Why I Admire Bill Gates

DISCLAIMER - I am not an employee of Microsoft and I am not been paid by them (Though i wish i were).

1. Bill Gates strikes me (allegorically meant that he impressed me due to some story i hear throughout the years) as someone who is a real good business thinker.

2. On the way he pulled IBM into the biggest deal of the century with the desktop MSDOS. Tell me how many business leaders you know who can do that? Most i know here only wait for subsidies.

3. On how he turned his whole ship around before it sank during the Netscape dominance days. Tell me how many captains can turn his ship around in such a typhoon. The only i know here is Dr. Mahathir. The rest will ponder about selling their souls off.

4. On how he replied to a Senate Congressional hearing that fines him USD1 million per day under some strange law for becoming the only one,
"It is all just an idea. Any 16 yr old kid can come up with his own and wipe me out the next day. So don't punish me that the world has no such kid yet".

Well, one such kid did emerge. Its name is Google.

(here is one good speech for Harvard graduation, some 30 years later)

Live and Die Song Tribute To Michael Jackson

'Live & Die' by red1, Toki (Malaysia) and Sidi Daoud (Mellow Mark, Germany) was rendered at the morning the news was breaking about Michael Jackson premature passing. May Allah bless MJ.



Song by Toki/red1 (composed August 2007)
Lyrics by red1
Music arrangement and vocal by Sidi Daoud (June 26, 2009)
Raw content here is made Creative Commons 3.0 pending future arrangement.

=Live and Die=
You have always sung this song
Since the day that you were born
Till the day you're gone;
You may look everywhere
Thinking there is something there
It may take you long

-chorus-
I will make you a promise, i will take you there
To see what you've never seen before
This the path you take, this the path you die,
So you'll be and be evermore

I can take you all the way, You can be there everyday, you will learn to fly
You can sing, you can cry, the world open far and wide, you will live and die

-repeat chorus-

Here i am, wondering what will i be
In a world, full of lust, with fools of certainty

I will go up to the mountain, i will build my temple there
no longer i look down below us.
No more sorrow i will bear.

I can take you all the way, You can be there everyday, you will learn to fly
You can sing, you can cry, the world open far and wide, you will live and die

-repeat chorus-

(listen to the metal less version )
(this is the original unarranged)

A Compierean Story 2004

This prospect is already a client when I introduced the ImportPrice Loader based on Compiere in 2004 This client is a large multi-national business dealing in trinkets and geomancy charms. It has many challenges such as:

1. Third party POS at retail outlets that require importing of its daily sales orders. That is done via mapping to the ImportOrder Loader. However the system does not have a Import Price one and so I need to create for it.

2. Legacy data of thousands of products and past ledgers that require scrubbing and migrating to the new system.

3. The main contractor who secured this project and engages me to resolve technical issues who assumes wrongly that this application, Compiere at that time is bug free.

This point about assuming open source projects to be bug free is interesting. In Compiere’s case, though it was open source, it was still new and maturing at that time. It also did not practice an open policy to accept bug remedies so as to protect its idea of intellectual property. Thus been a new maturing project is bound to have more bugs than expected. Also those bugs are what I termed as ‘Discovery’ bugs which are like bumping into them in the middle of the night. As I or no one else around has understanding or access to the minds behind the software we would not know what to expect from it. Any bug found is like an uncharted part of a map. They were disastrous for my client that time and the project quickly overran its banks, into months beyond the year.

For the ADempiere project, being a community fork of Compiere, there were much more practitioners and developers working with the same codebase and evolving their collective experience quickly thus producing enough ‘map’ material of the monster in their hands. Thus we could quickly resolve serious bugs and holes within the system. We could also figure out how to extend the model in its architectural sense. Carlos Ruiz of Colombia is chiefly responsible of noticing the need to control extensions by enforcing Centralised Record ID and use of the ModelValidator to protect core processes from mutating. However he was not the only one to think in that fashion.

Previously there were already the XML2AD by Marco Lombardo, 2Pack by Robert Klein, and ADCK by Trifon Trifonov.

