Adopting Linus Circle of Trust

After a tiring long 6 year on-off war in my ADempiere project about 'trust' within a stable branch of codebase, I was led to discover how Linus Torvalds, the Lord of the GNU Kernel did it.

I then setup the same Circle of Trust he talked about in my own Sourceforge.net space. Those other admins are whom i just met on the road to Berlin from Paris, trekking through Austria.

Why do I suddenly trust them? Well they help me do things in this wondrous project and played wonderful hosts and we had face to face discussions which let us communicate and share better or best rather than online forums mostly. They also trusted my role as the 'benevolent leader'.

In fact we first met via online forums and chatrooms within our Open Source ERP project. But politically wise (beyond just these peers) I am always aligned to the best coders in town which is Carlos Ruiz and Low Heng Sin. So I have extended my circle into Rings of Trust extending quite viral throughout the world.

You can easily smell that from the Jenkins stack we setup based on our little roadmap and works.

(Pcitures: TOP - taken by Dietmar Berlinger of Austria of us having our own mini barcamp in Volker's (right) home office in Kempten, South Germany. Later, Thomas Bayen (left) topped it up by inviting us to his Krefeld home higher north.
RIGHT - Those rare sessions with the almighty coder, Low Heng Sin who happens to stay 20 minutes drive away from my Kuala Lumpur farm.
LOWER - (To be put up later a prized photo with the omnipresent Carlos Ruiz in Bogota, Colombia which i am due to visit next month from January 4th till February 14th 2012, compliments of Thomas Bayen) (Finally i arrived! And posted this last photo. So now i have completed this big circle!).

Google Gravity makes DotComs obselete

I learnt something important from Thomas Bayen last week in Krefeld. I think he is the origin or quite original on this subject because i Googled 'Google Gravity' and did not quite get the same thing he meant.

What he mean is that users today do not care what site or domain name you have. It is your content that matters. Users will just Google up whatever they want and they will hit whatever content relevant to the search out there.

Say for instance we have this war going on in our ADempiere project over control of assets and domain space among which there are squatters or opportunists stealing our domain names and hoping to get alot of hits from it. Well, the truth is that no one knows your name and probably just search for the category or exact question they have for example, "Free ERP solution for beer industry" and guess where will they hit? Most likely not ADempiere or even FreeERP or OpenERP if there is some site out there already having such information within its content base.

It is from more sheer content that users repeatedly hit that makes the creator or domain name no matter how obscure famous. Take for instance I always hit roseindia or vogella when asking about Java issues. I do not hit oracle.com or java.com that readily.

Thus Thomas Bayen theory to me seems right. Create real content, and the world will find you. Not holding the right domain name does not matter. This fits into the earlier theory I learnt in the 2000s during the dot-com crash era that it is the 3 Cs - Content, Community, Commerce.

That is what I did also at my www.red1.org site which harbours content of Compiere and now ADempiere and onwards to the future iDempiere.

(pic shows Thomas Bayen with one of his twin daughter Laura up in the attic where he held me captive for some days as his guest).

The ADempiere Wars - Institution and Dictatorship in Open Source Project

Oops, I done it again! I started WWIII in the ADempiere Project. Well, once a Darth Vader, always a returning Vader. And this time I am surprised there are still many Star Wars 'Empire Strikes Back' supporters out there, prompting me for a takeover and I promptly put up this notice.

Wait a minute. If what I am saying which is that the ADempiere e.V Foundation setup at my prompting in Berlin with proper by-laws and elections is too business-like, deaf, dumb and many other Oxford terms i could muster, then how come I have control of the www.adempiere.org URL? Well, uh... I hid it upon retirement when them authorities dropped by to search my home from brick to brick for the last remnant of our freedom and dignity.

Today many people in my community shudders if I had given that URL back, putting all eggs in one basket, as ADeV has also taken control in the dark of the night the ADempiere Inc, USA and brand. As John Lennon's Imagine song goes, "But I am not the only one..". I read a blog, that suggest its OK to keep such assets in another basket. So that is why during the founding days in 2006 I placed the bigger www.adempiere.com asset in Carlos Ruiz of Colombia.

Now, I want to make one clear remark about Benevolent Dictatorship. Firstly there is equal potential fault with Dictatorship as with Democracy. But what can be evil in both rules are not some trigger happy Saddam or US Marine, but an inept closed door execution of power. A Democracy can be equally cruel, vicious, deadly, suppressive, fatal, humungous, audacious, blatant, deaf, dumb and many other Oxford terms I could muster. A dictatorship like Linus can be really great as the person is open, swears outside the Queen's English, approachable and can tolerate Big Mac.

What is important is finding the right person for the job and having the streets wide enough for any eventual popular uprising to take place, just in case. Which, by the way seems to be the popular choice to make a statement in most modern spick-and-span democracies.

The ADempiere project has voiced in an anarchic fashion of their preference to return to the good old days when I was up there, inefficient but effective, clumsy but loved, always siding the top contributors, always allowing reverts of bad code, always allowing just anyone to walk in and shake my hand and sit right next to me. In fact the person who removed my admin rights was the one whom I gave the admin rights without much ceremony. Of course this time he quoted some obscure dubious convention and rule of a central command and control that is the answer to my previous anarchic rule.

Just that this new institution often do not show a human face. They show their own (interpretation of) by-laws, made in the 'silence' outside forums, without chat logs and excuses of busi-ness busy, while our top contributors slogged at it, code by code, swan egg by swan egg, feeding the masses including the Animal Farm new occupants.

Now when I open my mouth and stated a desire to return to anarchic rule, they cited need to stick to democracy, and when we started nominating citizens that supported us, they began demanding for immigration papers, and when we began exposing bad code in trunk, they cited loss of business as a direct consequence of my foolish expose. They even use Godwin's Law. I have this to say back:

To hell with your business. This is a Bazaar. 'THIS IS SPARTA!!!' would sound really cool, but I have no fight with the Persians. Just those democrats.

:)