aross's blog

This is the third in our series on Asterisk. This article will cover enabling asterisk to record calls. You may want this to interview people over the phone, podcast, or some other purpose. Read on.

In the past, we've been given feedback that as an organization supporting open source and open standards we should not use certain technologies. Adobe flash, and Adobe Air have been two notable examples of this. For some, this issue is black or white... if you want to reach people on the web, flash is a big part of doing so. Conversely, those advocating open standards note the risks and damage caused by using technologies encumbered by patents and royalties and thus push strongly for free alternatives. It is thus interesting to see what Adobe has to say on the matter. Read on.

This story is very interesting given it's significance from both an open and closed source perspective given the high performance and disruptive potential involved.

I meant to post this earlier but was hit with a nasty cold bug that clobbered me - the good news was my hair wasn't infected. The bad news was nearly everything else was.

This is a brief retrospective of what FOSSLC did in 2009, and a look forward to 2010.

Our original goals for 2009 were:

Like many of you who will take the time to read this, I have spent the last decade or so using great software from open source projects. I chuckle when I think of the weekends I lost in the early days fighting to get my XF86Config file tweaked just so, get my new network card working with bleeding edge code, or squeeze out that last drop of performance from my creaky old computer. Along the way I found I was drawn to learn from experiences building and nurturing community. I enjoyed writings and talks from people like Linus Torvalds, Mike Milinkovich, and many others since. I have learned a lot from them and developed a very healthy respect for what they do. They are the masters who make a complicated job of community/ecosystem building look easy. I wanted to share some lessons learned thus far from my own modest efforts, or at the very least, a few thoughts I consider important stated in my own words.

We have updated the site to the latest version of drupal and latest patches including for contributed models. We tested the site and everything seems ok. If you notice anything amiss, please contact us through commenting here. Thank you.

Each year, FOSSLC has been running a conference to bring together community, academia, industry, and government for a couple of days to learn about great open source technology and concepts. We would like to call for proposals to host an event in the summer 2010. Read on for details.

Is it possible for open source to be too successful?

If you talk to someone working at a company where the majority of their revenues come from software with an open source license, you'll more often than not hear the same thing, even though it is possible, it isn't easy to make money with open source. A new trend has established itself, one in which large firms use open source components for the commodity building blocks to develop their software. They can then spend less on these areas, more on areas that differentiate them, and thus be more competitive. This has much goodness, but there are potential risks. Read on.

On Thursday, I posted New open source project for capturing video to announce our project.The response was great. In fact, it took down our server 4 times. Weeeh!

We then posted a screen capture image of the software running. A video is coming soon.

We would now like your help again to name the project. We've picked the best names suggested, and there were some really good ones. Please take a moment to complete the poll. The poll will close in 1 week.

The following is a screen capture of the capture software in action recording this web site. This latest iteration of the interface reads from a flat file which keeps track of speakers and talks for a given event. We found this saves fumbling and bumbling in the heat of the moment as the talk starts. Instead you pick the talk from the list. We'll likely have a balance between this and our text box approach from the previous version....perhaps a way to override the dropdown and type.Read on.