Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, I am not qualified to nor am I imparting sound legal advice.

BSD & MIT

Both licenses are very similar. They are very liberal and allow for sub-licensing meaning that any derived works may be released under a different (commercial or otherwise) license.

What they primarily accomplish is mandating that the copyright notice remains in place and the disclaimer that the software is without warranty.

The BSD license is a bit more specific on how the copyright notice needs to be displayed.

GPL

This is the most popular Open Source license. Without a full description of what the GPL does, as there are many places to find this, the GPL is a true Open Source license in the sense that it enforces that derivitave works must retain same license. In doing so it ensures that Open Sourced items remain open source. It does this by enforcing this based on distribution of binaries.

LGPL

The LGPL is substantly the same as the GPL with one major difference. It permits for inclusion within other projects with different (including propriatary) licenses. A good read explaining when to use this vs the GPL is located here.  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

AGPL

The AGPL is again substantly the same as the GPL but addressing the fact that today distributing binaries is becoming less common, falling to providing access on a server. The AGPL address this by requiring enforcement based on if it is accessible from a network (ala a web site).

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I came across an article today titled “Help! My boss is on twitter“. Allow me to share a secret with you, if you current boss isn’t on twitter yet, I can guarantee that your next one will be. Social media has caught on like wildfire. In all the excitement too often people forget that everything that you say on twitter / facebook and others is being published and recorded. This isn’t a private conversation you are having. Just because it’s not at the top of your feed doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

Even if your current employeer isn’t savvy to social media yet, your next employer will more than likely due some due diligence (as simple as a google search) and will be hiring or not hiring based on what he/she finds. You can tell more about an individual from their tweets than a job interview. Even if you nail an interview (assuming you get that far) a few misguided tweets could blow it for you. Here’s some general good advice.

1. Nobody want’s to hire someone that has a bad attitude.

It negatively affects everyone and lowers productivity faster than you could imagine. If you are complaining, epecially about your job, boss, position, etc in your tweets (in a very public way) imagine how much more damage you are doing in private.

2. Loose lips shink ships.

If your the type of person that is isn’t smart enough to keep private matters private, why would anyone trust you with any information or responsibilities.

3. An image is worth 1000 words.

Be especially careful about what images you post. Your appearance and conduct can say a lot about who you are and nothing reveals that better than a photo or video.

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Regardless of your title or degree of experience, any misstep could result in a failed project. It’s a good habit to review the following two slide shows, if nothing else to provide a good confirmation that you are on the right track.

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Every so often a “new” technology catches on. RIght now it’s nosql databases. A couple years ago it was Ruby, before that it was java. Each arise because they propose a solution to an existing problem, or in other words a better way of doing something.. something, but not everything.

Unfortunately knowing when to use the technology requires actual experience with it, which never seems to catch up to the hype engine quickly enough, so consequently the technology transforms into a “golden hammer”. Better at everything and ready to displace everything that existed before. Of course this nearly never happens because it’s not rarely true. Current technologies exist because they do something well. when a new technology emerges it will likely be good at a different thing meaning the two will co-exist.

The second stage of the hype factory is when it spills into the business world. Last week I had a VC ask me if we were using Hadoop. DId he really care if we were using Hadoop? Of course not. He didn’t know enough about our needs or architecture to even know if Hadoop would be appropriate. He just knows that Hadoop is an emerging technology that a bunch of people are talking about. Really what he wanted to know was are we keeping up with the latest technologies.

The current situation due the popularity of the LAMP stack, which is a victim of it’s own success. While Linux is virtually universal in application today, Apache, MySQL and PHP each have their own niches. The LAMP became so easy to use together that people began to use MySQL for things that relational databases aren’t good at and are unnecessary for. NoSQL isn’t remotely new technology, though until recently open source implementations either didn’t exist or went unnoticed.

As Facebook, Twitter and others saw them as solutions to their massive scalability solutions (and because they were using relational databases for things they shouldn’t have) people began to see NoSQL as a golden hammer, big enough to solve Facebook’s problems.NoSQL is a good solution to the right problem, though unfortunately the gain in popularity now largely exists because well intentioned, though seriously misinformed people believe it’s the next golden hammer.

