Picking (a) Company
Many people don’t know what my nickname means even german speaking ones. The direct translation would be tick, these animals that sit on leaves, bite people and suck the blood, the ones that can cary scary deseases. But there is another side to the word, a political one. In my youth this word was used to refer to punks and similar associates by right wing people, I was labeled this way. And this is nothing to be ashamed off, the view of kids with weird haircuts (or none), not washed hairs, broken and dirty clothes probably disrupted their lovely right wing world, but their world deserves disruption, change.
When joining irc I had to pick a nick and the most often used word for me not equal to holger or freyther was zecke so I settled with that. And looking at it now, as a discordian pope, it was a good choice.
Like many hackers I started to work from home, communiciated through irc, started to work on projects, collaborated, learned (thanks to a guy named tronical willing to answer any question), grew, got better, continued to make stupid mistakes. Saw Mr. Eilers and Lauer finishing their PhD. I believed an ideal FLOSS career would be to work remotely from home, little did I know, little do I know.
I started university, joined the RoboCup team, started internships and got hooked to the power of teams in one physical place. Having many brilliant people at the same place working together, sharing success and helping each other to recover from failure is the best way of working. At least I have not witnessed something better than an awesome team.
In december I decided to resign from my current part time job, we/they are an awesome team, because I wanted to work on FLOSS again. So my constraints for finding a new job are now FLOSS + awesome team.
I had the opportunity to visit the Oslo trolls (they do not live caves, in contrast they are close to the sky, the 5th floor to be exact) and it is an awesome team. Brilliant, international people, there is little more you can ask for. And even if you do ask, there are soft drinks (no Club Mate though), food and vegetables, and some people have chocolate… I started to verify if the requirements of FLOSS and awesome team are fulfilled and oh my god, they are. The only downer was. Oslo trolls live in Oslo, and I’m in Berlin (at least 2 to 4 more terms). After a lot of flirting, tears and counseling (or eating spaghetti at Berlin based usability experts) I was forced to accept that Oslo trolls live in Oslo and even with the power of the mind of fooling myself applied, Oslo is not another name for Berlin and is really not referring to the same place. Looking at the size of the universe the difference from Berlin to Oslo is really minor, but if you happen to be in one of the two cities you recognize that even this minor difference is significant. Specially working with simon would have been ueber cool, it looks like it has to wait some more years. So yes Trolltech has the simon factor and its weight is really really heavy.
To keep a long story short, there are two other companies that I really like because of doing FLOSS and having an awesome team and these are o-hand.com and OpenMoko. To stop the flirting and crying tears I’m going to do a project for OpenMoko, I want to see them finish the GTA02, ship it to the people and want to see OpenVG capable hardware with open drivers coming.
Harald Welte helped in drafting the NDA of OpenMoko and at no surprise there are exceptions for FLOSS. I agree with rms that NDAs have victims, like he was victim of a donated Xerox printer and not able to fix the driver for ITS (awesome book, a must read), this NDA is going to have victims as well, victims that need to know the pricing of hardware, business plans, and all the stuff I do not care about. There is no doubt that the software I write will be FLOSS, will be released on day one and I can talk and discuss about it as much as I want as it is definately not covered by the NDA! You certainly know when not to argue. Oh and on to the team. I had the pleasure to listen to a discussion of Werner Almesberger and raster yesterday, a bit disturbing but totally awesome! I’m looking forward to meet some of you after FOSDEM in Taipei! So let there be Qtopia, Qtopia on X11, next to Java,Gtk+,FLTK+,EFL,FooToolkit and any other Free Toolkit all buildable from OpenEmbedded!
Let us be productive, innovative and provide prior art for mobile computing for years to come! With all the cool people working at OpenMoko it is a pleasure to say… “Hello Moko” as well.
PS: Ironically almost one year after I considered joining initially.
