It is quite interesting to see the number of Mauritian websites cropping up these days. It is not unusual to see URLs on brochures, business cards, billboards or even on vehicles.

My best guess is that businesses are starting to understand the value that a website can bring to their businesses. Portion of netcitizens of today are increasingly people who earn and who have buying power.

However number of websites provide only basic information. Many businesses are afraid to display their prices. Others have flashy websites or plenty of graphics but have little relevant information.  Maybe they should try to concentrate on giving indepth information about their products/services.

Increasingly people look for information on the net by default. Maybe businesses should try more to cater for their needs and put some effort on SEO and useability. It is truly sad to see two of Mauritius’ major banks having broken websites.

I guess this may sound outright crazy but ever since I have been to University, I have always been fascinated by the notice board. Each time I pass by the notice board I would systematically scan for new stuff.

Been to Accenture’s hosted open source conference this week, featuring Alef Arendsen from Interface21.

Interface21 is behind Java’s leading web application development framework, Spring. Alef did an hour long enriching introduction of the open source world and Spring.

Interestingly he seemed to acclaim Spring’s choice of BSD license as being enterprise friendly as opposed to GPL’s ‘restrictive’ or ‘viral’ license. Looking back, I ask myself, would Spring’s licensing scheme be as ‘enterprise friendly’ if it depends on GPL’ed components or libraries as such to create solutions for corporate clients?

He also used an analogy mapping Minix to ruby on rails and Linux to Spring. Rails is going mainstream and is to be adopted increasingly for enterprise grade applications sooner or later, I think he must well be aware of that.

Overall however he did a very professional, up to the point coverage of open source and helped dismiss misconceptions with regards to use of Open Source Software in the enterprise.

On a side note, it seems that Interface21’s website is based on PHP based Drupal CMS and Alef’s Blog is based on equally PHP based WordPress. Nice!