This part of history is interesting. I actually worked with Marco Lombardo in his Compilo project back in 2004 for better Compiere technical documentation before he introduced to me his idea of XML2AD in transfering changes from one installation to another without repeating the changes of the AD metadata. I then roped in Trifon Trifonov who became active in my red1.org/forum and was about to leave his employer and ‘bite the red pill’ - another term for going fully freelance selling FOSS implementation services.

Trifon, based in Bulgaria, being a strong Java developer quickly picked up the concept of Compilo’s XML2AD and began helping to complete its opposite, the AD2XML. However Marco became part of a commercial enterprise that forks Compiere and sell their extensions on a closed basis, thus stopping him from releasing his AD2XML into the open. Trifon however introduced his part as open source but in his forked version which he called ADCK or Application Dictionary Customiser Kit.

Another developer from USA, Robert Klein in turn took a different path from the whole concept at the beginning but reuse and extended the Compilo model to fulfil what he called the PackIn/PackOut concept where the user need not deal with external handling of Druid or XML files. All the user does happens right inside the live application. It is a more automated form of ADCK. Robert called it 2Pack and released it separately into open source which he gladly assisted in integrating into our new ADempiere project.

Today the project has evolved to quite a dizzy height as a more advanced plugin architecture called the OSGI of Eclipse is now made feasible through the efforts of Andreas Schmidt but largely completed by Joerg Viola, both in separate outfits in Germany. All this coloured the wonderful world of community open source at its best which is now at its height or shall we say, it has not peaked and is still rising.

Open Sex, Not Free Sex

Suddenly, without warning, while translating the university course on Open Source ERP into local Malay language for Malaysian readers, i came across the chapter about Richard Stallman and his definition of his struggle in FSF. I realised the true meaning of his words that he meant 'Free' as in freedom and not 'free' as in free sex. Boy! Did the sky suddenly opened up and i hear angels singing the Fort Minor tune of 'Remember The Name".

Where was my mind all this while? After about 5 years since knowing Compiere Open Source, and the last 2 or so years on ADempiere, the community fork from Compiere, only today i truly have gone to the true depths of that abstact concept that is behind our existence and battles. That is it! Free Software is not free. It is just supposed to comform to that pristine principle that the nature of software development is that it is social and thus politically it has to conform to the principle of freedom of speech. Nevermind Guantanamo Bay, just stick to that basic heavenly tune ringing softly in my heart.

So in all earnesty to call it Open Source instead should be even more closer to that percept as Free Software carries the stigma that it costs nothing. Sex is not, remember? Good sex is more expensive depending on how good it is. Now, why then, will Richard Stallman disagree with the term Open Source and insists that it does not stress the word 'freedom'? I wouldn't wana argue with his holyness on this, but look at this statement and tell me if you see what i see:

Free Sex; Open Sex

Which statement conveys the meaning of freedom better? Not free sex. That would mean that you want to have sex without paying. No wonder you end up in cheap sex. 

Open Sex would mean that you have the freedom to that basic human need but you cannot demand it without payment or effort as we are now saying -not- Free Sex. You can appreciate that been open about sex, means you are promiscous but not getting it for free.

Thus not only is Free Software less apt than Open Source Software in describing that philosophical bent, it can be even be misleading. I admit that it is not easy explaining FOSS or else i would not have been unemployable the last 5 years. It is so difficult to sell this concept to idiots and those who have hormonal disorders. What more with commercial versions such as what happened with Compiere and OpenBravo that has abused the term but locking up that freedom due to their morbid fear of IP and branding dilution on the road to IPOland. Which they won't go very far, with the freedom fighters lining the whole route with the community fork that allows the freedom of anyone to come in and make a stake on our ADempiere project.

Lately we have even obtained OSGI capability thanks to a few german contributors. The point is that they have the freedom to be part of the bandwagon, and improve the culture and civilization of the software, which is growing unabatedly as its DNA dicates.

I think i should stop chanting here and move a few metres back from the centre of the bonfire.