Since I began at Open Sky a few weeks ago I have been tasked with building out a great team. Over the course of my career I have interviewed hundreds of people (mostly developers) and hired dozens. At OpenSky I was able to find and hire 6 fantastic employees in my first 6 weeks and wanted to share some of the tips and techniques I have learned over the years and found successful.

Make connections

Most of my best hires came through referrals. Get out and network with people in the community and the space your needs are. There are so many tools available today to do this includingLinkedIn and Twitter. These tools are not to replace personal connections, but to assist in making and keeping them. There really isn’t any excuse for not having a solid and reliable network.

Interview well

The whole purpose of an interview is to determine if the candidate is a good fit for your company and a good fit for the given role. Also it’s important to ensure that your company is a good fit for them. Something they will be passionate about and will help their career. I usually know within the first 10 minutes if the candidate is the right fit.. If not I’ll let them know why and end the interview right there. There are many good different approaches to interviewing. Figure out what works for you.

Don’t compromise

If the candidate isn’t the right person, don’t hire them. The right person is out there. Ever time I have compromised I have regretted it. Only bad results have come from it. Nobody is better than the wrong body.

Hire well and fire better

Success comes from having the right person in the right job. The interview process is supposed to determine this, but even the best interviewers aren’t perfect. If the candidate isn’t the right fit move on quickly. The right candidate is out there, go out and find them. The damage the wrong employee has an organization is huge. Help them find the right opportunity where they can be the most successful.

Image by steve.francia via Flickr

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that I have accepted a position at The Open Sky Project. I am leading the architecture, development and technology.

It’s rare in life that one has the opportunity to do what they love to do and be paid to do it. Even rarer is to do something great with people you love working with. At OpenSky I have found this and more. There is an energy and excitement at OpenSky; come spend 10 minutes in our office and you will feel it. The team is passionate about what they are doing and the passion is growing.

OpenSky has assembled the strongest team I have ever seen at an early stage startup. Each member of the management team has excelled in their particular domain and exhibits youthful passion for doing it. This level of deep experience allows us to focus on building the business, which is hard enough without the distraction of trying to learn how to do your job as well.

The more time I spend at OpenSky, the more impressed I am. There isn’t a weak link in the chain, and when you combine this with a great idea, good things are bound to happen. I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this team working together to build the next great e-commerce revolution.

We are at a really good place right now. All startups begin with an idea, turn it into an experiment, and if that goes well, build a business around it. We are at the exciting stage where the experiment was not only successful but exceeded all possible expectations. Now we get to go full speed ahead building a great business and all the technology and systems to power it.

We have the challenge and opportunity to build a modern scalable e-commerce system using the best open source software, libraries and technologies.

I am looking for the best and brightest to come and join our great team of all star engineers. If you’re interested give me a shout out on twitter @spf13 or check out our jobs page.

If you want to find out more about OpenSky, come check out our blog!

Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr

Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password.

In our office we have a similarly shared bathroom, but instead of a password, we have a physical key required to unlock the door.

A password for the bathroom was just the right amount of security. It prevented just any stranger from easily accessing the bathroom, but wasn’t inconvenient and easy to provide access to. My friend simply told me the password and I as a visitor had all I needed to enter. It was the right amount of security for the right purpose.

Our physical key certainly provides a higher level of security, but with additional inconvenience. Physical keys hang next to our door which is easy enough, but what happens when someone took the key into the bathroom, or home with them. The solution is for everyone to make their own copy which is excessive and unnecessary for a bathroom.

If our expensive merchandise was stored in a room, would we use a password to guard it. Never, wouldn’t think twice about it, we would have multiple security measures in place (and do at Portero Luxury). Keys, codes and surveillance.

In our increasingly electronic world how many times are you using passwords for sensitive data when a key (or key + alarm + password + …) is appropriate. Or even worse, how many places share the same password. Is your email and bank password the same? If someone had access to your email address & password from a single site how much could they access? what damage could they do?

For those that claim they choose insecure over inconvenient I say to you why choose. You can have both secure and convenient. Excellent tools exist to fix this problem, whether it is server (SSH keys) or browser 1 password (mac) or KeePass (win).

Image via Wikipedia

Some of this may seem like a broken record, yet every single time you hear about a bank losing millions of customer data, or a company having a security breach they consistently have failed to implement and enforce the most basic security practices. Here are 7 simple security practices that you cannot afford to not follow.

