stalkerish..

This is stalking to the extreme !
Earlier, they wanted to know what everyone is searching for - now they wanna know the locations(lat/long coordinates).

Man, this is compromise of privacy - big time :) Ppl give up privacy for services they receive - not knowing what price they might pay for it later.
The recent one in stack is Google's Dodgeball

Is this Google's answer to 2 challenges:
1. orkut not being as popular/usable as facebook.
2. need to locate folks and provide advertisement possibilities to local businesses.

well, letsee wait-n-watch what happens !

which company is your favorite company?

Usually, many of my colleagues ask me this question: Which is your dream company?
My reply: my own company :D

They ask: Besides that?
My reply: From what perspective?

They ask: to work for...duh!
My reply: None

india business conference

Date: 2/16
Theme: Investing in India: An Entrepreneur's Canvas
Organized by: South Asian Business Association
Experience:

The event started off with a panel's meeting. Panel included CMU's Ashish Arora, Madan Mohan from Infosys, Rick Russow from USIBC, and some others.

Citi India portfolio owner for CitiCards managed his session over Webex as his flight from NYC got cancelled. CEO of iGate, Mr. Sunil Wadhwani had come down for one of the speeches. Besides, Rick had one speech as well. Rick is remarkably aware about India's political, economic, and cultural panorama(Of course, he had coffees with most of the bureaucrats including Montek Singh Ahluwalia and deals with bureaucrats in Tamil Nadu quite often!) Last speech was by Vish Mishra, from Clearstone Venture Capital. Clearstone invests in India-centric ventures (for instance, BillDesk)

In between, there were breaks with Indian foodstuff lined up (samosas, dhoklas, etc). I was unimpressed by CMU's Indian populace who didn't participate at this event ~ doesn't talk well about the entrepreneurial spirit of the community at the school.

spring courses

Technically, the school authorities call it the spring semester - I have no idea why - this cold is getting annoying - the temperature is 8F and feels like -2F. Man, that's -18C....! that's coooooooooollllllllddddddddddddd !

I wanted to write this post since a long time but either didn't have time or didn't have an inclination towards it. However, right now, I think I am over my writer's block period and can write ...and yo, I am back !

Macroeconomics

Prof Christopher Sleet has recommended the textbook of the most influential economist in the world - Mr. Ben Bernanke !I have the fifth edition but the professor insists on the sixth one which came out midway between the mini. However, this is a semester long course.

I am grasping some important macroeconomic concepts which help give an added dimension and credibility to any of my analysis.

Some of the CMU students are so impudent - they keep their feet on the bag! Check out the adjacent picture !

Business Law and Ethics

Course on Contracts by Ashish Arora was cancelled. That made me take this course and I am so glad I took it. Prof Dale Hershey has close to 40 years of experience practicing civil lawsuits. The book by Beatty Samuelson on Business Law is exhaustive and interesting at the same time.

This gives me a perspective on strategy analysis and also good amount of information required for a manager while making decisions and taking actions.

Contracts, Corporate structuring, intellectual property, cyber law, class actions, jurisdictions, shareholder rights, insider trading, antitrust, environmental law, consumer law, uniform commercial code (UCC), CISG, etc are the topics which are broadly well-covered in this mini-course.

On a sidebar, I met a bunch of first years (MBA) students in this class for our group presentation - all of them were caught up in a crazy chase for the internships .... 2 of the 4 I worked with got offers from Amazon which are freaking amazing offers :) One got from AT Kearney and one is still looking as she wants more !

Digital Transformation

Prof Ramayya Krishnan brings in some good models to think while making decisions w.r.t. IT and deployment of IT for strategic purposes. We mostly deal with IT user category of companies and not the creators.

However, I have a complaint: As participation has such a high grade component, in order to be fair to everyone, he gives way too much time to some of the folks in the class who crave attention. For instance, someone gives a long pregnant pause (just to get the footage) once s/he is given an opportunity to talk. Moreover, there are folks who bring in previous points while the discussion is in a specific flow (no matter how irrelevant they are to the current discussion). Then there's someone that takes at least 3 mins to describe the point s/he is trying to make.

