Cupertino Perspectives

At the corner of Stevens Creek and De Anza boulevards in Cupertino is the twisted silver metal sculpture called "Perspectives." It can look like a figure-8, an infinity symbol, a Möbius strip, and the stitching on a baseball; all depending on the viewing angle. Perspectives is flanked by two water fountains and it is illuminated at night. It's a visual treat no matter when or from what angle you view it. I often ponder it's meaning when I walk by and I find it helps me look at problems differently, ahem, from a new perspective.


Perspectives is the center piece of Cali Mill Plaza which is the closest thing Cupertino has to a proper downtown area. Cali Mill actually used to be a feed and supply store back in the days when Cupertino was an agricultural community populated with fruit orchards. Today, Cupertino is a suburban metropolis populated with amazing high-tech companies such as Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, SigBlips, and Symantec.


The Perspectives sculpture was created by Roger Berry and it was installed in 2004. The sculpture was commissioned by the city of Cupertino and it generated a bit of flack when it was first unveiled. Some people didn't like it. Some people didn't understand it. Some people thought it was a waste of Cupertino's limited funds but those critics were quickly hushed when it was revealed that Apple Computer had funded it!


And finally a view of Perspectives from space. Note the cool shadow.

source code trivia

From the start, SigBlips utilized the services business model to support the development of the baudline signal analyzer. Customers pay for the addition of new features and custom modifications. More baudline users lead to a larger pool of potential customers which lead to more paying customers. The key with the success of this model is to get as large a product distribution as possible. It's all about the numbers.

Back in 2001 Red Hat had just finished a very successful IPO and they were the dominant Linux distribution for scientific desktop users. Red Hat seemed like a perfect match for finding more baudline customers and improving our fledgling services model. So at Linux World 2001 we talked to a couple managers at the Red Hat booth about including baudline in the Red Hat distribution. We made an offer of open sourcing the code if baudline would be included in a future Red Hat release. We thought it was a very generous offer but to our surprise and great disappointment the offer was rejected.

Several years later. Still wanting to increase our baudline user base, we decided to attempt the open source mass distribution route again. We signed up and submitted an application to VA Software's Source Forge. Again, to our great surprise and disappointment our offer was rejected. The reason was something ridiculous about baudline not being useful. Who would of thought that Source Forge rejects applications? Well they do.

After the disillusionment of being rejected by Linux's two most successful IPO'd companies we decided to reevaluate our open source strategy and ask some very intriguing questions. What is the value of source code? How best can it be monetized? Can operating in the free software space be profitable? Careful analysis of these questions is how the hybrid SigBlips dual licensing model happened to be. Today, the source code for the baudline signal analyzer can be purchased.

10101

10001001 ^ 10101 = 10011100

That's the answer but what's the question?