have changed. Of course this didn’t happen over night, this is the result of a series of decisions a couple of companies made. Red Hat decided to release an enterprise version of their Linux distribution and begun to compete with Microsoft, Sun, HP and others about the space in the data centers and not too long ago Red Hat also bough the popular open source application server JBoss. Novell bought SUSE and pretty much replaced NetWare with SUSE Linux and joined the party in the data centers.

A company that definitely made a difference in leading open source into the next phase is Sun Microsystems. In the past few years Sun has been changing the licensing of Java to open source and also released OpenSolaris an open source version of Solaris. As another step in Sun’s open source strategy they bought two very significant open source projects, MySQL and VirtualBox. Sun isn’t the only company to buy open source projects at the moment and not to long ago Nokia bought Trolltech and Citrix bough Xen Source.

At this new playground there’s a new set of rules to live up to that the open source-community never faced before. At this playground of companies, business agreements, economics and profitability there’s no room for decisions based on ideology. We need to help these companies find ways to make their decisions so that they do not interfere with the ideology behind open source and so that these companies can benefit from their decisions.

It’s no longer the open source-community’ believe in their ideology that brings open source further, open source has silently taken the step into the commercial world and whatever you all think about that it was all of us that brought it there. We got what we asked for and now it’s time to learn to play by the new rules.

Today is International Women’s Day all over the world to celebrate the economic, political and social achievements of women. In honor of International Women’s Day IDG (International Data Groups) published interviews with fourteen women working with IT on interesting positions in their newspaper Computer Sweden and this morning they published the same interviews on their web page. I’m one of the interviewed women in this article and I find this a great way to encourage young women thinking about an IT education to take the step and actually do it.

My main question about women in IT industry is: Where did they all go?! In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s when mainframe computers where the only computers that existed almost ONLY women worked with computers. This was back in the time where a mainframe computer covered a whole room and the personnel worked in white robes. All of these skilled women must be out there somewhere in the IT industry, but where are they? Well, of course this was a while back and some of them is old enough to get their pension today, but at least some of them must be working for the IT industry still in these days. Why do we never see any interviews with these ladies that were a part of building the IT infrastructure we have today?

To all women in IT industry i want to say one thing: Never forget that in the old days we were a majority in the IT industry and that we today are a row model for young women to encourage them to seek the knowledge and enjoyments of working with IT.

Interviews with all women: “Gå din egen väg i it-branchen” (swedish)
Only my interview: “Självlärd Linuxevangelist” (swedish)

Old interview with me referred to in the new interview: “Vi kan lära oss av Microsoft” (swedish)

Today I got an e-mail in my inbox at work from a swedish company named Minicall that provide a beeper service. They started a new campaign to bring up the benefits of beepers called “Saving lifes is never out of date” (original swedish title “Rädda liv är aldrig omodernt”). Twenty years ago a lot of people used beepers instead of cellphones, today most people barely remember them and much less use them. Yet, these small devices for receiving a phone number or text messages from someone who wants to get in touch with you are lifesavers, literally speaking.

Most people today own a cellphone and use it on a regular basis, some people use only their cellphone and don’t even have a land-line phone at home. In the 90’s most people put their beepers in a box somewhere in the basement or garage, but some people didn’t and these people still use beepers. During a storm, a power outage or other emergency situation cellphones and land-line phones aren’t reliable enough, but the beeper never fails. Every day police force, firemen and hospital personnel use beepers to know when and where they are needed in case of an emergency situation, so literally speaking a beeper can save your life.

Why am I bringing this up on my blog about Linux and open source in enterprise environments? International and internet based companies are dependent on their IT-infrastructure to work 24/7 to provide information to offices all over the world or services for their customers. To meet these requirements you need staff in-house and on-call staff 24/7. In case of a power outage where a whole city turns black land-line phones and cellphone might get knocked out and in this situation you want to call in as much on-call staff you can get, but how? Beep them!

I’m on call at the moment and I carry a beeper everywhere I go, whenever they need me they beep and I can be at home sleeping as usual if everything works fine instead of spending the night at work. I want to remind you all about this great technology that makes beepers the most reliable way to send a message to someone and it’s importance in our every day life, whether we know it or not…