I frequently talk to our customer base about what keeps them up at night. While there is a large variance of answers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is the conditioned fear of some monster lurking behind the scenes that could pounce at any time. The second, of course, is the actual monster of downtime on a critical system. Ask most tech folks and they will tell you outages seem to only happen late at night or early in the morning. And that they do keep them up.

Entire companies and product lines have been built around providing those in the IT world with some ability to sleep at night. Modern enterprises have spent millions to mitigate the risk and prevent their businesses from having a really bad day because of an outage. Cloud providers are attuned to the downtime dilemma and spend lots of time, money, and effort to build in redundancy and make “High Availability” (HA) as easy as possible. The frequency of …

There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

From Monday to Wednesday we at eZ Systems AS had our internal developers conference in Skien, Norway.

Since I joined eZ systems only recently, this was the opportunity for me to get to know all employees that gathered from all over the world. Most of the Tuesday was reserved for a "Crew Day" with some "team-building" which took place in a forest nearby.



On Thursday and Friday the eZ publish conference 2006 took place.

During the conference I met with Sébastien Hordeaux of WaterProof SARL, the …