One pet peeve of mine is when I hear local input that for various reasons business, research grants etc. is difficult for open source.

There are plenty of examples, where local people have done very well for themselves at the local and international level. They're working for open source MNCs (not sales), wrote a key database library for PHP, developing on Linux/FreeBSD kernels, released popular open source e-HRM systems.. the list goes on. Most of the people I know in this group, don't get any form of grants, support or incentives from local sources. And yes.. they're getting nice income from it, invited to speak at international conferences etc.

The same goes for research, Andrew Tridgell who wrote rsync for this Phd. thesis and during his studies also wrote Samba So if he can do this at the ANU as a side project, why not locally?

For his master thesis, Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. What are the submissions that failed to get grants locally? Are they at a similar level?

Have a read also of Michael Tiemann's startup of Cygnus Solutions They started up with USD6,000. RedHat started in an apartment, Google in a garage.

Did you know that a local IT SME can get up to 5 years tax free profit without even getting MSC status?

A lot of innovation can happen if you main incentive is the will to succeed and not handouts.

http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/Day1.html

I blogged this a while ago, but it's something I come back to often. angch pointed this to me when I was struggling to find words to explain, why some developers seem to do the same things without reflecting on whether things could be improved or done differently in a better way. Why people with 3-5 years in the IT industry we were interviewing can have worse quality and less knowledge than an intern.

This can actually be mapped into other domains, not just IT since these days a lot more of us are working in a knowledge/information environment.

• Packer: Server is unstable. Let's reboot it each night.
• Mapper: Why is it unstable? Let's find and work on a solution so it doesn't.

With regards to total quality management,

"The packer corruption is to regard the job as ticking the boxes as quickly as excuses can be found to do so."

It's frustrating when you're in this kind of environment, where people just don't care about the bigger picture. We will just hit our figures somehow, quality and long term effects be damned. That's not what the target figures are there for. Unfortunately this kind of environment is usually the norm and not the exception.

Managed to catch a documentary that hits home a point I've discussed with some people around me thinking along the same lines.

"The Hubble telescope project was something, that was worth it to me to spend 10 years of my life working on."

I think "Years of a my life" is a damn good measure when evaluating your long term goals. It puts things into perspective, and makes you realize just how little time you have to achieve them.

I don't know, some people just don't get it I guess.

When you need free community support, you should post your query to a public forum, public irc channel etc. Via these public channels, you may or may not get a response. If you ask the right questions in the right channel, you'll probably do get a response. By right questions, you should ask beginner questions, in a beginner forum, and technical ones in technical forums.

If you think it's a bug, then file an issue. Almost all FOSS projects have one.

People don't mind responding to community support questions in a public forum because:

• The responses are public and archived, therefore answering one questions, will allow others to find it also. Therefore building and sharing community knowledge. Maybe others can join and help too.
• There is no requirement for any one person to respond.
• If you've contributed before to the community, the community will likely try help you in return.

You'll find that when I have free time, I'll be quite happy and friendly to help when I spend time reading public mailing lists or in public irc channel. This is a public channel though.

Firing random technical questions via direct email, IRC private message or IM however, is just plain rude and inconsiderate. Even more so, if you attach a long pastebin or logfile and expect a person to spend time looking at your problem. Unless somebody is explicitly maintaining a public project, and says to email problems within a certain scope, don't treat people like free individual hotline support for your random technical problems.

If you think about it more, you're asking somebody to spend time just for you (it's private, nobody else benefits), for free to solve a problem that's likely related to your job which you are already paid to do. Is the other person's time only meant to solve your problems?

Try this, get some random stranger to do a task for you for free. eg. changing your car engine oil. "Here's the oil, the car manual, I can't quite figure it out, can you do it?"

Situations that are acceptable, is if that person is employed or assigned to you in some way. Meaning you're that persons boss, or that person's client. Or maybe you're that person's parent. A local school maybe where that person is volunteering to help with the Linux setup.

So if want to ask a technical support question, keep it to the public forum. If you dont' get a response, check if you're in the right forum, but if not, don't go emailing privately the most active people in those forums.

If you want to always have immediate private and personal responses for solutions to your technical problems, you can do what everybody else does, which is to pay for support from individual consultants or commercial service provider.

Otherwise, ask the community (publicly) and the community is more likely to help you if they can:

http://foss.org.my/about-foss/support

I had to drive to work last week, something that I don't usually do. It requires a lot of concentration to avoid being hit by rude and inconsiderate idiots. This is rant, feel free to skip this post.

Tailgating

What's up with driving 1m behind the person in front of you? Even at 60km/h,  10m is not enough for you to react in time if somebody in front has to slam on their brakes unless you have Jedi like reaction times. In one second you would have traveled 16m. So by the time you react, press the brake, and hydraulics transfer and the car starts to decelerate, you would have slammed into the back of the car in front already. People do this at 100km/h and above, that's like 30m/sec. Maybe we should do speed in m/sec so people are more aware of just how fast they are going in terms of physics.

The worse is rush hour, where the highways are already packed. So they tailgate and flash their headlights at you even though the road is packed ahead as far as the eye can see.
Only a few people deserve the right to have the road cleared ahead of you, ambulances, fire engines and police. Of course, since I keep some space in front of me they think I'm going slowly, they do the next thing....

Weaving and overtaking from slow lane or lanes where you need to give way

To overtake cars from the slow lane is dangerous, because the cars are slower, therefore the window to overtake is even less as you need to do it before slamming in the car in front of you. Almost always  these people end up forcing their way in front of you as they swerve back into the fast lane. Of course they are probably thinking how awesome they are, when actually you have to hit the brakes to avoid them taking out the left front of your car. And right there behind you is another idiot tailgating you. I usually have to anticipate this and slow down earlier so that the next guy behind me also doesn't slam into the back. Usually though, I just take the middle lane, it's a bit slower but people there seem to be safer and keeping their distance.

Give way lanes are even worse. I don't know why, but people seem to think that when merging and your lane is ending, that when the space is running out, it means time is running out and you have to overtake from the inside and squeeze yourself in somehow.

Sticking car out and overtaking while trying to join main road

On slow packed roads, it's understandable to slowly edge in. Otherwise you would never join the main road. Not so when traffic is relatively fast. Edging your car out a few meters into the main road is bloody dangerous. Of course, when somebody is being safe, the dude behind comes right up beside you and blocks the other lane and your view.

This problem is compounded by the fact that cars never use their indicator light, probably leading to the above scenarios. Maybe drivers are too uncoordinated to use flick a lever. Even driving manual shift, it's something you can do without thinking. So I consider people who don't use indicator lights as just plain inconsiderate.

Be most excellent to each other

Of course it all boils down to being rude and inconsiderate to others. Since coming back 7 years ago, I have to say that driving situation has improved a lot. They should keep the shocking ads on TV going. Driving a car is one of the most riskiest things you will do on a daily basis. Inconsiderate drivers probably are not aware that they are not just being rude, but that they are potential murderers every time they are behind a wheel.