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Open projects are a phenomenon that entered the arena of computer history at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, in the form of the free software movement. At that time, business players in the IT industry saw them as a whim of a few members of the academic community, which had no place in commercial conditions. The vision of open projects, within which software could be used and copied for free, and users would be treated as collaborators, seemed to have no chance of developing and improving valuable computer products.

If you're interested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. then you're probably tempted by ads with mining equipment or cloud mining contracts. Many of them promise you substantial passive profits and a fast return of investment under one year. Can it really be this easy? Here at WALCZAK.IT we experiment heavily with cryptocurrencies and we've also build our behemoth of a rig which mines three totally different coins at once. We've experienced firsthand that cryptocurrency mining is not trivial, nor is it passive or risk-free. Here are some cons you should consider before investing into it.

For the past few moths we've been developing our own simulation and notification system that aids us in cryptocurrency trading. As a byproduct of this enterprise we maintain a huge database of trades, exchange rates and OHLC data imported from many exchanges. We decided that it would be a shame to just keep this in-house so we're lunching a new polish website - kryptowalutownia.pl - on which you can view aggregated price charts and compare exchange rates from multiple exchanges.

The first copies of our book "OPEN SOURCE projects – how are they organized and financed" saw daylight in the year 2011. It’s hard to believe that so many time has passed since its first release.

In the last article we described why the division of responsibilities between ERP-MES systems from the IEC/ISO-62264 standard cannot be directly applied to small and medium enterprises. Now we’ll show you how we devised our own integration scheme for systems used in SME based on the conclusions from the previous analysis.

At the beginning of the year we began preparations to design our own IT system for industrial production management targeted towards small and medium-sized enterprises. As part of this stage we analyzed standards related to such solutions. Our attention has been particularly caught by IEC/ISO-62264 (based on ISA-95), which attempts to construct an unified model of concepts, data structures and activities that occur at the interface between Enterprise Resource Planning systems and Manufacturing Execution Systems. Now came the time to share with you our insights and design sketches. This is our first article from a hole series that show you our efforts aimed at transferring the standards adopted for large ERP and MES systems to the SME scale of things.

In the past year we took part in two startups and also got to know how many others work from the inside. Because of this we think its a good time to codify our 8 startup commandments. They are simple as a screw driver, every one believes in them, but few actually follow…