As Esther writes, open source is a great way to circumvent office politics, which tend to rely on “who you know” rather than “what you know.” Open-source communities, while not perfect on this score, generally offer a meritocracy: You’re as good as your code (or other contributions). It’s a great way to prove what you can do.

As a bonus, open source savvy developers tend to make up to 40 percent more than their proprietary peers. So, untold fame, more money, etc. What’s not to love about open source?

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Sometimes, there isn’t much you can do to kick-start your career. Not everyone can be lucky enough to get involved in a high-profile project at work, or to develop a talent in a technology that’s suddenly in-demand. But it surprises me when IT professionals who aim to move up the career ladders don’t take advantage of one resource that’s a win-win solution all around: get involved in an open source project.

Ah, yes. That work/life balance thing. Well, you always have retirement during which you can relax.

The .NET approach is a chance for Novell to take an entire development framework that Red Hat has shown no interest in and dominate it. For the majority of the linux world, .NET is irrelevant. The Java guys who think some of the aspects of .NET are cool have no interest in running only on Windows.

There are only a few notable exceptions of successful .NET open source companies (I can only come up with MindTouch at the moment, and maybe DotNetNuke.) Novell should take their cash, buy them all and become the leader of open source .NET. It would ease Microsoft’s entrance into open source and theoretically help developers who want their .NET apps to run on Linux (assuming Mono gets some help.)

My previous post about Novell looking to make acquisitions got me thinking about what the company could do to become relevant again. The best I can come up with is that Novell should become the dominant force in the open source .NET universe.

There is nothing else that is strategically interesting at this point that Novell is capable of pulling off. At least this would put a stake in the ground, and would make .NET accessible to a much broader audience.

The gift marks is the second time in recent years that a philanthropist has come through with the money to keep Fermilab in business. But even with the cash infusion, the lab still faces an uncertain future.

The only particle physics laboratory in the United States has received a $5 million grant to continue operating.

An anonymous donor gave the gift to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, of Batavia, Ill., to keep the facility from laying off more employees and prevent some planned furloughs.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

Barring the unforeseen, it’s likely the European Commission will look kindly upon the plan. This would be quite a big deal, setting the stage for a continent-wide challenge to the way big search engine companies set procedures handling log deletion and browser cookies.

Until now, privacy advocates haven’t gotten very far convincing search companies to drastically curtail the length of time they retain data. For instance, the argument made by Google is that keeping log data around can keep you safe, help prevent fraud, and improve search results (using the argument that “better data makes for better science”).

That all may be true–though I’ve known more than a few security experts who argue otherwise–but this is less a matter of computer science than of public policy. And it’s not a fight the search engine companies are going to win. Can you see some congressman campaigning back in the home district for reflection on the campaign plank, “What’s good for Google is good for all the rest of us?” I don’t think so.

On its public policy blog, Google sounded less than thrilled with the news, although it boiled any bitterness out of its official reaction.

We believe that data retention requirements have to take into account the need to provide quality products and services for users, like accurate search results, as well as system security and integrity concerns. We have recently discussed some of the many ways that using this data helps improve users’ experience, from making our products safe, to preventing fraud, to building language models to improve search results. This perspective — the ways in which data is used to improve consumers’ experience on the web — is unfortunately sometimes lacking in discussions about online privacy.

The Working Party’s findings also stated that IP addresses should be treated as personal information, with the full weight of data protection laws. Based on our own analysis, we believe that whether or not an IP address is personal data depends on how the data is being used.

The findings are another important step in an ongoing dialogue about protecting user privacy online — a discussion in which Google will continue to be engaged. It’s also a debate in which we hope our users will participate.

Google figures that it’s already met privacy advocates’ demands by reducing to 18 months from 24 months the length of time it stores private data. I imagine Microsoft, which similarly retains data for 18 months and Yahoo, which keeps data for 13 months, feel the same. They can’t be thrilled with what’s going on because it presents a threat to their Internet business. Unfortunately for them, there’s not a really good counter-argument. (Here’s a good primer News.com assembled on the companies’ respective privacy policies.)

Greg Sterling of SearchEngineLand.com offered a quote to Bloomberg that was spot on:

“Today’s decision may threaten “the golden goose” of the broader business of Internet advertising, which uses customers’ online records to offer personally targeted ads, Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview.”

That’s why you can expect search engine companies to fight as hard as they can, enlisting support from political and business allies. But when it comes to privacy, most people are less concerned with the stock price of big tech powerhouses than they are in keeping their personal data safe.

I spent my lunch today in Buenos Aires with Red Hat’s general manager of South America, which I’ll report on tomorrow. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Red Hat announced a cool deal with Munich Airport, thrice-named “Airport of the Year” in Europe.

