www.alexhudson.com Open in urlscan Pro
4.150.214.10  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

SECURITY BY DESIGN FOR EVERYONE



 * Home
 * The Blog
 * The Newsletter
 * About Me

 * Home
 * The Blog
 * The Newsletter
 * About Me



CATEGORY: FEDORA (PAGE 1 OF 6)



FEDORA’S REVISED MISSION

By Alex

On April 4, 2017

In fedora freesoftware strategy

Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never
easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do.
Setting a clear and crisp vision is crucial to create an aligned organisation.
Refining down into an elevator-pitch sized statement while avoiding
generalisations, platitudes and (frankly) abstract jibberish is practically
impossible. Doing so outside a corporate environment I think is even more
difficult – money is at least a straightforward motivation to hang a hat on.

Read More




A BUSINESS PLAN FOR UBUNTU

By Alex

On April 4, 2017

In fedora forecasting strategy

Back in 2010 I wrote a post about Canonical’s business direction, in response to
something Bradley Kuhn had posted. Both he and I were worried about Canonical
becoming reliant on an “open core” business model – worried not just from the
perspective that it would dilute the principle of Ubuntu, but that frankly every
time I have seen this executed before it has been a dismal failure.

The posts are worth re-reading in the context of Mark Shuttleworth’s
announcement today that Ubuntu will be dropping a number of their in-house
technologies and, more importantly, abandoning the explicit goal of convergence.
I would also say, read the comments on the blogs – both Bradley and I found it
deeply strange that Canonical wouldn’t follow the RHEL-like strategy, which we
both thought they could execute well (and better than an open core one).

Of course, our confusion was – in hindsight – obvious. We weren’t seeing the
wood for the trees. The strategy has since been spelled out by Simon Wardley in
his rather good talks; one example is here:



It’s well worth to take the time to watch that and understand the strategy
against RedHat; but it’s pretty easy to state: “Own the future, wait for it to
come to us”. Let’s see why this is important.

Read More




WHAT I REALISED I’M MISSING FROM GNOME

By Alex

On July 7, 2013

In fedora freesoftware misc

Not that long ago, I did a switch on my Android phone: against all the promises
I made to myself beforehand, I switched on the Google account and allowed it to
sync up to GCHQ/NSA the cloud. I did this for one main reason: I had just got an
Android tablet, and I despised having to do the same stuff on each device,
particularly since they weren’t running the same versions of Android, and one
was a Nexus – so not all the UI was the same.

Read More




A FIRST LOOK AT DOCKER.IO

By Alex

On May 5, 2013

In fedora freesoftware misc

In my previous post about virtualenv, I took a look at a way of making python
environments a little bit more generic so that they could be moved around and
redeployed at ease. I mentioned docker.io as a new tool that uses a general
concept of “containers” to do similar things, but more broadly. I’ve dug a bit
into docker, and these are my initial thoughts. Unfortunately, it seems
relatively Fedora un-friendly right now.

Read More




PACKAGING A VIRTUALENV: REALLY NOT RELOCATABLE

By Alex

On May 5, 2013

In fedora freesoftware python

Recently I’ve been trying to bring an app running on a somewhat-old Python stack
slightly more up-to-date. When this app was developed, the state of the art in
terms of best practice was to use operating system packaging – RPM, in this case
– as the means by which the application and its various attendant libraries
would be deployed. This is a relatively rare mode of deployment even though it
works fantastically well, because many developers are not happy maintaining the
packaging-level skills required to maintain the system.

Read More




IS PACKAGE MANAGEMENT FAILING FEDORA USERS?

By Alex

On September 9, 2011

In fedora freesoftware

(For those looking for an rpm rant, sorry, this isn’t it….!) Currently there’s a
ticket in front of FESCo asking whether or not alternative dependency solvers
should be allowed in Fedora’s default install. For those who don’t know, the
dependency solver is the algorithm which picks the set of packages to
install/remove when a user requests something. So, for example, if the user asks
for Firefox to be installed, the “depsolver” is the thing which figures out
which other packages Firefox needs in order to work.

Read More




SPECULATION ON GOOGLE’S “DART”

By Alex

On September 9, 2011

In bongo fedora freesoftware

Just yesterday people jumped on the biographies and abstract for a talk at goto:
the Keynote is Google’s first public information on Dart, a “structured
programming language for the world-wide web”. Beyond knowing a couple of the
engineers involved – which allows a certain amount of inference to take place –
there’s also some speculation that Dart is what this “Future of Javascript”
email referred to as “Dash” (this seems entirely possible: a dash language
already exists; Google already used ‘Dart’ for an advertising product but have
since stopped using that name, potentially to make way for the language).

Read More




THE QUALITY OF FEDORA RELEASES

By Alex

On September 9, 2011

In fedora freesoftware

Scott James Remnant blogged his ideas about how to improve the quality of Ubuntu
releases recently, triggering some discussion at LWN about the topic. I offered
some opinions about Ubuntu which are not terribly interesting because I don’t
get to use it often; however, I did also write about Fedora based on the last
couple months’ experience of Fedora 15 & 16. Before I get to that, at roughly
the same time, Doug Ledford was posting his thoughts about the “critical path”
process – essentially, saying it was broken.

Read More




WHO CAN PROGRAM?

By Alex

On August 8, 2011

In bongo fedora freesoftware

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the above question for a
number of different reasons. For people who really study programming, like I
attempt to, there are a number of claims/myths/legends/tales that are commonly
held about people who cut code for a living, such as: some programmers, the
“alphas”, are as much as ten times more efficient than the common programmer;
there are people who “get” computers, and those who don’t.

Read More




SHORT THOUGHTS ON THE RIOTS.

By Alex

On August 8, 2011

In bongo fedora misc

Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort
of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was
open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se,
but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot
just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north.

Read More



Page 1 of 6

Next →




ABOUT ME

Advisory CTO to a portfolio of start-up and scale-up companies. I specalise in
taking businesses through periods of extraordinary technological change, often
navigating tricky waters of enterprise sales and regulatory compliance.

This is my personal site, where I write primarily about software architecture:
how to build better software, faster, and more securely.


SOCIAL MEDIA

You can find me in the following communities:





CURRENTLY WRITING





ARCHIVE

 * Jobs in the AI Future
   May 5, 2023
 * Introduction to the Metaverse
   October 10, 2021
 * It's tough being an Azure fan
   September 9, 2021
 * The Trials of Contact Tracing
   May 5, 2020
 * A No Drama Action Plan for Covid 19
   March 3, 2020


CATEGORY

certification infosec security forecasting Uncategorized misc methodology
serverless strategy teams containers performance freesoftware proprietary fedora
Put Simply quotes python bongo green



@EALEXHUDSON ON TWITTER