Jason Brooks

For the past few months, I’ve been using Twitter, the microblogging service that you may well be sick of hearing about. Right off the bat, I was attracted to Twitter because the 140 characters per entry that Twitter allows add up to about as much blog as I’m capable of mustering at most times.For me, […]

For the past few weeks, I’ve been running OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my main work notebook, in part because I’m working on a review of the OS, and in part because Linux’s rough edges have grown a bit smooth to support the desktop tweaking and fiddling with which I like to sidetrack myself. One of the […]

More than a few times now, I’ve heard it said that our new president, Barack Obama, will be an open-source president. Owing to the many meanings of “open,” this catchy tagline has been used in a lot of different contexts, most of which relate to transparency in government. There are, however, indications that the Obama […]

Dabble DB is a Web-based application from Smallthought Systems that can help solve one of the modern knowledge worker’s most enduring dilemmas by bridging the gap between the spreadsheet and the database. Spreadsheet applications are excellent tools for ad hoc data crunching. You fire up a new spreadsheet, key or paste in your data and […]

As somebody who enjoys blowing away his notebook computer to install a new operating system every six weeks or so, I have a special appreciation for the way that software as a service lets me leave my key applications and data, accessible and undisturbed, in the cloud. At least, “accessible and undisturbed” describes the way […]

In my previous post, I began making a case for an open-source Windows, and several commenters have weighed in on why such a Windows licensing shift would/could/should never happen. One of the more common points of contention involves a fear of forking–the idea that an open-source Windows would be too fragmented. One of the most […]

With IT budgets contracting under the weight of the recession, the sales pitch for software as a service is sounding more attractive than ever. SAAS can help organizations quickly roll out new applications, avoid large upfront capital investments, and expend fewer application management and maintenance resources moving forward. However, the qualities that make SAAS an […]

Keynote’s Keynote Internet Testing Environment, or KITE, is a desktop application for testing the performance of Web sites. While KITE is aimed primarily at Web application developers, it caught my interest as a tool for measuring the performance of an organization’s current or prospective software-as-a-service-based applications. I tested KITE Version 2.0, which began shipping in […]

In my previous post, I wrote about how Microsoft’s attitude toward open-source software has evolved, encouragingly, from outright hostility to cordial coexistence, and about how the company might maintain and extend its platform leadership position by moving beyond simple tolerance to aggressive adoption of open source. Obviously, Microsoft isn’t getting knocked off its perch any […]

Recently, I met with members of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, including the group’s director, Robert Duffner, to talk about their company’s activities around—and evolving stance toward—open-source software. After assuming an initially hostile position toward open source, Microsoft has adopted sort of an experimental approach—the company developed a pair of bona fide open-source software licenses, maintains […]