Why? Because Unix couldn’t deliver the performance that Munich Airport needed, so the organization went with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to “provide both the savings and performance benefits desired.” Thirty servers and 40 desktops later, Munich Airport is running smoothly and at lower cost than before.

While this may not sound like a lot of servers and desktops, it’s important to remember their purpose: keep air and ground traffic running efficiently and productively. In other words, it’s true mission-critical deployment, however small.

Sun Microsystems has hired high-profile Python programmers Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki, stepping up its bet on open source and scripting languages.

Sun has already hired other open-source luminaries such as Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, in an effort to capitalize on open source and diversify beyond its roots in Java and Solaris.

Python is one of several dynamic, or scripting, languages that have grown in popularity over the past several years. Developers are using scripting languages, such as PHP or Python, in some cases over Java, which is considered more complicated and harder to learn.

Leung, well known for his work with XML and Python, will join Sun as “principal engineer, dynamic languages and tools,” he said in his blog Monday, which means that he’ll be working with other dynamic languages.

“Sun is (finally?) very serious about this. As part of Sun’s new direction, Sun wants to give developers the ability to use whatever tool sets they want. Ruby, Python, PHP, Java. On or off OpenSolaris. On or off the JVM (Java virtual machine),” he wrote.

Wierzbicki is the lead implementer on the Jython project for making Python run on the Java virtual machine.

“Jython is going to remain completely open source….This move by Sun means that Jython is going to get some of the attention that it needs to move forward,” he wrote in his blog.

On July 8, IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed a flaw in the DNS but would not provide the details until all the affected vendors had released patches and all the systems worldwide could be patched. He figured that it would take about 30 days for that to happen.

The 30-day mark just happened to coincide with his speaking engagement at Black Hat in Las Vegas on August 6.

But on Monday, fellow Black Hat presenter Halvar Flake attacked Kaminsky’s plea that a security flaw such as this be kept a secret. Flake then proceeded to lay out what he thought the flaw was. Turns out, he was right and laid the foundation for others to create and publicize an exploit.

On Thursday, Kaminsky will be a guest on the second Black Hat Webinar. This is the second of what is hoped to be a monthly series produced by the conference. Kaminsky will be joined by Jerry Dixon, former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division; Rich Mogull, founder of Securosis; and Joao Damas, a senior program manager at the Internet Systems Consortium. The Webinar begins at 1 p.m. PT.

To see if your connection to the Internet is vulnerable to DNS cache posioning, use this test on Kaminsky’s site. As of Monday, researcher Neal Krawetz was reporting that servers at several high-profile ISPs remained vulnerable.

Once integrated into publishers’ RSS feeds, it’ll serve up contextually-related advertising based around the content, helping publishers make money off the growing number of users accessing their site through RSS readers instead of the site where page and ad views have been factors in revenue.

For users who did not have access to the AdSense for Feeds menu in Google’s AdSense, it’s a pretty straightforward setup. Publishers can set ad frequency, placement, and have it only add them on content that’s over a certain size. It also employs the same “channels” tool that lets you later track ad campaigns on certain sections of your site.

Google Blogoscoped’s Ionut Alex Chitu notes this release comes just a few weeks after the closure of FeedBurner’s in-house ad publishing network, meaning all new publishers will need to through AdSense to be included in in-feed advertisements.

AdSense users can now set up advertising for RSS feeds, right down to what length of post gets advertising.

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

Doerr was the keynote speaker at the MIT Energy Conference here Saturday. He alternated between expressing wonder at the progress in addressing global warming and discouragement at the overall state of affairs.

Kleiner Perkins investor John Doerr sees a 'green tech' boom whose scale is falling short.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

The theme of the conference is “scale,” as in finding the right technologies and policies to address burgeoning global energy demand without polluting the planet to the point of dangerous greenhouse gas levels.

Doerr is a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital icon Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he has invested in Google, Amazon.com, Sun Microsystems, and several other successful technology companies.

Thousands of people have seen a video of a talk Doerr gave at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference last year, in which he broke down crying, telling the story of how, after seeing the movie Inconvenient Truth, his teenage daughter angrily told him to fix the global-warming problem because his generation caused it.

Two years ago, Kleiner Perkins announced the creation of its first green-tech investment fund, and Doerr has become a high-profile investor and policy advocate in the field.

Altogether, the company has invested more than a half million dollars in 30
green-tech ventures, many of which Doerr touted during his talk.

Fisker Automotive, founded by a former Aston Martin and BMW sports
car designer, will have a four-door plug-in hybrid electric vehicle out next year. Another investment, Amyris Biotechnologies, is using synthetic-biology engineering to create low-cost malaria drugs and synthetic biofuels that mimic the characteristics of hydrocarbons.

