Scott M. Fulton, III @SMFulton3@qoto.org

From @stuartpstevens in The New Republic today (@newrepublic):

"A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s true.

"Because it is."

(About blooming time somebody finally said it.)

You can't really make a mark in the #datacenter #infrastructure software industry today without developing your product in an #opensource environment. That's really the way it is; come to the market with a commercial license agreement, and you'll be perceived as trying to finagle a vendor lock-in agreement with customers.

You can't really grow from being a startup to being, as I've heard it called from more than one source over the years, a "real company" until the product you produce or the service you offer has a discrete, accountable asset value. With financial advisors and underwriters equating "open source" with "free" in their minds, that's hard to accomplish. At some point, a company capable of standing on its own without more funding rounds, must have its own strategy for asserting value. And many companies say, the ecosystem that organically formed around their products, is where the most value originates from the asset.

Which sounds nice. Even inspiring. But what happens when a company executes a strategy that involves replacing its open source licenses for commercial licenses -- as HashiCorp, MariaDB, Redis, and many others have done -- in order to assert value for existing or future shareholders, only for the people comprising the ecosystem to take their market with them elsewhere, centering it around an open-source fork of the original product? There appear to be ethical grey areas on both sides.

For The New Stack, I explore all of these grey areas with world-class experts Richard Fontana (the co-author of GPLv3) and Prof. Clark Asay of BYU Law School.

https://thenewstack.io/closure-is-open-source-licensing-suddenly-unsustainable/

My triumphant return to The New Stack: There's been a resumption of the debate among #infrastructure software #developers over whether decoupling an organization's functionality into #microservices in the name of #scalability reduces complexity or re-introduces it. This happened when Amazon Prime Video engineers made an architectural decision, and chronicled it in their blog. For a streaming video monitoring function, they moved _away_ from microservices, they said, and back toward a #monolithic architecture, for purposes of simplicity, speed, performance, and cost reduction.

Before long, the whole debate fired up again: Microservices only buys you so much scalability, some said, but eventually the complexity of its messaging between services eats any speed gains you had at the start.

At least that's what Prime Video's engineers appeared to be saying. But a close examination of their situation by world-class experts, including from Amazon Web Services (AWS), revealed that the devil was lurking outside the details after all and out in the open where we should have seen him: Yes, they had consolidated some #StepFunctions, but in so doing, they actually went the other direction. They made a microservice; the blog's author simply didn't realize it.

So what was this debate truly about, then? Do we not know a monolith when we see it anymore? Are we so quick to take sides in a debate that we've lost track of what we're actually arguing about?

No, that wasn't a digression. I'm still talking about #cloudcomputing infrastructure.

Anyway, do take some time today to read this article, which features an all-star cast including Donnie Berkholz @dberkholz,
Lori MacVittie from F5, David Mooter from Forrester, Laura Tacho, Ajay Nair from AWS,
@microsoft CVP
Brendan Burns, and one of the original microservices champions, Adrian Cockcroft @adrianco.

https://thenewstack.io/amazon-prime-videos-microservices-move-doesnt-lead-to-a-monolith-after-all/

I think it was Marina Sirtis who first revealed how replacing a female #startrek character's spandex catsuit with a regular Starfleet uniform made the writers treat her more as a brilliant human being. Here we see the same phenomenon with the already brilliant @JeriLRyan in the Voyager episode "Relativity."

First of all, this entire episode is worth it for _this first shot alone_. Second, can we admit that, as Trek fans for over a half-century, we have a bad habit of playing dress-up with our girl characters, that makes both the writers and the viewers treat them more like paper dolls than people? Put this woman in the same wardrobe as any other cast member, and she still radiates, but in a more natural way.

A hero of mine has passed. I have long wished Pat Schroeder would have been this nation's first woman president. Perhaps she was born too early, and in her time, the glass in the ceiling wasn't really all that visible. But she would have been magnificent in the Oval Office -- as she was in Congress, in Colorado, and everyplace else.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/14/pat-schroeder-dies-women-rights-00086926