Michael Tiemann's blog

I just wrote a blog posting at my other blog, ( parent . thesis ), about a new application for the XO laptop: the Sahana disaster management system.

Andy Updegrove posts yet another insightful analysis on the evolution of standards in the modern technology. He reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided 3-to-2 that a licensing promise made in a standards development process trumps the private right to hold licensees for ransom when a 3rd party later acquires the patent. This is bad news for patent trolls, but great news for the rest of us.

The Ardour project is an open source digital audio workstation. To many in the recording studio business, digital audio workstation is written DAW. Unwritten is widely held belief that recording studio platforms come in two varieties: proprietary native platforms like Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows, and DigiDesign's HD system (which is a proprietary hardware add-on). Ardour demonstrates that there is a new game in town, and that new game is open source.

I just read an excellent summary of the top 10 SE Linux stories of 2007, and it reminds me that I owe the world a blog posting about the amazing vision and accomplishments of the SE Linux project.

Yesterday afternoon, Red Hat, Inc. announced that James Whitehurst would be taking over for Matthew Szulik as chief executive. This is important open source news because Red Hat is by far the largest company practicing open source as its primary business.

Most of you know me as President of the Open Source Initiative, but I am also Chair of the Fundraising Committee. Over the years we have raised monies large and small from companies large and small, public and private, and we have had great participation from individual donors as well. In fact, this year was probably a record in terms of the total number of different people supporting the OSI--which is cause alone to celebrate.

This morning the Give One Get One program went live, and after reading the terms and conditions of the program, I was ready for not one, but two laptops. Why two? You can read my ( parent . thesis ) blog to find out. (And you should, after reading this one.)

In my professoinal capacity, I spend most of my time talking with public and private sector executives about how they can use open source software to save millions (potentially billions) of dollars while replacing brittle and broken proprietary software with code that actually works. And I talk about how the values of the open source community promote the very innovation that their organizations and economies so desparately strive to achieve. But I am just as excited about the creativity and self-expression that open source can inspire, especially when it helps those who would otherwise have no voice to find, develop, and then use that voice.

Last night I received a google alert about a new blog posting with a most misleading title. The title read "OSI Approves Microsoft's 'Shared Software' Licenses". This half-truth was paired with another half-truth: that I was President of the Portland-based Open Source Initiative. (The OSI is incorporated in California.)

This morning, I received another google alert from another blog posting with exactly the same article, but from an entirely different blog.

In July I was honored to be appointed Visiting Scholar at SILS, the School of Information and Library Science and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Information and Library Science community and the Open Source community share many common passions, especially the belief that sharing knowledge is important and good work. And increasingly I see a shared fate for both communities...