I feel stuck in this class.... I didn't have a choice while taking this course as it has been made a capstone course which is compulsory. It must be dropped from the list of required courses - or must be allowed to be exempted if something similar is done. My strong opinions come from the fact that I had to miss the Capability Improvement for Service Organizations class due to time conflict with Digital Transformation. If DT wasn't a core course, I would've taken the Capability one !


Information Security and Risk Analysis

Interesting course with a great deal of insight in valuing risk. This is close to Options Pricing which I studied last semester. When I put up the point regarding security firms coming up with insurance for the clients w.r.t. managed security services, professor mentioned that there is lack of data. I could quickly correlate it to the fact that in case of stocks, there is second to second ticker data.

Prof Ashish Arora puts out the ideas really neat - these are useful for a consultant in general and a security department personnel in specific.

One of his TA Sasha Ramanov has a nice site which you can check out here. Another TA suggested me the WEIS 2007 event. I will try to make sure I am in Pgh around that time in order to attend it.

Lectures are conducted in Collaborative Innovation Center (CyLab hosts Google, Intel, etc offices here) for the infrastructure setup as the classes are being relayed to Kobe(Japan) as well.

Capstone project: Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking
I can't write much about this as we have to protect the interests of our client.

In order to maximize the learning experience, our advisor Dave Burke has given roles to the folks who did not have experience in those areas. For instance, I have acquired knowledge on being an architect but never worked as an architect before - so, I was made the architect. Someone else hasn't done project management, so s/he took up prj mgr role and myself and someone else who has done it will guide him/her. This method has its own pros and cons.

All in all, a busy semester going on. I can manage to hit the gym several times a week and I am happy about that. Moreover, I am able to undertake other activities such as ice-skating, skiing, clubbing, latino dancing, etc in some free pockets of time.

Rendezvous with a Mayor!

Last night, at the PNC Park, I had an opportunity to meet the youngest Mayor in the United States Mr. Ravenstahl. He is young, dynamic, understands business terms and concepts well, and a visionary. He is fairly matured for his age and has the burning desire for turning around the City of Pittsburgh. Accordingly, he has taken steps at the micro-levels to work on converting the "Iron City" to a "Techno City". I wished him all the best in his endeavors when I met him and briefly introduced myself to him and where my origins are from (Mumbai).

After the Mayor's event followed the Network Pittsburgh event for Alumni networking. I met a few Deloitte folks out there and met some other interesting folks from the Heinz school who I had never met before. Nice event !

Post-networking meet, we went for the happy hour to Atria's to have some more meetings with the folks. Ron, our career services director, gave me compliment for being the "best dressed MISM" - so flattering ! Thank you Ron !

The travel back home was horrendous. My lips hurt due to the extreme cold weather in Pittsburgh. I didn't drive down to the event because I was planning on having some drinks. Hence, I had to use several connections of the bus routes to reach back home. One such link made me wait for half an hour and I think the temperature was -5 F. This coupled with the thin suit trousers sent shivers through my spine...literally ! It taught me a good lesson that I must never be out in the cold - no matter what my cold tolerance is.

social entrepreneurship

Jerr Boschee, the grand-daddy of social entrepreneurship had recently visited CMU. Received a lot of gyan from him on why SE ventures must make themselves self-sustaining and how to acheive that.

Moreover, he also mentioned that someone in this field, if in a dilemma (does it matter? types) can approach him for a discussion.

He had visited and taught students in India in the past ...after which he got this enlightment about devoting himself for a social cause - fairly noble person it appears.

ice skating

screeeeetch, whoooosh, whooop, THUD ...... are the sounds you easily get to listen at the ice rink if there is no music in the background. Yes, my first experience with ice-skating was yesterday evening. It reminded me of roller-blading days of 1995 !

Despite of few hurdles, a few MISM colleagues finally managed to reach the Schenley Park ice rink (on a lighter note, how many MISMs does it take to locate the rink ...LOL). While I was waiting at the rink, I saw quite a few kids doing nice maneuvers. As folks arrived and we tied our skates, we entered the rink with some apprehension. Some crashed at the beginning and some others as the time progressed.

Fortunately, I didn't fall in the first session. In the second session, in the last five minutes, I was stretching too far and my muscles had given up. I was unable to lift up my legs for the gliding action and hence, lost balance and fell. I crashed softly though and it was fun - no pains, no tears. The muscles of the lower back and the tendons of vastus medialis were screaming at me -

Manik Manik
Go away
Come again another day....
Little tendons want to lay !

