IP Longevity Through Open Source

You never forget working for your first vendor.  I was reminded of this at the SUSEcon conference last November, when I met a young colleague who had recently started with the company and was overflowing with enthusiasm for the culture, workmates, and feel of the workplace compared to his previous experiences.  I saw the same degree of enthusiasm in former colleagues at NetApp, who had grown up with the company, and invested themselves completely in the company culture, even as it went through change.  My own experience with Sun Microsystems was also a match: there was something special about working in a place which, especially for a technologist, offered access to such great ideas, people, equipment & opportunities. For me, this was compunded by being there during the dotcom boom.

While I was at Sun, the place seemed to be brimming with innovation - we were proud of our brilliant ideas & cutting-edge execution. There were a few less-enthusiastic, or perhaps better said as "more realistic" people who didn't look through such rose-coloured glasses. These were the folk who had come to Sun from elsewhere - places like DEC (Digital Equipment Company), which had previously been one of the go-to places & hotbeds of innovation. They could see the good times wouldn't last, and in the end were proved correct.

It seems there has been a constant stream of "innovation" companies, each in turn attracting enthusiastic contributors, building great technology, and then folding or being consumed by some larger organisation that ultimately fails to capitalise on the innovations. The tragedy here is that as the smart people leave these companies, and the intellectual property gets buried under legal constraints, the innovations get lost, and the next generation effectively has to start from scratch. Sun's amazing technology & concepts of the late 1990's & early 2000's has only recently become part of the mainstream understanding (in 1997, no-one could understand what "the network is the computer" meant - modern smartphones demonstrate the concept completely), yet a lot of companies today are re-inventing the capabilities of the last generation of technology Sun developed before the decline & loss of personnel.

This is where free & open source is so interesting: once ideas expressed in open source are exposed, they are forever available, so the demise of a particular company doesn't bury the intellectual property (even if it does mean a lot of the workers on a project may not be able to spend as much time on it). Perhaps as more and more development moves into open source, we'll have less re-invention of the wheel (or even less out & out ignorance of what has come before).  

So long as we can work out a way to agree on licensing schemes....

Extra Time in Tokyo

For the first time ever, I actually got to spend some free time in Tokyo, over thr weekend between one corporate event & another. I could't have been luckier witht he weather - bright, blue autumn skies,  a crisp frostiness in the air that made walking around easy and comfortable, and no significant wind chill that would necessitate heavy coats.

As per usual I spent the extra time walking... a lot... If I did this much walking at home I'd probably be 20kg lighter :/  Saturday was Kamakura, one-time capital of Japan & home of the 2nd largest bronze bhudda in the country. Kamakura is a country town not far from the sea - there were actually tsunami awareness signs posted on telephone poles: "7m above sea level - be tsunami aware". The town is about 1hour by train from Tokyo central station - and it seems like house prices aren't that outrageous (around 40,000,000 yen gets you a 3br house), although I could have been looking at some dodgy properties...

With a multitude of temples & shrines dotted about a fairly picturesque little town, Kamakura is the classic historical walkabout of the kind that I would have hated as a child Maybe if, as a child, I'd been more into photography; or if ther was the same instant gratification that you get with photos these days, those wlakabouts would have been less dull.  Clearly I still lack the killer instinct for a good candid photographer, since there were a couple of wedding parties who would have made great subjects if I had the nerve to ask for a pose - just got the one snap.

Dinner was in Ginza. I didn't find the shabu shabu place that I went to about 10 years ago, but I found another instead which was pretty good - all you can eat in 90 min, which was a good deal considering I didn't have lunch.

On Sunday I took the subway again to Asakusa. The fine weather & Sunday crowds made it a vibrant place to go, and I was seduced by the smell of fresh baked something to a little store selling sweet Japanese bread & apple pies, and playing a 40's recording of japanese boogie-woogie music to the long queue of people eaiting to buy. It was fantastic! Crispy & biscuty on the outside, light & fluffy on the inside, and warm. So good I had eaten it before I even thought about taking a picture.  I'll have to go back next time for, ahh, "research". 

Another long walk through almost deserted backstreets to Ueno park, also lovely in the fine weather. There seemed to be some kind of koi fish competition going on, with some available for sale: 80,000 yen for a goldfish? 

I trawled through Akihabara & found the little video adapter gadget I was after, but nothing else stood out as being super-cheap.  The area seems to be as much about maid coffee shopes and anime model stores as electronics these days. The fashion market on the other side of the river was probably a better find.

Another lesson of Tokyo on weekends: Akasaka is pretty much closed. Only one restaurant in four was open, and I eventually grabbed a basic meal. Maybe near Ueno or Roppongi would have been a better option. 

The next lesson was to check other flight options than just from Narita (which is 90 mins from the city by bus). My flight to Beijing left at 8:20am, which meant I didn't have time to transit from Tokyo & has to camp at an airport hotel overnight. Not the greatest hardship in the world, but it basically wasted an evening with colleagues. 

My last view of Tokyo this time was the ground crew lined up waving goodbye to the plane - surprisingly uplifting & not something you'd conceive of in most places.

 

Finally, one unexpected bonus of the flight from Tokyo to Beijing (and the fine weather) was the epic view of Mt Fuji. If only I'd asked for a window seat!