Adding Understanding

Dave Winer has been blogging about vendor lock-in for quite a while now. It occurred to me earlier as I was reading about a really cool project and realizing that this project would never be possible with commercial applications. Would it be possible to put Microsoft Content Management on a flash drive even if the license permitted it? How else could one have a flash-drive based cross-platform web-enabled application?

When companies and organizations take the stand that open-source is not for them it is often a short-sighted view. Certainly there are organizations that can't deal with open source themselves but there is no upside from skipping the numerous vendors working with open-source and there is almost certainly long term risk. What does a business do when their system is no longer supported and their data is locked-in to a particular vendor's system? Just ask some organizations that are just now trying to migrate from mainframe systems to database systems and the years of work and millions of dollars it takes to make the move.

According to reports on the web Monster will modify several resumes and remove job postings today. Citing Federal laws the company says it must remove references to certain countries. So if your resume says you travelled in, worked in or studied in some countries Monster will be deleting portions of your resume. Time for a new, and open, resume and job base.