When I learnt rollerblades, I had someone to teach me baby-steps with the skates on and then hold my hand for making a few rounds of the skating ring. I learnt faster that way. Yesterday was different as none of us were good at this though UD did well at the learning curve part - he was way ahead. However, I did have a bunch of folks who were constantly motivating me. Nah, not my colleagues, but a bunch of folks from UPitt who I met while tying up the shoes. Drea was one of them and she was half American and half Puerto Rican - very warm personality ! She was fascinated by Indian culture as well. I could never believe that she was skating for the first time because she was doing it so well!

All of us (MISMers) had decided that we shall have a look at the city from the point above the ice rink - however, that never happened ! A few other aspects ruined my mood towards the end of the event but that was fine - a part n parcel of this journey called life. After the skating event, I met some friends at Silkys and enjoyed some drinks with them for about a hour or more!

All in all, it was a good part of the weekend activity. Letsee whats lined up for today!

GramIT - phenomenal !

At the turn of the millennium, I asked KB Chandrashekhar aka Chandra, about when does he think that IT will become a part of India's GDP contribution and help at the grass-root levels. His reply was that when the jobs from all this IT boom in India reach the country-side, it will mark the significant contribution.

Seven years later, I read this news piece on GramIT. If offshoring is to remain India's growth engine, this must happen. Wage inflation and attrition at major centers such as Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai are causing huge problems on the supply side for the companies who are setting up shops in India. For GramIT employees, lack of other paying jobs make sure that currently, these are not the issues. With Indian service providers moving up the value chain, the lower end work can go to places such as GramIT.

I feel that this cartoon of outsourced CEO is exaggerated. However, moving up the value chain is so evident - few years ago, we could not imagine an Infy employee doing Application Management and yet, I was both, a Project Manager and Application Manager at AT&T. These are functions traditionally offered to US-based consolidated labor suppliers such as IBM, EDS, Accenture, Deloitte, etc Traditional model put virtual team mgrs with other vendors such as IBM. However, cos like Infy are invading this chain from right to left - right uptil client coordinator :)

Will this journey stop?

India has a significant challenge in maintaining its supremacy in being the preferred offshore destination. The offshoring industry is going to be 1.45 to 1.55million in strength and will contribute to about 7% of GDP by 2008 end. Challenges arise from the fact that clustering has happened during evolving stages at locations such as Hyd, Blore, Bbay, etc pushing the prices higher. This has caused huge internal competition within clusters and coupled with lack of supply (talented pool) has accentuated the problem. Let us look at the real numbers.

There are about 14m young grads in India with about 2.5m new ones getting added each year. However, only 10% are suited for the MNCs setting up shops. English skills remain a major issue. Bigger problem lies in the fact that Indian univs have varying quality of education. IITs and IIMs are world-class. However, the quality steeply declines as one goes into the second and the third tier institutions. The higher suitability figures lie in the engineering crowds - roughly 25% are suitable for MNCs. However, given the supply side constraints of engineering schools and huge demand in no. of IT workers and middle managers required, the wages are being pushed northwards. This is similar to demand for a stock in absence of floating stock and institutions placing huge orders.

Some doomsdayers say that Indian wages will get equated to US wages. This belief is misplaced. When the threshold of 30% of US wages will be crossed, Indian IT labor suppliers ( Infosys, TCS, Satyam, etc) will start looking in other low-wage labor supplying countries such as China. Infosys Shanghai already has already been set up and TCS has made several acquisitions in China. PRC provides cheap programmers but costly managers (with dual language skills) and hence, cost of team is the same at both the places in India and PRC. Suppliers are looking at Philipines as another destination for call centers as they have lesser Indian accents and can understand US accent with relative ease.

So what must GoI do?
---------------------------

Disperse the clustering

This is risk-diversification. GramIT is on right track - more such things must happen in India which will help both, Indian populace coupled with capitalists. More regions will get developed. Currently, due to origins of most of IT entrepreneurs being from Southern part of India, they are mostly concentrating in the South with Pune, Chennai, etc being the alternative destinations to avoid clustering issues. However, MNCs such as Accenture, IBM, et al have set up their shops there as well. So, cos such as Infy run to Kolkatta, Jaipur - nice solution :)

In order to enable this dispersion, government needs to focus on infrastructure such as airports, utilities, telecom network, etc. The effects of neglect by GoI in this matter have been benign so far but they will rapidly become a hindrance for the growth in next 3-5 years.

