Special issue of a magazine with articles on women in open source.
Article by a leader of an internal HP "open source" user group type organization. Interesting.
"With the financial meltdown eroding IT budgets, large investment banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions have been forced to rethink their attitudes toward open source technology. Use of open source technology is quietly booming in the capital markets because of increased cost pressures, and analysts predict the current economic conditions will drive further industry adoption."
"So, in my view, the OSI should not give in to this blackmail, but should stand firm on the fundamental principle that software patents are an unmitigated harm for free software. It should reject the current proposed licence, and insist that if the MPEG Working Group wishes to benefit from open source, it should play by open source's rules." Amen.
Interesting in relation to the FSF lawsuit.
Feel good article about FOSS although not a lot of new things to say.
Interesting blog post about the difficulty of chasing up old copyright licenses.
I'll bet that FOSS experience does increases one's job prospects. Sounds like a great empirical project!
Via Marcell: "The fact that the current policy of not releasing documentation and providing source code only to their immediate customers, as well as the frequent abomination of binary-only kernel modules also effectively prevent any independent third party (commercial or non-commercial) to actually provide such a solution based on a particular hardware offering. Thus, it is actually not an anti-FOSS environment, but an anti-competitive environment. By opening up at whatever level and enabling (or even encouraging) any third party to build on top of your product, you encourage a market and encourage competition. A market with actual competition will increase innovation due to competition. In the end, any customer who wants to use the actual chip will have more software options, and thus the resulting product will be able to reach more markets and boldly go where it hasn't gone before."
"And therein lies the great paradox: Open-source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open-source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world. The traditional open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors."
Points again to people worried about threats of lawsuits.
"Trying to shift the burden of proof back onto themselves, I asked why they don't contribute to the open-source projects from which they derive so much value. Many indicated that it's too hard to contribute back to open-source projects due to internal legal issues and the high bar to knowing how to contribute. They suggested that they would instead prefer to pay the open-source companies to do that work for them."
How can ESR write this and not mention Eric von Hippel?
