Month: April 2008

GNU tools on MS-Windows

When you are used to work on a computer with GNU/Linux and are obliged to process your files on a MS-Windows system for some time, the GnuWin32 project can come in handy. They provide a lot of command-line tools from the GNU collection (sed, iconv, tar, bzip2, … see the whole list of packages they provide).

This evening, I needed to convert a lot of files from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 (because it seems no decent Windows text editor can correctly translate text between these two encodings). Apparently, the GnuWin32 project removed the recode tool. But it can be easily replaced by iconv. With iconv, it’s done with:

iconv -c -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 utf8file.txt > iso8859file.txt

Photo credit: “In the beginning…it was the command line” by Dick Mooran on Flickr

Two nice schemes about Open Source

I don’t know how I stumble upon this report of a conference (English translation) from Avi Alkalay but I liked 2 schemes he showed.

In this first scheme (left), I like the way it reminds you that “Open” is not only about software, source code. But now that more and more people are aware of the benefits of Open Source software, it’s interesting to also stress the other sides of openness: open standards (like OpenDocument), open hardware, open architecture.
In the second scheme (below) is about the trend from private control / closed access to public control / open access (apparently from Rebecca Henderson; it could be interesting to find this whole presentation from 2004).

There is a third scheme in Avi’s post but there is something I don’t like in it, although it’s visually appealing. Although I understand that proprietary and open innovations should collaborate for the time being, I think that Open Innovation is the model to follow. Moreover, the “speed-to-market” criteria is, imho, better in the Open Innovation model (but maybe I should see Rebecca Henderson’s presentation).