So we all know that most open source projects are licensed under the GPL - Ken Krugle's graph shows that clearly over 75% of projects are GPL or LGPL - but it turns out that most open source software used by enterprises are not licensed under the GPL ... companies are using primarily Apache licensed software! 

One of the most common questions we get is about how the OpenLogic support model works.  People that hear about it are often curious about how we can provide support for 300+ open source software projects.  I think most people are used to the standard commercial open source support model, where a company owns many or some of the committers for a particular open source package and provides support around it.  This commercial open source model is pretty intuitive since it parallels the “commercial proprietary” world that people are used to.   However, part of the promise of open source is freedom – and we think part of that is freedom is to get support from whomever you feel can best provide it.  That means that there will be choice for customers, and we have to offer our customers a choice that they think is worthwhile.  Otherwise, they won’t buy from us.

A couple of days ago the Software Freedom Law Center filed the first GPL violation lawsuit in the US.  Basically they are saying that Monsoon Multimedia is shipping GPL software without the source code (or an offer for the source code.)

Anyone interested in how outsourcing, the internet and open source software have change the world should read the first few chapters of Thomas Friedman's  The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. He gives a really good anecdotal history of how the internet and open source have changed how we work.  I highly recommend it and I plan to give it to a few people that keep asking me "what's this open source thing really about?"

So, I swing by a Starbucks on my way into the office this morning and pick myself up a latte.  Nothing out of the ordinary yet.  

If you like seeing how things are connected, you should check out some of TouchGraph's products. You can explore the connections between webpages, books on Amazon or even your friends on Facebook. Add the TouchGraph application to your FaceBook profile and you can see not only how you are connected to your friends but how they are connected to each other. I could easily see my high school group of friends, my college group, the GNOME group, etc. You can see which friends are hubs - The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means in action! - and which groups dominate among your friends.

I rarely ( read never ) blog about other blogs.. that seems so ... plagiaristic ... to me. But,

Working in conjunction with my coworker Rod, we came up with a name for code like this:

Dana Blankenhorn makes a good point that credibility is key to open source:

So, the documentation that tells you how to do what I'm about to tell you already exists, it just wasn't easy for me to find.  Hopefully you've ended up here by googling for something like 'jruby cruisecontrol.rb'.

There have been a few studies about women in open source - mostly focused on the fact that there are so few of us - only 2% by some counts!  Leslie Hawthorne's comment got me thinking:

So, I'm chugging along, enjoying myself, writing some RoR code, and run across one of the funnier method names I've ever seen.  I had to make an effort to use it, so here it is... I'm using it in as many yml fixtures as I can.

At LinuxWorld this year I gave a talk called How Global 2000 Companies Are Addressing Open Source Legal Concerns. It was a fun talk (for me) because the audience was really interested and they not only asked lots of questions but a couple of them also provided some interesting anecdotes afterwards. I talked about: