Then there is also the first-mover advantage, by virtue of which your competitors, though not as good as you, get a bigger market share and user community that is already active and familiar with the product. Betterment, by itself, is not an effective weapon to fight this.

Another perspective is that by virtue of being better, its benefits can be shown only as a comparison against the worst counterparts. A product can make a break-through if it has a definite USP of its own that offers something radically different and new to its users.

So, when a friend called me to ask my opinion on his new CMS, I advised him to rethink his approach. Normally, I do encourage everyone to write their software, especially if they want to learn. But it is a completely different ball game if they want to go commercial with it and make it popular. In fact, I believe that open sourcing a product is the best way to popularize a better product today, and that is something he was not interested in.

The best piece of conversation that talks about this is between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in Pirates of the Silicon Valley:

Steve Jobs: We’re better than you are! We have better stuff.
Bill Gates: You don’t get it, Steve. That doesn’t matter!

It will be interesting how Google approaches this. The alliance maintains that it is not “anti-Google” but “pro-Android”, and hopefully they won’t mean the same for Google. I am sure Google knows open source is very efficient in creating functional equivalents and improvements. Having said that, its popularity will depend on whether the alliance is able to replace with complete equivalents. I sincerely hope this alliance picks up momentum and gives us a fully open sourced Android based mobile OS.

I wish all application developers kept an underlying readable text file for configuration. In addition to being light-weight and portable, they are transparent and offer an efficient way of configuration, without having to even start the application.

Through transparency and an active community, open source drops the costs of availability, custom development and collaboration with the vendor, along with the licensing costs. This makes it easier and cheaper to experiment with and gives an opportunity to tailor it to the company’s needs.

The biggest mistake that people do with open source is that they drop their guards against the risks of software world. Open source software still carries those. But it gives you full control of the software and the best chance to mitigate those risks.

As Michael Tiemann says, the $2 bn number is accurate but low. There is a lot more potential. India, as a developing country and market, needs open source for growth through innovative solutions.

So here it is. In fact, it is just another tool, which has nothing to do with xmonad or Haskell. It is just an executable shell script – multitz:

#!/bin/sh
in=`TZ=Asia/Kolkata date +"%c"`
uk=`TZ=GMT date +"UK %c"`
ca=`TZ=America/Los_Angeles date +"CA %c"`
ny=`TZ=America/New_York date +"NY %c"`
(printf "%s | %s | %s\n" "$uk" "$ny" "$ca"; sleep 3) | dzen2

It uses the shell commands to get the times for different zones, and displays them using a status bar called dzen2.

I involve xmonad only to assign a hot-key or a keyboard shortcut to use it:

    -- show dzen2 statusbar
    , ((modMask, xK_s), spawn "/home/anadgouda/bin/multitz")

That’s it, I get my own applet of multiple timezones on pressing the Windows key (my modMask in xmonad) + s.

I received a couple of pings saying that WordPress is insecure and the community is irresponsible. By personal experience as a WordPress user and as a software developer, I think it is the exactly opposite. Some reasons:

• This attack is on the older versions. The couple of recent releases are immune to this attack. Which means that this security hole has already been plugged.
• It can happen with any software where security holes in older versions can be exploited. The recent case of Ruby On Rails is a good example. The alarming fact here is that there were significant number of installations with older versions.
• Considering that it is important to stay updated with the latest version, WordPress makes it easy to upgrade with automatic upgrades and a reminder about the upgrade right on the dashboard.
• Like many other open source projects, a lot of contributing members go through the WordPress code. This helps in proactively spotting bugs or security holes before the code gets released and in reacting quickly to avoid such attacks.

In spite of this, it is a fact that no software can be bug-free. There will be those who will keep looking at exploiting vulnerabilities. The best we can do, after releasing a version, is to have a way of tackling these attacks quickly and help those who are in panic. And I think WordPress has the most assured chance of doing this, because of its community and because it is open source.