
Every year I attend more tech events than I care to count and every year at this time (just before my birthday) I go through my closet, collect all the "souvenir" t-shirts and donate them to a local homeless shelter.
Official event t-shirts are a pretty cool reminder of the events that you've attended and some of them are even designed well enough that you are happy (and even proud) to wear them again in the future.
But what about all those t-shirts given away by event sponsors that are nothing but adverts. Do you really need them? The photo above was posted on twitter by one person of their personal SWAG collection from just one day at a tech event.
Yesterday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day of remembrance, repentance, confession and fasting. It is unique in that it is almost universally observed, even by the most secular of Jews for whom it might be the only day of the year that they attend a service.
Central to Yom Kippur is the Al Chet prayer where we are asked to consider the sins we have committed intentionally or unintentionally, what are our sins of commission and our sins of omission and what have we done inadvertently by doing nothing at all.
There is nothing new about Open Source. We might like to think that it is a concept introduced in the last 50 years but in fact the origins of sharing knowledge date back to some of the oldest recordings of written works.
Doing some reading recently I came across the following text translated from a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims (Pirkei Avot) of the Rabbis (jewish teachers) written down almost 2000 years ago.