1. Secure pass phrases

Throw away the notion of a password. Pass phrases consisting of multiple words and symbols are considerably more secure and easy to remember. Most people use the same password for everything and it’s almost always a word or a word+#. A good pass phrase can be something like “Mary.had.@.little.Lamb”. It’s really easy to remember and nearly impossible to guess or brute force. Using a password management system like One Password for Mac is also a good idea.

2. Educate your users

All too often policies are put into place but lacking training necessary to ensure that policies are understood and followed. Quarterly web casts can go a long way to ensuring that the most critical policies are complied with without adding unnecessary disruptions to the business.

3. Perform regulatory compliance self audits

Hackers are attempting to break into your systems right now. If you aren’t holding self audits than the only ones auditing your systems are the hackers. It’s critical that this practice takes place routinely to ensure that your data and systems are as safe as possible. It only takes one small mistake to make you vulnerable. Routine system checking means there is a chance you will find it before someone else does.

4. Access provided on a needs to have basis

Yes this is inconvenient. Yes you need to do it. Firewalls, ACL, fine grained permissions. Properly setup roles. In every system you do use, in every level. This also means that root/admin permission should always be behind sudo and never logged in.

5. Encrypt all sensitive data

All sensitive data should be encrypted. Hard drives should be encrypted; Tunnels should be encrypted using SSH, VPN or SSL; Wireless networks and even wireless keyboards. Passwords should be stored via a one way encryption like md5.

6. Never take data off site (flash drives, laptops, etc)

It seems every time you hear about a bank or government agency losing millions of critical identity information a portable drive or laptop is involved. While encryption is part of the solution here, it could entirely be avoided if sensitive data is not permitted off site. Data should reside on servers sitting behind properly established ACL and not be available to be copied or transferred onto a laptop or portable drive.

7. Use common sense

Lastly, the most important security principle is to use common sense. If it seems wrong, it probably is. Common sense is your best defense. Use it wisely.

Image via Wikipedia

Imagine if Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc had chased every oppotunity that they came across. One thing is certain, you wouldn’t recognize their name today. Each of these companies was successful because of extreme focus around a central vision. As Bill Cosby said.. “I don’t know the key to success but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.”

Bill Gates achieved monumental success with Microsoft, and attributes “focus” as the key to his success. He stated “maintaining focus is a key to success. You should understand your circle of competence and spend your time and energy there…I’ve learned that only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are.”

There are three central questions you need to be able to answer:

• What is the goal?
• What is our action based on (underlying principles)?
• What is the purpose?

or in 3 words, Vision, Values, and Purpose.

The interview runs long and is spread out over multiple clips. I’ve only included the first handful here. Watch the rest on youtube.

It’s clear that they have a reasonably good relationship and clearly know each other well. They have a genuine and sincere respect for each other. It’s amazing how firm a grasp both have on the industry as a whole. Steve is clearly passionate about the engineering aspects of his business, while Bill is full geek about the coding and operates very much in a shrewd business mentality.

Clip 3 contains some jabs at each other.. where else, but on the desktop / os space.

In clip 5 they both are on the same page taking a single stance.. which now 2 years later is obviously against Google.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Z7eal4uXI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_HThS8DZo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scf6dV4FSf8

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvLTlQWT6A

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuhHIqJyjY0

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Vendors only provide the customers they are certain will give a glowing endorsement. You need to know the right approach and the right questions to ask. If you do, you can ascertain quickly if the vendor is right for you.

Your purpose must be to determine if the vendor is:

• Honest and Trustworthy
• Reliable
• Appropriately priced
• Easy to work with
• Performs well
• Supportive

If possible you should always ask for former clients as references. They will likely be more honest about their relationship and reasons they are no longer clients can be insightful.

It’s important to first start at a high level, then drill down into the specific services or products that you are looking to implement.

Questions to Ask:

(customize to your specific needs)

1. Introduction

• Tell me about your company and relationship to the vendor?
• What other vendors did you consider?
• Why did you choose this vendor?
• What did you bring this vendor in to do?
• What products or services did you use?
• Did they deliver on time? Were you satisfied?
• Did the vendor fulfill promises?

2. Implementation?

• How long did the implementation take?
• What sort of resources did the implementation take?
• What would you do differently next time?
• Was the vendor responsive to your needs?
• After implementation how was the ongoing support?