Airports
When interrogated about the bias for Chennai and other south Indian destinations, entrepreneurs mention that the infrastructure in other places is not as developed. For instance, Infy setup a shop at Chandigarh but there's no easy international airport access. Hence, government must focus on developing international airports fast. Jaipur is a good destination because of the international airport decision made in 2002 budget.

Telecom network
If telecom network is well developed then telecommuting can be started in India leading to easing pressures on wages. This will help dispersion of work in low-wage areas within the country. GramIT is the best example. Labor is available at $800 per head at less than 5% churnover rate- wow !

Utilities
Individual companies have been making sure that electric power, water, etc do not become an issue at their offshore development centers. For them, it makes business sense as economies of scale ensure lower marginal cost which they can pass on to the customer under component of reliability. However, GoI can provide this to the smaller startups who can compete far better. This takes us to the next aspect why should GoI support smaller ventures.

Showcase the depth and the breadth of Indian pool

India's talent pool can be showcased in other fields such as industrial R&D, Finance & Accounting (culture which invented zero man !), etc. Small ventures are starting in these arena and must be helped by GoI in various forms and they will reap the benefits of the same in next 5-10 years in form of higher $ revenues, money sent back by expats, etc. In order to scale up on manufacturing supply, we need roads, roads, and roads ! Bharat Forge is an innovative auto-component solutions provider helping companies from the developed nations become more competitive. I agree beating PRC is very difficult given the lead they have over India...however, its not impossible. PRC supplier rates are going up. India can become an alternate supplier location for competitive supply chains.

Brand India as a destination for alternative services. This includes wide range from medical tourism in Hinduja hospital in Mumbai to exotic Himalayas in the north and the healing Ayurveda destinations in Kerala. Our slogan must become:

What can Mr. Bharat do for you?

Besides, investment in educational infrastructure is required.

Private sector
Companies such as Infy, Wipro, TCS, etc must invest in educational centers. Profits seen today on a quarter to quarter basis will vanish soon if they remain myopic and do not address this 3-5 years pending issue. Their margins will be squeezed out if they dont invest in educational institutions which ensure a steady stream of good quality graduates. For this, both Indian as well as MNCs will have to form a consortium of sorts in order to invest together.

GoI
It can help setup an IIT in every state. Even if quality of existing grads is improved then the existing numbers will yield huge supply metrics which will satisfy demand of foreseeable future. India still remains a low-cost labor supply nation with cost of a grad being 12% of that of US grad and working hours being atleast 5% higher (2058 hours p.a. vis-a-vis 1900 p.a in US).

Bottomline: Collaborative execution committee between corporate world and govt is required which will yield results that can help country reach the BRICs dream drafted out by Goldman Sachs in y2k.

Ethics...

Check out what Bill and Warren mentioned at UNL.
This is a video on how they instill ethics in management under them.

winter break ends..

With the last week in the winter break, I want to blog the winter break experience. After the initial hedonism, I wanted to focus on family-time and health.

Bal, Val, and myself headed for a trip to Virginia beach in the week before Christmas to celebrate Christmas at Val's mom's place. On the trip, we once took an exit towards Williamsburg which has one of the oldest schools of US - College of William and Mary. On that night, we went for holiday lights at the beach front. The waiting line was quite long for the car-drive-thru but we were enjoying with christmas carols in the background. The best lightings were the ones towards the end - depicting the 12 days of Christmas.

Next day, myself and Val headed for the Virginia beach museum and I checked out some marine species out there. Touching a ray-fish with bare hands was the high point for that visit ! Later in the day, we forgot that the shops will get closed after 3:30 pm for Christmas eve and we were having difficulty finding a good place to eat. Finally, we got to eat at Val's favorite Mexican place. ....yummy salsa they had. The family spent the evening watching "walk the line." I watched it for the third time - but everytime I keep on finding something new in it. Well-made movie, I must say. I extended in the night to watch "Christmas with the Kranks."