Open Source Needs Good Salesman

Sometimes it is so hard to sell your services around something so cheap, or in fact entirely free as in Free Software that cost zero for its licensing.

All you want is just to offer your services at a reasonable rate, but heh!, when people hear that the software is free, they do not see the need of you. So in the end you have a hard time explaining that you as a better informed expert can help the client saves money and effort and heartaches.

But no, the word 'free' has corrupted their minds. They expected even your time to be free, and demand you to give them pre-sales or presentation or even prototype as if you have SAP or IBM that pays your salary. 

Thus i come to the conclusion that it is all a matter of salesmanship. You just need to have the best sales know-how you can find. Try googling for "art of negotiation" and "art of salesmanship".

I came across this 'Peeler Salesman' who could sell something that at first thought no one would wana buy. It is like selling ice to eskimos. But then we do buy bottled water don't we? So do learn more salesmanship whenever you can. It could be that you are just a bad salesman at selling yourself.

Here are some thought-provoking links:

> High Probability Selling

> Selling Idea For Royalties

> The Fox Forum

> The Art of Woo

> People Love To Buy!

> What Do They Want?

Now ADempiere Fights Itself

Somehow when you reached the top of SourceForge most active rankings, you have no further need for enemies but yourselves. Lately we been seeing the community split in halves and the strongest contributors having to defend themselves against, well, their own community!

It all started some while ago over the integration of POSterita (another breakaway distro from early days) back into ADempiere. Read this record 111+ replies thread here. Then I tried to divert from the burning bush to the centre ring in the arena, but i myself came under more fire. So i am forced into a truce here. After some relative calm, an englishman fired up a small stove. This prompted a seeming plot that is still not cooled off at press time. But notice there my shrewd change of tactics. I changed sides!

Mortal combat in olden days do not last this long because, well, you really die from wounds. But not these virtual spats. As long as your keyboard has keys and your router does route, your fingers aren't crammed for tapping small horizontal spaces. And some probably do it vertically while lying in bed.

But all seemed well today when our greatest hero whom you either hate him or love him is to be overwhelmingly loved when he released these latest gems.

It was another close call and more action to come, as we have lost sight of our competition - Compiere and OpenBravo seems to stay away from the top rankings for quite some time now. There will be more days when ADempiere again turn on itself for game.  To relieve its boredom on the upward march to overcome proprietary software's hold on ERP space.

Aren't Bugs Free?

I put question mark there because i do not dare to end any sentence now without asking WDYT - what do you think?

My humble opinion and i am sure many in the developers' world (at least newbies) will share this common conclusion from here. That a developer ironically learns fastest or most from bugs and somethings s/he will inevitably breaks and the more the better.

Firstly its the psychological impact that he is responsible for breaking something and thus highly motivated to fix it. Thus bugs are not free and there are expensive in both cost of repair but more importantly in the cost of learning. Yep, bugs are more important to science than to life. And we are even more thankful to those bug finders out there for been the eyeballs we never have - covering areas we could never have the time and resources to as any software company will confess.

Now in the software development bazaar context, so are other developer eyeballs in their share of the psychological impetus. They equally feel responsible in trying to offer help or fix it and earn the kudo first. Call it peer pressure. It still cost something to make a whole bunch of nerds feel good. And the whole community at large feeling calm.

Now imagine the world of software without such bugs popping up now and then.  I know, i know, its best there are no bugs, but that does not exist with software. Software has a very short lifespan. If its left alone it will die say in 6 months. I mean death in competition and SourceForge :-)

For us in ADempiere, there are different types of bugs. Some are elegantly discovered and we say 'good catch!' Some are very rude self created ones, and we say "What in Farmer Jones' name were you trying to do?"  

Can we seriously have an utopia where all developers are born or made equal and behave equally? Not even in the Animal Farm fiction.

In the bazaar approach, Eric Raymond described it as chaos and put forward the paradoxical question of whether really good software can come out of an apparently disorganised un-cathedral approach?

Well it did. So get used to the farm-life will ya?