San Francisco CCP has made it easy for people to become a supporting member online with their credit card, PayPal, etc. You can become a member even for just $10 a month. northxsouth is very proud to support community networks like SFCCP and we urge everybody to do whatever they can to increase the SFCCP membership. If you believe in old school internet values of openness, democratic expression, freedom of speech and non-commercialism, they have an online sign-up page so you can become a member right now :)

We will be at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit today! Hope to see you there.

Java One is in San Francisco and there has been a ton of press because Sun has re-licensed Java with the GPL2. We can’t ignore it any longer :) Java is not one of the technologies that northxsouth really uses. If you don’t know, open source software contributed to a period of sharp decline for Sun Microsystems during the dot-com crash. While Linux enjoyed over 10% growth quarter after quarter, Sun’s revenue kept plummeting. Everyone with an IT department realized that Linux offered everything that Sun offered at a substantially lower cost, both initial and maintenance. In their defense, Sun fought back and is starting to recoup their losses from that period. In the web development world, a similar effect happened, with widespread adoption of open source PHP. So, for over a year, there has been a battle within Sun for the strategy to open the source code to Java. Finally, the big announcement was made at this year’s Java One Conference, happening right now in San Francisco. They even made suggestions that open source developers should be compensated for the technology they’ve contributed to the general public. Remember that recently, Sun recruited Ian Murdock of Debian fame, who had been working at the Linux Foundation.