On the day of Christmas, we all awaited the princess to come - Angelina - Val's niece. After she arrived later in the day, the gift exchange ritual started and undoubtedly the princess was the center of attention. I was in complete festive mood because the family provided me with such warmth, care, and hospitality. The gifts which Bal, Val, Val's mom and Val's sister gave me will go long way in helping a student like me :) Thank you for everything...it was so thoughtful of you guys!




When I went to bed that night, I had the glum feeling while thinking that this will all soon be over. However, I must say - I enjoyed every bit of it. Bal and Val have become like the bhaiyya and bhabhi I never had.

While we were returning back to Pittsburgh, I got to check out the downtown Va beach. Then we headed back - as we came - Bal driving all the way. IN between, we took a break at Tyson's corner - a bit before D.C. and Bal did some shopping there. Val ordered her Prada shoes on the phone to her Saks salesperson in downtown Pgh as we were not going to make it to Pgh by 7 pm in the evening.

We planned to hit the gym after coming back - unfortunately, gym was closed early that day. Val made nice pasta and beans (yummy thoe were - I got to get the seasonings recipe from her) and we watched a movie. Next day morning, I got up early to join Bal for the gym and then back to my routine I've been having.

The day before New Years was spent at their place as we worked towards getting down the tree which was put upstairs. Man, this tree was special - it had traditional ornaments and also, ornaments such as elephants - can you beat that? This year, she had 2 trees - one upstairs and one downstairs !

New Years was awesome - with friends at the Prive lounge. I did some shopping before heading for the New Year bash - bought some stuff for my younger bro during the after-Xmas sale. From 2nd Jan, I've been working on various projects (personal and professional) and this week the winter break ends - with good memories to treasure for long time to come :)

UK users gagging for IPTV

Check this out - this is just the beginning of the end for the cable folks .....as mentioned by the proponents of IPTV gang.

However, I feel that cable folks have some long way to go before giving up the battle. Comcast had taken up AT&T Broadband last year - and their results haven't been as impressive yet. Company has megalo-debt with it and it will take some time before they make themselves fit in order to compete. This keeps them on their toes at all the times in order to strive for the best. The consumers are the obvious ones to benefit due to this competition.

Stay hungry - stay foolish !

Apple Keynote Bloopers

Some funny clips of Steve Jobs and his gang over at Apple mssing up on their very important keynotes. ....so much for the ones who try to poke holes into Microsoft's imperfections ....

we play on a different ground

reading spree

I've been on a reading spree in the last few days and would like to share some of the highlights.

After I finished The Tao of Warren Buffett, I got onto the online video search for Warren Buffett - I didn't find very many videos but some interesting ones are posted on my bazaar blog.

The next one in line was My life as a quant. The book is a recommended reading for the Financial Engineers. Bernstein, Rubenstein, Taleeb, et al have all given good reviews for and the same. Mr. Derman is program director for MSFE program in Columbia these days and will shape the future of this field as he has in the last decade or so while at Goldman Sachs. His model was fairly popular. What drove me to read this book was the excellent class by Prof. Duane Seppi for Options.

Next one was 7 indicators that move the markets by Paul Kasriel and Keith Schap. That's a fine book and recommended for anyone trying to get the correlation of macros with the markets.

Besides, the reading on Strategy Power plays from Businessweek is enlightening. They havent been as good as HBR case studies, however, help me get updated on some of the fields that I wasn't as update.

While searching for tax-saving books, I had a glance at the book Financial guidebook - 9 steps to work by Suze Orman - which I will recommend to anyone seeking practical to-dos in order to lead a financially independent life. Most of us know most of the concepts she presents and yet ppl act contrary to the conventional wisdom. What I liked in particular about the book was her down-to-the-dirty-details approach and charts etc created for layman. For instance, she has mentioned a checklist of aspects to figure out what all to check while considering a credit card offer. Also, she has beautifully pounded on the idea that if you dont respect your money (by spending it too much) then you disrespect yourself. I like this lady as she gives practical advice and her show must be watched by everyone who feels they know very little about financial matters because she elicits it so well. I knew most of it but it is a sort of book which I will recommend folks who are trying to get in grips with that kind of information/knowledge.

A bunch of other books too - however, I left them mid-way either because the topics were not of my priority or because the content was not good enough.

