pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

John Schinnerer wrote:
> Aloha,
>
> Finally I have *huge amounts* of power!!
> Bwaaahahahahaa!!!!
>
> Well, it seems that way anyhow, going from mimimalist car battery to 
> having my full solar electric system up and running :-)

Great show, John!

> So once I get a little more fully furnished here in the 'ohia hut, I can 
> potentially work on the bug db some more and do some actual testing.
>
> It might be good if someone could tweak our PIW home page content, where 
> it says:
>
> Look for collaborative capabilities in early 2005.
>
> ...that's making us look pretty stale...
>
> More news as it happens.
> What is everyone else's status?

Still here, involved and interested and will probably be more so through 
the winter andd into the Spring.

I just completed a 10 year soil improvement on 4 of my 6 acres and got 
it all planted with overwintered crops. I have a new dual processor
Zeon/Intel platform with huge storage capacity, fast DSL connection,
22" Lacie CRT monitor and other peripherals. I'll try to figure a way to 
help the project with this gear, maybe some graphics.
What about a Blog for PIW? I am setting up a Permaculture Piedmont NC 
Blog on Google's Blogger. Very nice software. Ibiblio is asking users in 
their community to test drive their new blog software. Particulars below:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [webgroup] An invitation to beta-test Lyceum
Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 16:47:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Fred Stutzman <fred@metalab.unc.edu>
To: lyceum-bugs@lists.ibiblio.org

Greetings,

One of ibiblio's current software development projects is Lyceum, an
enterprise-scalable multi-blog derivative of the popular blogging package,
Wordpress.

You're invited to beta-test Lyceum.  We've reached an important development
milestone, and we'd love to have you give our software a test spin.

You can go to the test site right now and begin. The test site explains
everything you need to get started:

   http://lyceum-jjb.ibiblio.org/lyceum/portal.php

Or read on for more info...

We'd simply like you to "use" the application, running through all the
functions offered, and seeing if they work, or fail.  We've put the
application through some regression tests, so a lot of the functionality
should work.  It is particularly helpful to test the application's
lesser-used functions, because this is where the bugs will be found (normal
user-paths have been walked quite extensively).

When you come upon a bug, please submit it to
lyceum-bugs@lists.ibiblio.org.  A helpful bug email is one that briefly
explains:

-what the problem is
-the actions you had performed just before the problem happened
-any other details you can think of. redundant is okay!

If you don't feel like writing a lot or don't have many details, that is
okay too. A small bug report is better than nothing.

So go to the test site right now, create an account, and have fun!

   http://lyceum-jjb.ibiblio.org/lyceum/portal.php

Thanks for your help!

The Lyceum Team:
Fred Stutzman
John Joseph Bachir
Sayan Chakraborty


Lyceum: http://lyceum.ibiblio.org
Wordpress: http://wordpress.org

_______________________________________________
webgroup mailing list
webgroup@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/webgroup



Also:

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | Open source turns money-spinner
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4407742.stm>
Open source turns money-spinner
By David Reid
Reporter, BBC Click Online

Open source code, written by a community of thousands of software 
developers, has always been made freely available. But there are ways of 
making money from it, as David Reid finds out in Amsterdam.

Programmer
Open source programmers from around the world met in Amsterdam
The Dutch are pretty open about the sort of stuff that many of us prefer 
to keep to ourselves - what goes on beneath the sheets, for example.

Perhaps that is why Amsterdam was chosen for a recent international get 
together of the open source movement.

The movement believes strongly that rather than being a trade secret, 
the source code of the software should be open for anyone to play with.

The result is software like the Linux operating system, created through 
collaboration that can involve thousands of programmers.

"Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just 
people working with computers, people passed around software because 
that was how you got computers to do things," explained Tim O'Reilly, 
the founder and CEO of computer information and publishing company 
O'Reilly Media.

"What we take as the shape of the software industry today, where 
software is shrink-wrapped and sold, is really a 20-year anomaly that 
started in the 1980s.

"Now we have companies like Microsoft as the avatars of that movement. 
But by the mid-80s there were already people saying 'we don't like this'."

And what they did not like was the idea of closing off information, 
especially information that others could build on.

Rich pickings

The open source movement does not object to making money. In fact, many 
of these programmers can afford to be choosy about how they earn.

        
We now have a world that has distribution costs of zero. We have just 
built a world-wide copying machine called the internet
Karl Fogel, CollabNet
The source code may be free, but there is gold in software support, 
training and publishing.

Damien Conway, who trains programmers through his business 
Thoughtstream, said: "I think the most successful of those is definitely 
licensing support; providing the software and then saying: 'if you want 
to buy a support contract, here's what it will cost you on an ongoing 
basis'.

"That way people are getting something that they can work with free if 
they want to, but when they get into trouble they have backup and you 
make some money out of it."

With businesses keen on open source software and the support it offers, 
geek chic is smartening up. And the software, as well, is now designed 
by, but not necessarily for, programmers.

Open source might be more user friendly, but can it really go toe-to-toe 
with the giants in the market place?

Programmer
Supporters of open source say it brings innovations to the market
Open source has been criticised for devoting so much energy to coming up 
with open source alternatives to what is already commercially available.

Voluntary collaboration, or so the argument goes, is good for worthy 
imitation, but it takes money, and lots of it, to truly innovate.

But IBM's Chet Kapoor believes only some of that is true.

"If you look at the open source, open community aspects of open source, 
they are definitely bringing innovations to the market, solving problems 
that are not being solved by standardised software," he said.

"These are programmers building great technology to help their peers to 
build software to solve customer problems."

Business asset

One very recent open source innovation is Flock, a browser that 
integrates next-generation web technologies such as RSS, blogs, 
bookmarks and photo sharing.

In fact the fortunes of open source are closely tied to the internet, as 
well as the fact that copyright and intellectual property are looking 
difficult to guarantee. Open source, then, might be a model to flock around.

Karl Fogel, from software distributor CollabNet, said: "We now have a 
world that has distribution costs of zero. We have just built a 
world-wide copying machine called the internet.

"People who learn to use that copying machine for what it is are 
suddenly discovering that they can have a great deal of success in 
traditional business economic terms.

"Freedom is a business asset, under certain circumstances."

If open source really can make money for free, then it might make sense 
after all to harness the wisdom of the group.

Click Online is broadcast on BBC News 24: Saturday at 2030, Sunday at 
0430 and 1630, and on Monday at 0030. A short version is also shown on 
BBC Two: Saturday at 0645 and BBC One: Sunday at 0745 . Also BBC World