Mark Fletcher says that stealth mode is a bad idea for Web start ups, and it’s hard to disagree. When I came on board at my company, they had no Web services offering at all. They just knew what they wanted it to do, roughly. Within weeks we had something up and running that customers could use. It pretty much sucked, but it worked for our early customers, and I came up with something a lot better not too long afterward.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a list of things you can do to let your elected officials know how you feel about torture. Even if you’re not opposed to it categorically, you should still let your Congresspeople know that you want our policies on this issue to be clearly stated.

Paul Graham has a good piece on public relations. Our company recently hired a PR firm and seemed to have really good luck picking up some press coverage as a result. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has some interesting comments no the piece as well.

Charles Taylor has written a paean to the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears that should be read. I watched part of the movie on cable a few weeks ago, and honestly could not imagine such a movie being made today. We live in a time plagued not only with empty moralizing but also where the worst thing you can be is a less-than-ideal parent. A movie that depicts foul mouthed little kids drinking beer after little league baseball games just doesn’t seem like it would cut it in this environment. For that reason I was shocked to read that Richard Linklater is going to be released in July. My hopes are not high.

Forbes ran an interesting article a couple of days ago about the troubles open source businesses are running into. They face pressure not only from users who use their applications without paying for any of their services but also from big companies like IBM who are getting into open source as well. The article makes some provocative points about how the only open source player making any money is Red Hat, companies like MySQL AB and the JBoss Group are money losers. Unfortunately, the author draws the wrong conclusion at the end:

Because when these open source software providers burn through their venture funding and go out of business, customers will need to either hire teams of expensive techies to maintain that orphaned code or pay someone to rip out the old stuff and replace it with something new. Either way, all that free software is suddenly going to look awfully expensive.

This analysis is utterly wrong. Basically there are two kinds of software out there. Software that’s too big to die, and software that isn’t. If the software is too big to die, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s open source or not. If MySQL AB were to shut its doors tomorrow, the MySQL database would be just fine. Companies like Google and Yahoo rely on it, it’s provided by hundreds of hosting providers, and it’s mature. It’s no more likely to suddenly go unmaintained than Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.

What about software that’s not too big to die. In my Java work, my preferred method for dealing with relational databases is to create a persistence layer using Hibernate. Hibernate’s author works for the JBoss Group, a money losing open source company. What happens if they go out of business? First of all, Hibernate has enough users that it’s almost certain that somebody would maintain it. (Indeed, someone would probably hire Gavin King to keep maintaining it.) Even if that weren’t the case, I could hire a Hibernate hacker to fix any problems I run into or add features, or I could fix it myself. Let’s say I instead had decided to purchase a Java ORM package instead, and that the company goes out of business. In that case, I’m guaranteed to have to pay someone to rip out the orphaned code and replace it with something else, because the fact that I don’t have the source code leaves me with no other option.

I’m surprised that people still argue against open source software by making this unfair comparison — commercial software that’s going to be around forever versus open source software that could suddenly find itself unmaintained. When you compare apples to apples, the advantage goes to open source.

James Robertson weighs into the mostly uninteresting throwdown between Joel Spolsky and Robert Scoble to say that regardless of Microsoft’s benefits and nice computers, their issues with tight coupling are going to keep making it harder for them to ship software. Trying to get a piece of software ready for release when you’re testing it against a DB server that has not been released and running it on an operating system that has not been released — not fun.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has a good article on the significance of the Downing Street memos.

One micro-saga that’s been going on for the past few months has been Jim Winstead’s quest to find a buyer for his blo.gs service. A couple of weeks ago he said he had a buyer but didn’t say who — today he announced that Yahoo is the winner. Seems like a good deal for both sides.

I don’t know if I’ll ever use OpenSolaris, but I think it’s cool that the people who built it are so eager to talk about it. The fact that team is posting so much about it makes me believe that it’s pretty good. (I certainly have no desire to write about projects that I’m not really excited about.) When it comes to connecting with me, there really is no better form of public relations than letting engineers loose to blog. The profusion of weblogs at both Sun and Microsoft has increased my respect of both companies significantly.

Once again my grandiose plans of creating the ultimate weblog software have been stymied by a busy life and other interests. My intention has been to write something cool based on Ruby on Rails, but I see that I haven’t gotten around to it. Work has been busy, and hey, have I mentioned how cool Netflix is? Anyway, my latest idea is to migrate this site to WordPress, for two reasons. The first being that someone else has already written it, so I don’t have to. The second is that it wouldn’t involve migrating everything on my site to a Web host with first class Ruby on Rails support (or worse, some kind of standalone server or virtual server that I would have to manage myself). I have been with pair.com for about 9 years, and needless to say I’m pretty comfortable with them. The third is that even as I intend to learn Ruby on Rails, I have been honing my PHP skills to a fine edge involuntarily for work. So today it would be much easier for me to hack on WordPress to make it do my bidding than it would be to write something from the ground up in Ruby on Rails. So that’s looking like the path of least resistance today.