Michael Tiemann's blog

By now you may have read that www.whitehouse.gov is now running Drupal, the open source content management system. So, too, does the OSI itself. So first I'd like to say "welcome to the club!"

But the open source wins don't stop there.

The Blender Foundation just posted news of two e-books issued by the government of Thailand, one covering the 3d content creation suite Blender and one covering the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP. I have a special affection for both of these programs, for several reasons.

I read Sun Tzu's The Art of War more than 10 years ago, and there is one bit of advice that I still use daily in my business dealings. It can be paraphrased as "when attacking an entrenched competitor, you need four times the force. Ten times the force is better." Thus, when Red Hat was building its enterprise business, I made sure that our sales people were focused on customers who could immediately measure 2x the performance at 1/2 the cost (yielding a 4x performance/cost advantage), although 10x performance/cost was more advantageous. It seems that Sun Tzu's math has been understood by the London Stock Exchange, who are seeing a more than 6x improvement in the all-important measure of latency, whilst gaining an impressive 2x cost advantage. No wonder they are switching from a proprietary platform to one based on open source software!

This week I'm speaking at Open World Forum in Paris on the subject of open source and the digital recovery (la relance numérique), and for a change I'm going to try writing down all my references before my talk rather than after it.

According to a new article in the Business Standard, Open Source software can save India $2 BN per year. Based on my experiences and discussions with Indian IT executives, that number is both accurate and low.

Of the people, for the people, by the people. These three ideals were framed in the Constitution adopted in 1789, but according to 21st-century Pamphleteer Carl Malamud, the actual history of America shows that they were adopted in three distinct phases spanning three centuries in time. Malamud explains all at the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in the 2nd day keynote, and in work he shares with CC0, "no rights reserved"...

Moore's Law has been a powerful enabler of innovation because every 36-48 months you get twice the CPU cycles at half the price. In 8-12 years, Moore's law delivers 10x the performance at 1/10th the price, making the seemingly impossible relative cheap, if not free. Consequently, venture capitalists-even after the Internet bubble and the financial meltdown-largely prefer to invest in technology-driven companies in preference to almost anything else. Moore's Law simply opens up so many new business frontiers.

Except for one small problem...Patent Trolls, aka non-practicing entities.

I'm participating at the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC this week, and it is amazing to see the people that the O'Reilly conference team has brought together, both in terms of speakers and participants. In the afternoon, WAMU radio host Kojo Nnamdi interviewed Macon Phillips, the White House Director of New Media, revealing that both had a handle on the technologies reshaping American politics and concepts of American civic actions.

The history and circumstances of video technologies have long militated against open source success, but a number of events this year point to the inevitability of open source reaching even into the video space. It's about time!

Glynn Moody writes an insightful analysis of Microsoft's latest attempt to confuse the issue of open standards by throwing a new word into the mix: balance. It didn't fool Glynn, and it shouldn't fool you, either.