Also, I read a bunch of other mags - Readers' digest, Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, some other health related reads. Apparently, USDA has changed the food pyramid this year from what it was in 2005- shifted focus from having lotssa carbs to having lotssa other nutrition. So, less pasta, bread, etc. Carbs were included in the pyramid at the base in 2005 when a major revision was done after the earlier revision in 1992. I read about some of the secrets to live longer:
1. Large number of anti-oxidants from veggies and/or fruits.
2. Croatian olives and oil used for cooking must be plant oils such as olive oil, soy oil, etc.
3. Eating a few 100 cals less per meal. This is inspired from Okinawans from Japan.
4. Red wine (frequency: 1 to 3 per week in less to moderate amounts).

Shall keep my blogreaders updated about the other reads which I may find interesting. I have CKPrahalad's residual reading next in my mind.

New Year wishes !

Merry Christmas !

winter break begins !

Fall semester exams got over on Thursday and that evening we had a final farewell hangout at PHI on Forbes with the graduating batch from 8 pm thru midnight. I got out at around 11:30 pm as I was not feeling comfortable in the smoke anymore.

Next day, I hit the gym for a few hours and enjoyed the steam room and the spa (Carnegie Mellon is a luxury brand - no second thoughts about that). Later, I had a talk with a recruiter about my offer and discussed the conversation with my career services folks to take a feedback if my conversation was in the correct direction.

On Friday evening, I decide to get freed of all the thoughts of the placements, etc. Consequently, we went for farewell of Shashank, an exchange student from Singapore. Playing charades was a nice light-hearted event with sumptuous meal (yummy !) to follow along with audio/video in the one of the Porter Hall rooms.

Later, we made a sudden decision to hit the Prive Ultralounge and have a good time - dancing !
Ambience: Good
Bar: Average to good (they messed up on my tab)
Crowd: Average to good again.
Dance floor: Can be well arranged.
DJ: Average to good (giving him good for being sensitive that there's Indian population and playing a Bhangra #)
Overall, I will give it a rating of 5.5 on a scale of 10. This is because I have experienced better ones earlier!

Next day, at 11 am, the phone rings - the dreaded call...from the landlady - is she going to visit? is the kitchen clean for her inspection? is she going to impose a fine on us? Apprehensions in my mind dont let me think but I HAVE to pick up the phone. What if it's a call to inform us of something else (say, cancellation of her inspection trip?). When I talk with her, she says, the maintenence guy is going to come in a while. Phew - a relief - because I was expecting something else. Meanwhile, I get ready before he comes because I have a lunch to attend with one of the earlier MISM reps as they are going.

Lunch was ok with a greek wrap (I've never had lunch at Shadygrove and so, I didn't know what to expect...shadysticks were nice though). Surprisingly, the Shadyside area was slightly crowded on a Saturday morning. It may be primarily due to holiday season and people doing holiday shopping.

Post-lunch, I came back and went to Waterfront for a small piece of work and later, got hung up on phone with a close friend and talked for long hours - it was as if we were catching up after a long time. Finally, I got hold of this great book by Mary Buffett "The Tao of Warren Buffet". I recommend it to everyone who wants to be successful in general.

In the evening, I came back to pickup my friends and went back to Waterfront for the movie Apocalypto. Nice movie ! It was nominated for a golden globe award in the best foreign film category - no wonder, it had English subtitles. More about the movie on one of my other blogs!

The weekend has been hedonistic so far and I want to catchup with my temple proceedings alongwith some other meetings. I wish I could've travelled to India or PRC this vacation but there are some things which are out of your control and you need to accept that !

IIT

Indian Institute of Technology are becoming more and more popular in Dilbert - check out today's strip ! Young Asok has long way to go.....lol !

iptv harp

http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06121110.htm?source=mppromo

its all coming together....iptv , zune, ipod, all the pieces complete the zigsaw puzzle - entertainment is the future !

ie7

Most of the features are picked up from Mozilla and hence, they are nice. However, some problems prevail:
1. IE crashes a whole lot more when compared with Mozilla - that's annoying especially while you are composing that web-based email or making that entry into the blog.

2. IE still has ActiveX - something which I consider as a big threat.

3. The tab-closing X is at the window tab itself - this is not good as per usability as the tab can be closed without it being highlighted and lead to potential loss of information on that window by accident.

Seems like the folks in Redmond have some more miles to walk before their products come close to those created by the open-source folks.