Dan

From Granizada

Hello, I'm Dan Shearer.

If you're a conference organiser or an editor, here's my more formal bio.

I work with companies and communities doing Open Source (a kind of computer software) in Europe, Australia and the US from my base in Edinburgh, Scotland. I am a Technologist covering a lot of technical areas, and over the years ^[1]I've learned to do Product Marketing and help manage businesses.

What do I do?

If you're not very interested in IT ^[2] I concern myself with these things:

• the big social trends of the 21st century: tribalism, globalism, science and non-science
• the reasons why, more or less, all computer software is rubbish
• opportunities and issues surrounding green energy
• how individuals can keep their private life private as technology, law, governments and criminals make it harder to do so

If you have at least a passing interest in IT, the areas I cover are:

• Free Software of all kinds. I've been doing it since 1988, full-time since 1997, free lance and for companies large and small worldwide. The best-known thing I've done is get Samba going but I've got fingers in lots of pies. Free software is wonderful for a technologist because there are so many chunks of software that can be plugged together to give new and different effects. I need to be a programmer in order to understand what I plug together, and to talk to the programmers who develop most of the software in the first place. But that is more or less incidental.
• Virtualisation. While it's the hot thing just now I strongly believe the only technologies relevant in the long term are very different from the current noise, after the style of Qemu. I am also interested in (and use) current tools such as Xen and User Mode Linux , and the Microsoft and VMware equivalents or their competitors from Russia. But I'm sure these products will all end up being virtualised inside my preferred approaches as they become obsolete.
• Software and law, as applied in medical informatics and aerospace engineering.
• The optimisation problems related to space engineering, space travel and space marketing. The aerospace sector is in many respects stuck in the 1960s and who knows? I may have some partial solutions to the human and technical problems involved. It is interesting to talk to others who are also working in this area.

You can contact me at dan@shearer.org.

Europe 2007 and Beyond

I've done my research and in case anyone was doubting it there is a commercial Free Software/Open Source industry in Scotland and the UK in general. It isn't France or India, but it does exist. And since I'm consulting to companies from my base in Edinburgh, that makes me part of it. If you're interested in any of the above areas, drop me a line.

What Happened 2005-2006?

Thanks for the enquiries! A lot of people have asked what's up; I was quiet until the second half of 2006.

Here's the story pre-2007:

• I was based in Australia until 2003, travelling to Europe and America more often than I care to remember. Communitywise I inhabited LinuxSA, linux.conf.au and worked with the good people at Linux.org.au and AUUG. Commercially I worked with dozens of companies, either massive or tiny but not many in-between.
• I spent a year during 2003/2004 being sick with various blood and immune-system nasties. Thanks for the understanding support of so many people!
• We moved to California during 2004/2005, where I worked for the outstanding Swedish company Virtutech, living in Cupertino. Virtutech does my preferred kind of virtualisation. By now 'we' numbered five!
• In August 2005 I moved to Edinburgh, and spent the next year settling in with the family and learning about the commercial free software environment in the United Kingdom, very different from the situation I'm more familiar with in other European countries. I didn't do anything commercially significant although I talked business with a lot of people in this nascent industry. In community terms there are some really good local initiatives and first-rate development expertise. In commercial terms there are FLOSS lessons the UK hasn't learned from countries that have gone through similar pains in the 1990s.
• Now (since August 2006) I am talking to large companies in the UK and the rest of Europe from my Edinburgh base about things related to my interests as listed above. My goal is to help the UK use its late starter advantage (in computing) and its special other advantages (in the non-computing areas.)

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1. ↑ Twenty-two years in 2007 from my first commercial contract. Which, compared to many of the people I've begged knowledge from in the minicomputer and mainframe worlds, is nothing at all.
2. ↑ An excellent position to take, but please along with it make sure you place high demands and standards on those who provide you with IT. The thing I find depressing about so many people who have no interest in IT is that they are willing to accept shoddy solutions and think problems arise from their own ineptitude. Whereas it is the reverse! Be the 'unreasonable man' of George Bernard Shaw's definition!