Cool story: I just got out of a meeting with a VC who is a potential investor in OpenLogic. At one point during the meeting, he asked about adoption of open source application frameworks — specifically Struts and Spring. I pulled up the web site for The Open Source Census, went to the All Packages [...]
Read More »In a recent post on open source business models, Fabrizio Copabianco from Funambol states his belief that a business model based solely on support won’t work. I can’t believe a pure model based on support is going to scale to the one billion dollars we always talk about. A pure support and services model works [...]
Read More »The old adage, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” applies to open source as well. Bernard Golden recently posted on why it is important for CIOs to understand what open source software they are using in order to adequately address both the infrastructure needs and legal requirements of open source. He looks at the challenges [...]
Read More »The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment has been making the rounds and has been quite amusing from many angles. Ironically, I received this email from my Mom a few minutes ago: "I keep getting a notice on the screen that I should install the latest version of Flash. Seems like nothing is working right this morning on [...]
Read More »When you decide to not only use an open source software project but to really rely on it, accessing community viability is important. You don't want to build your business around a project only to discover that nobody is really working on it, bugs never get fixed and there are no new releases. At OpenLogic [...]
Read More »Mark Radcliff gave a talk at OSBC about making sure your legal strategy matches your open source strategy. One of the things he talked about and blogged about was how to pick a license. He mentioned 7 factors to consider when picking a license: the sources of revenue the type of product business model type [...]
Read More »I've heard rumors lately that the One Laptop Per Child program may go to Windows. That would be a shame. And not because I think Linux should win over Windows but because OLPC has the largest, spontaneous community I've seen and OLPC would lose them immediately if they moved to Windows. When I'm at conferences, [...]
Read More »Microsoft just held their 2008 "MVP Global Summit" in Redmond last week. This is an internal conference where they recognize awardees in a number of divisions and have over 400 technical sessions on a variety of topics. The interesting bit for me is that Jamie Cannon reports that there's an informal meeting of Microsoft Rubyists [...]
Read More »A number of people have asked about my "Would you do it again for free?" presentation. It's a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people [...]
Read More »I just read Matt Asay's blog post MySQL adoption: Deep and wide in which he refers to an anecdote on Jonathan Schwarz's blog about MySQL adoption in the enterprise. In the anecdote, Jonathan meets with a CIO who claims that they don't run MySQL. A Sun sales rep counters this claim with the tidbit that there [...]
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