3. What do you like?

• Does the product or service perform as expected/required?
• How easy is it to use?
• How has it performed?
• What impresses you the most about product / service?

4. What do you dislike?

• What are the major friction points?
• What are the limitations?
• Are these easy to work around?
• How supportive is the vendor when you have issues, questions or concerns?

5. Training & Support

• Is training required?
• How long does it take for an individual to become proficient?
• Does the Vendor provide training? If so is it adequate?
• How expensive is it to train new employees?
• How knowledgeable are the support staff?
• Was the vendor willing to go the extra mile to help?

6. Conclusion

• What kind of results have you seen from using product?
• What surprises did you encounter?
• What advice do you have?
• Would you recommend this vendor (for our needs)?

Engaged workers do work harder or longer, but that’s not the core benefit, rather an engaged employee will demonstrate commitment, dedication, initiative and will work for the company (rather than for a paycheck). Engaged workers require no supervision and little management. Only when employees are properly engaged can organization move as one towards a unified goal. When employees are engaged, organizations will succeed because all the participants will ensure it.

How does a leader engage employees and once engaged, how do you maintain it?

Here are a few suggestions.

1. Embrace councils

   Let the group make key decisions together. Nothing engages people more than knowing that they have a say in the direction (and by extension success).

2. Ask for help.

   It’s amazing how trusted individuals feel when they are asked for help.

3. Eliminate leeches

   Someone who isn’t performing or engaged is a cancer on the organization. Resolve the situation by either engaging them, or giving them the privilage of finding a different company they can be engaged with.

4. Listen

   Sure you are busy. Employees recognize that, so when you take time out to listen to them they feel unified and trusted. As a bonus, you will learn a ton from listening to those whom you lead.

5. Admit mistakes

   Nobody wants to work for a ‘perfect’ leader. You’ve made mistakes, plenty of them. Admit them and you’re employees will respect you for it.

6. Accept an honest answer

   If the answer is ‘no’ or ’3 weeks longer’ accept it. Show you have trust in and respect for your employees by trusting their ability to assess the situation.

7. Have a vision

   Any organization needs a vision they can rally around. Something guiding their decisions and efforts.

8. Be consistent

   Once you have a vision, strategically plan out goals and stick to them. Don’t be as a flag in the wind, changing direction every time the wind blows. Give your employees a reason to have confidence in your leadership abilities.

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Image via CrunchBase

Recently a book came out The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience. Jobs has mastered the art of presenting. I thought it would be interesting to look at his presentations over the years. Here are the three biggest announcements Apple has made.. iMac (Jobs first product after returning),iPod, iPhone.

Look at how his personal style has changed over the years. As time progress he began to emulate his products more. His appearance is much simplier and more refined. Look at how his presentation style has changed over the years. In his iMac presentation, Steve gives us a well presented, but somewhat canned and tech heavy product pitch. Notice how the word count on the slides dramatically decreases over time. The presentations become more about the image and visual storytelling, rather than the details. When we reach the iPhone annoncement he is full on storytelling. His story has villians, peril and a hero (Apple, and by extension, Steve Jobs himself).

iMac -1998

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHPtoTctDY

iPod -- 2001

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs

iPhone -- 2007

www.youtube.com/watch?v=slqNRlFPfeo

Image via Wikipedia

This isn’t new, Louis C.K. ranted this on Conan’s show in 2008.. I came across it recently and felt like sharing.

I don’t really know much about Louis C.K., this is really the first thing I’ve seen of him, but I think he makes some excellent points. Happiness is learning to appreciate what you have. We live in an amazing time exceeding the dreams of our grandparents. How much happier would we be if we simply realized that. Full clip after the break…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkusicUL2s

Here are for keys to helping others and making them feel like a priority while doing so.

1. Be empathetic. Stop thinking of yourself and put yourself in the shoes of those around you.

2. Take time out. Believe it or not, you have the time. Help others and you will find more time to finish the things you need. Importantly make whoever you are helping feel like they are the priority.

3. Be genuinely interested. Don’t only make the people you serve feel like you are interested in them, be interested in them.

4. Listen. Nothing can make a person feel lower than to think
you don’t care about them, the easiest way to do this is to not listen
to them. If you value them (which you should), then show them you care
by listening to them.

Remember as the old adage says, it’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

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