Friday, January 25, 2008

Happenings at Technalign!

My latest blog is regarding the new happenings at Technalign and some new directions. The employees at Technalign have been asking that we open more of what we do to the community, including a new project called VoIPTelCaster. My first reaction was we needed to be closed source and add code to existing applications. I also thought, why would I give all this code away that cost the company to produce with programmers at Technalign. What I found was there were already people programming for free and other companies were doing it. I spoke to Mark Hinkel awhile ago and asked him why I should do this since I was confused. After a bit of time and groaning I decided that we should and we should also allow the community to be part of what we do, so with www.technalign.org we are now opening our projects, including Warrior, to the community with full access to development and input provided by them. The Automatix folks, as always have been more than helpful in getting things going and providing suggestions.

While in a meeting last week I had our support people hammering me to do something with community editions. Again my reaction in the meeting was less than pleasant when these guys were staring at me with the look of a hurt puppy or others like mad dogs. Why should I support a community Linux distro? I thought back to when my son first got me into Linux with those big blue eyes of his and that excitement when he said I should move HIATLANTIS to Linux. I then thought about how hard these guys work on distributions, kernels and everything else and that all my support people actually play with and use many different distributions. How else can we get companies and people to move to Linux unless they have actual support services they can purchase at a pretty good price. They were right, providing support for community editions was a good thing that would allow us to give back. If you're curious please visit the www.technalign.org site for more information. We're going to give 5% back to the distributions, but you should read the support pages on the .org site. We also have 3 new repositories thanks to Jared at Automatix called cowboy (free speech and free beer), cowgirl (Free speech and not free beer) and Wrangler the commercial repository. Again, Automatix helped and directed this effort as the start of Warrior!

While we were developing Electricity, one of our community guys said we were nuts and should just use Wine-Doors. Once again I didn't want to listen to dj in the forums and decided that we needed to do our own thing. In come the developers and support guys hammering me once again – almost like a daily routine here now. I contacted Karl over at Wine-Doors and what a great guy he is. He's one of those true Linux guys who just loves to do his thing! Well, Electricity is now powered by Wine-Doors and anything we do gets back to them and not kept to ourselves. We're also going to do the port to OS/X with their guidance and that of the Automatix guys. Yeah, we all have those MAC guys around, even at Technalign – right Steve you short-timer? Just joking! Anything that sells of Electricity with support, we're giving a spiff back to the guys at Wine-Doors.

All in all coming together as we get ready for our new office in Margate, FL! It's pretty cool, a bit warm actually, but cool that there is ready and able Linux people we can hire.

Just want to say thanks to everyone and here we go!