Lately I’ve been thinking about how the open source values of choice and flexibility might be affected by enterprise uptake of open source and the evolution of open source business models.  As we talk to enterprises we find that more and more of them are following the advice of industry analysts who recommend evaluating open source on an equal footing with commercial software.  This often means that organizations are looking for the same types of services for open source that they are used to getting from commercial vendors.  They want a trusted supplier, technical support agreements with specific service levels, product updates, and indemnification, to name a few. 

During my "You're a Girl!" talk I usually point out that flaming (deliberately rude emails or posts) tends to turn women and other newcomers away from open source software.  When I get asked why people flame, I usually cite a study that found that people are much more likely to be rude online than in person.  Unfortunately I could never remember what study that was nor where I read it.  Well, the New York Times came to the rescue.  Flame First, Think Later quotes several studies and says they've discovered it's the following aspects of online communication that make people more likely to flame:

Seth Godin published an ebook under a Creative Commons license.  His intention was to make it free - he wanted people to read it and he didn't want them to have to pay for it.  Imagine his surprise when he discovered a hard copy of his book available for sale on Amazon!  Turns out the license he chose not only allows people to read his book for free but it also allows them to sell print copies on Amazon without his permission.

So, I go to install the SpringIDE plugin, using the Callisto installation directions. I get part of the way through it, and receive an error, informing me that an internal error regarding the update manager's zip deflater has occurred, and it can't go on. After a bit of googling... I find this entry on Colin's blog, and follow Olivier's advice. So, I do a 'mv /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_11-64/bin/unpack22 /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_11-64/bin/unpack22.findme' (Java HotSpt 64-Bit Server VM build 1.5.0_11-b03, mixed mode running on SLED 10 by the way), try the eclipse update manager process again, and voila, it works.

I suppose CIOs are an easy target to poke, because they sure are getting beat up over Open Source lately.

Charles Babcock of InformationWeek recently posted on How to Tell the Open Source Winners from the Losers in which he discusses a 9-point checklist that potential users of Open Source projects should complete before making the plunge.

Strata Chalup gave a talk titled "The Secret of Programming" at the Women in Open Source Mini-Conference.  Strata's talk was impressive in two ways.  It wasn't a prepared talk.  She just opened up the floor to questions - questions about anything related to open source.  (Although now that I think about it, I don't think she limited it to open source.) The two things that struck me were:

Jean Anderson, the second speaker of the day at the Women in Open Source Mini-Conference, is a PMC member of the Apache Derby project.  During her talk she explained how the Apache Foundation works, the barriers to getting started on an Apache project and how mailing lists work and why that intimidates people.  Here are some of the barriers that she found women and men encounter:    

I attended the Women in Open Source Mini-Conference at SCALE on Friday.  There were some very interesting speakers and it was a great opportunity to meet some women in open source - some who I knew online and some who I met for the first time in person.

Bernard Golden recently posted on Why CIOs Don't Care About Open Source.

As I drove home from work last night in a snow storm that turned my 45-minute commute into a 2-hour-plus crawl, I had time for my mind to wander.  Still, the weather certainly wasn't far from my mind.  It might seem that, with near-zero temperatures and icy roads, the topic of global warming wouldn't be my first thought.  But, in this year of relentlessly snowy winter weather in the Denver-metro area, one could speculate that these effects could be linked in part to global warming.  Not to mention, here I was, in one of the thousands of fossil-fuel-burning vehicles trudging along on the highway.