I first got involved in balloting in a standards effort in 1988. Over the subsequent 30+ years, I have done a lot of work in and around collaborative efforts with standards efforts and open source licensed projects. While these efforts represent diverse tools to be used in diverse ways in…

(Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Software Freedom) Update: 4 May 2020. I wrote this post as prep for a talk of the same name at CopyleftCon 2020. The video was posted recently (25 mins + 5 mins of Q&A). Slides are on slideshare. Update: 3 Feb…

I have the privilege of having been invited to participate in the LF Energy Summit here in Paris early November. As I read more about the energy sector to get a sense of the problem the group wants to tackle, I see a set of possible challenges they will need…

The ‘open source sustainability’ debate continues with yet-another-company relicensing their product away from an open source license to something proprietary. The sustainability debates seem to fall into one of several buckets: Commercial collaborations working diligently to identify significant projects in which to invest member resources: This discussion is best represented…

I wrote a blog post two years ago called There is NO Open Source Business Model. In it, I argued that open source software is really about engineering economics, where well-run collaborative communities capture orders of magnitude of engineering value, and that Red Hat is really a successful enterprise software…

OH: “Every evangelist of yesteryear is now a Community Manager … at least on their biz card.” This statement best captures a question that comes up regularly in the open source community world when you have corporations involved. Does your community manager report to engineering or marketing? …

During his inaugural speech on Jan. 20, 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy uttered the challenge, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Its simple meaning was to challenge society to contribute to improve…

Preface: It has been brought to my attention by friends and trusted advisors that a valid interpretation of my point below is that open source is ultimately about “grubby commercialism”, and altruism equals naïveté. That was not my intent. I believe that economics is about behaviour not money. I believe…

In Part I, I laid out the why and how of OpenNT as a portability solution for UNIX/Linux applications to Windows NT, the early days of the startup, and ideas for running a business based on liberally licensed software before we had the open source definition. …