Thomas Koch - free software

Free Software in companies

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:46:25 +0200

At work we currently have a discussion: I'd like to develop some components as Free Software. My bosses like the idea, but the client goes nuts only thinking about it.
So as part of the discussion I thought to collect those companies who actively advertise their Free Software. I know about the big ones, but it would be even more interesting to get a list of succesful small companies that share at least part of their inhouse projects. On the other hand it would not be too interesting to list full Free Software companies like Red Hat.
It would also be fine to share this list in some wiki (FSFE?) when it grows larger. For some companies I also list very popular projects from my point of view.

big companies

Adobe
Facebook: Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe, HipHop for PHP, ...
Yahoo: YUI, Design Pattern Library, YSlow, Hadoop, ZooKeeper
Twitter
Google: Chromium Browser, Google Summer of Code, Android, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Protocol Buffers - data interchange format, Java Collections Library, unladen-swallow - faster implementation of Python, ...
IBM: Developerworks (Tutorials), Eclipse, International Components for Unicode (ICU)

middle sized companies

Digg

small companies

101tec (now Datameer): Katta (distributed lucene on Hadoop), zkClient

Update: Need to add Danga (Gearman), Liip.ch with Okapi, Flux CMS, Jackalope, rackspace

NoSQL summer at lake constance

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:31:00 +0200

Have you already started to try out these new storage/database things commonly referred to as NoSQL? (For you google-bot, I'm talking about CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop, Hypertable, MongoDB, Tokyo Cabinet, etc). Well, it's one thing to install and use them but another to understand all the computer science background about them.
Therefor many developers around the world thought to make this summer a NoSQL summer. Local meetings are held in many cities: London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, lake constance ...
If you like to meet for a beer and learn and discuss about some of the hottest stuff in computing, then come around! Please select the dates when you can join and the papers you'd like to discuss. You can subscribe to email announcements or ical and rss feeds at the lake constance nosql summer page.

tnt is not topgit

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:43:49 +0200

As I've already written, I'm working on an alternative to topgit. I made a first attempt in perl some weeks ago, but gave up after some frustrating hours. Yesterday I started again in python and had a very nice time putting together the groundwork and the first two commands.
It may be noted, that I've no previous programming experience in neither perl nor python!
By now, I can create a patchset branch and add a patch branch to it. There's still a lot to do. For my talk at the Debian Mini Conference in Berlin next month I'd like to be able to update patch branches, export patchsets and give a status summary.
Maybe I can already find somebody who's interested in joining me with this project? The code is in my github account, however the name will most probably change.
One reason that I've been much faster in python is the fantastic python-git library. I can only recommend it!
In other news: I'm searching a couch to surf in Berlin from june 7.-12. I prefer couchsurfing over hotels mostly to get to know nice people around the world. Please contact me, if you'd like to host me for a night or two. (thomas at koch punkt ro)

Update: Slides of my talk at the debconf are available.

Going to FOSDEM 2010

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:52:08 +0100

I'm going to fosdem 2010.

These are things I'd like to attend:

time	room	topic	speaker
10:45-11:30	Janson	Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company	Brooks Davis
13:15-13:45	AY	Packaging Java Software for Debian	Thomas Koch
13:40-13:55	Ferrer	CiviCRM: Common goals of FOSS and Not For Profit Organisations	Xavier DUTOIT
14:00-14:45	H.1308	The Maemo Community Council: a case-study in governance	Dave Neary
14:00-15:30	Guillissen	LPI exam session 1	Klaus Behrla
14:00-14:45	Janson	What is my system doing - Full System Observability with SystemTap	Mark Wielaard
14:30-15:00	H.2213	Building Federated Social Networks on XMPP	Tuomas Koski, Simon Tennant
15:00-15:45	Janson	Ganglia: 10 years of monitoring clusters and grids	Bernard Li
15:00-15:30	H.2213	XMPP and the Social Web	Alard Weisscher, Laurent Eschenauer
15:30-16:00	H.2213	PubSub Gone Wild: Info Sharing at Mediamatic	Ralph Meijer
16:00-17:30	Guillissen	LPI exam session 2	Klaus Behrla
16:00-16:15	Ferrer	SIP Communicator: Skype-like conf calls with SIP Communicator	Emil Ivov
16:20-16:35	Ferrer	Kamailio (OpenSER) 3.0.0: redefinition of SIP server	Daniel-Constantin Mierla
16:40-16:55	Ferrer	asterisk: An introduction to Asterisk Development	Mark Michelson
17:00-17:15	Ferrer	csync: Roaming Home Directories	Andreas Schneider
17:30-18:00	H.2213	Jingle Nodes: An Open Alternative to Skype	Tiago Camargo
18:00-18:30	H.2213	Multi-User Jingle: Voice and Video Conferencing with XMPP	Dafydd Harries, Sjoerd Simons
18:15-19:00	H.1302	Spacewalk: Linux Systems Lifecycle Management	Marcus Moeller, Sandro Mathys


09:15-10:00	H.1302	Linux distribution for the cloud	Peter Eisentraut
10:00-10:45	Janson	RepRap - Manufacturing for the Masses	Adrian Bowyer
10:30-12:00	Guillissen	LPI exam session 3	Klaus Behrla
11:00-11:45	AW1.120	My life with HBase	Lars George
11:00-11:45	Janson	Tor: Building, Growing, and Extending Online Anonymity	Andrew Lewman
12:15-13:00	H.1302	Cross distro packaging with (top)git	Thomas Koch
12:15-13:00	H.1308	Shared libraries in Debian	Sune Vuorela
13:00-14:30	Guillissen	LPI exam session 4	Klaus Behrla
13:15-14:00	AW1.120	CouchDB, a database designed for the web and more	Benoit Chesneau
14:00-14:45	Janson	Large scale data analysis made easy - Apache Hadoop	Isabel Drost
15:00-16:30	Guillissen	LPI exam session 5	Klaus Behrla
15:30-16:15	H.1308	Continuous Packaging with Project-Builder.org	Bruno Cornec
15:30-16:15	AW1.120	Comparing the MapReduce way in CouchDB with the SQL way in a RDBMS	Stéphane Combaudon
16:15-16:45	AW1.120	Designing a scalable content management system on NoSQL technologies	Evert Arckens
16:15-17:00	H.1308	Debian Secrets: power tools for power users	Wouter Verhelst

talking on basic income at google open source jam

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:42:25 +0200

Tomorrow evening I'll be going to google's open source jam in Zürich. I want to explain, why free software and the idea of basic income do play together well. The slides are already prepared:
google_jam_talk_basic_income.pdf