Doerr also successfully lobbied to pass the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

“So what’s happened in the couple of years since my daughter yelled at me? We’ve invested a lot, we’ve lobbied a lot, and I’ve learned a lot. Think about it: who would have thought that a designer of gas guzzler vehicles would make a 100-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrid?” he said in reference to Fisker Automotive.

But despite all the accomplishments of these innovative companies, he struck a downbeat tone on both technology and policy. After listing some of the technologies being generated by Kleiner Perkins-backed companies, he said:

“To the point of scale, who would of thought that all of that is not going to be enough? To get solutions that scale, we are going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We are going have to use policy to harness innovation to make sure the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do, so that it becomes the probable thing to happen. There’s more money that flows through markets in a day than all the word’s governments in a year…

The energy market is $6 trillion. I like to say it’s the mother of all markets. Compared to that Internet, which is a big deal, this is much bigger, much more exciting. But the challenge is much larger. Going green–solving that problem will be largest transformation on the planet.”

Doerr said the entire planet needs to “reindustrialize” to adopt less-polluting forms of energy.

Many people have called for the equivalent of an Apollo Project or Manhattan Project in the United States to solve the energy challenge. But Doerr said that those, which were multibillion-dollar, single-government agency projects, “fail miserably to convey the size of the challenge.”

To underscore how little is being done at the federal level, he said government funding in U.S. research and development on renewable energy was less than $1 billion last year, while oil giant Exxon makes $1.1 billion in revenue a day.

The $5 million in federal research for geothermal power is “so low, it’s almost criminal,” he said.

He predicted that the three leading presidential candidates will address climate change regulation far more aggressively than the current Bush administration, which has opposed mandates and sought to stay outside United Nations-led climate talks.

Despite Doerr’s concern for inadequate action on clean energy, he touched on the question of an investment bubble in green tech. Overall, he said there isn’t a bubble, but he does see some problems.

“There’s too much money chasing too few good ventures, despite the size of this problem,” Doerr said.

Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into the sector, making it one of the fastest-growing areas of investment, though it still garners fewer venture capital investments than biotech and information technology. That rapid capital influx, along with the challenges of large capital demands and regulatory complexity in energy, have caused concern that investment has been too aggressive.

In response to a question, he said the venture capital industry will not change to fund more capital-intensive energy projects. And he noted that returns in venture funds have been getting worse.

But he predicted that returns for green-tech investments will be good, once more recently funded start-ups go public in 2009.

Echoing the comments about a “global-warming bubble” made earlier this week by investor and tech luminary Bob Metcalfe, Doerr said “booms,” or large investment waves, are generally good for the economy.

“I think that we’re at the beginning of a green-tech boom. I can assure you we don’t have an overinvestment to deal with the scale of the problem.”

Nova Spivack

(Credit:
Radar Networks) In addition, the company raised $13 million in Series B funding from Velocity Interactive, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Vulcan Capital. The new capital will go toward building out the back-end infrastructure, which can be substantial as Semantic Web applications process and store large amounts of data, as well as adding staff as the business scales up, says Radar Networks founder Nova Spivack said. The company raised $5 million in Series A funding in April of 2006 from Vulcan Capital, Leapfrog, and angel investor Ron Conway.

Twine has been in private beta with a few hundred users since November 2007. “We have 30,000 users on a wait list, and we will let them in 1,000 at a time in our first week in the market,” Spivack said. “The next phase will give us tons of feedback, and we will continue to fix things and add new features, but a lot of it is there already and you can get a feel for where it is headed.”

“Twine is a new service for knowledge networking, sharing, organizing and in finding information from people you trust,” Spivack explained when the application was first introduced in October 2007. “Unlike a social network that is about who you know, Twine is more about what you know.”

He also describes Twine as “Web 2.0 with a brain,” and as a milestone in making the Semantic Web useful to end users. (See my earlier post on Twine.)

Twine is similar in concept to Facebook and other services that aggregate relevant feeds and notifications. Twine categorizes people, places, organizations, and other concepts.

(Credit:
Radar Networks)

Twine will be ad-supported, with limits on storage and the number of advanced features for the free version. A subscription-based, premium-content service is also planned.

Twine isn’t the first application to apply Semantic Web principles, extracting meaning, and classifying and relating data with or without using Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL (the query language for RDF).

AdaptiveBlue’s BlueOrganizer, for example, knows about thinks like music, books, wine and travel destinations, but doesn’t use RDF or other Semantic Web standards. Metaweb Technologies’ Freebase is a like an open public almanac that includes structured information on topics such as movies, music, people and locations./p>

See also Paul Miller’s ZDNet take on Radar Networks’ news.