I sound like a left wing donkey (aka Democrat)

I asked myself, "Will open source technologies ever fly?" after reading this article "Google asks US Patent Office Oracle Java patents". As businesses try to make a dollar or two from innovative minds who donated their "code" to better of man kind, I wonder if my children will enjoy the benefits of open source technologies. I don't know the answer but one of way of safe guarding these open source technologies is let government agencies take over the maintenance of open source software. I realize that I sound like a left wing "donkey" (aka. Democrat) but the open source community needs to address the bigger problem. How can brilliant works of engineering like Java, Ruby on Rails, Linux, Hadoop can be safe guarded from the hoards of entrepreneurs? I don't have a problem if a company like Cloudera and RedHat who make a living on supporting open source software. I however question when businesses fight the over basic fabric of open source software. Here is one idea we can look at:

• Apache and other open source organizations should be care takers of open source. These organization should be funded by government agencies and they should be regulated by a UN organization.

My right wing friends may ask the question, "why should the government get involved in managing open source technologies. I answer by saying do you want human safety compromised over a business indicator flashing red. Since IT is being used to track and guide flights, manage energy grids, and control access to vital information, I say the government should be responsible for managing open source technologies. Government has so much red tape that it reduces efficiencies but the red tape also safeguards the things under its control from the economic and political moods.

Frankly if things don't change then I will start working Objective C, C#, and reduce my investment as a developer on open source technologies.

Day 2 at the Ontology Conference

My second day at the ontology conference was quite good. I impressed by the various teams which presented their papers on they were designing and implementing ontology based systems. The biggest theme from the conference was that the current technology and lack of defined ontology methodologies was the biggest drawback in this field. Most of the applications are prototypes and they are extremely slow in processing decent sized ontology. I heard talks about reasoners, owl, geo-spatial ontologies, multi-order logic processors, ontologies in graph databases, etc., etc. However the applications which were using these technologies were prototypes. The other problem was that if ontologies were not built correctly then the results were hideously wrong. Everyone in the conference agreed that ontologies and their applications are still new in the field of IT however the promise of ontologies and their applications is so great that large organizations keep funding R&D in the field. I personally enjoyed my time at the conference since it was good to see other data lovers and people who understood the value of data in any IT enterprise. I will probably go again next year. Here is a list of products which were mentioned in the seminar.

• Knoodl.com - A semantic wiki. It creates ontologies from the wiki entries or uses uploaded ontologies in categorizing wiki entries.
• VideoQuest - This product searches entities in a video. For example, if the user typed in the query "white car in saint louis" then the result set would include videos which have a white car in Saint Louis. The backend of this product is based off ontologies.
• Poised For Learning - Rensselaer Polytechnic University's Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory's Ontology product which is based reasoners. I was very impressed with this research.
  

As you can see there weren't many products since this area is still new. That's all for now.