Sam Dean posted a good list of places to find open source software related webinars, free webinars on free software. One of the resources is OpenLogic's archive of webinars. OpenLogic's webinars cover topics that are interesting to open source software users in the enterprise. Some of them we do ourselves but other times we bring in OpenLogic Expert Community members or other topic area experts.

InfoWorld put out their 2008 Best of Open Source Software Awards (BOSSIES) and SourceForge put out their Community Choice Awards. I thought it would be interesting to see how prevalant these products were in the Open Source Census findings.

Question: Is it theft if the other person still has it?
Answer: It can be.

One of the most debated things about hiring a community manager is which department the community manager should work in. Common consensus among community managers seems to be the engineering department even though most of them report into marketing. Bernard Golden suggests that they should be in the support department:

Thursday was the first time an open source license was upheld as a valid license in US courts. People are excited!

The relationship between communities and the companies that are involved in them is always a tricky thing to navigate well. 

Synopsis: The Arduino is a good example of how open source thinking can spur innovation and variation in hardware, firmware, and application design (open source autopilots, for example.) I haven't seen a catalog of Arduino hardware evolution anywhere on the net, so I thought I'd take a crack at one to show you how one open source hardware design has physically evolved over time.

Robert Kaye blogged about the OSCON talk An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. As I read it I was thinking, yep, yep, yep, and then I realized, "wait! These don't just apply to open source. They apply to any project." For example:

Last year, there was a bit of discussion about how the launch of Vista was going to open a lot of doors for Linux on the desktop.  I'm not going to go into a discussion about the pros and cons of Windows Vista and why the door is open to alternatives, but I have been very interested in seeing how this would turn out.

So last year I blogged about a new trend at OSCON, Donations for Tshirts. This year, free Tshirts were back. (I got four.) So what confuses me is that supposedly the economy isn't doing well now, but here were a bunch of companies with nice booths, handing out tshirts. I figure either:

Enterprises that are new to open source software often get started with databases, web and application servers, and scripting languages, but open source reporting tools have become increasingly popular in the enterprise over the past few years. Applications like Jasper, Pentaho, and BIRT are now widely used by enterprises, and each comes with unique strengths and weaknesses.