OSI Board Blog

Last week I posted a story titled Are we really wasting $1T USD annually?" and I used our spiffy Drupal software to attach a PDF document to that blog posting. This was the first time I used the attachment feature, and what I didn't know was that unless you were logged into the site (as I was), you couldn't see it.

My apologies.

I have now made the paper available via an explicit link in the article. Or you can click through to the paper from this link.

The Board of Directors of the OSI typically conducts two face to face meetings each year. Our first meeting in 2009 will take place this week, just before FOSDEM, one of the largest open source conference for developers. We want to use this opportunity to be more visible in Europe, and to meet open source developers, users and policy makers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocacy in Africa receives a big boost from the Open Society Institute for West Africa (OSIWA)

ACCRA, GHANA - February 1, 2009

I am traveling again, and I am reading again. Today I am in Dubai, and on the way I read two great books: The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson and Remix by Larry Lessig.

Last week I was quoted by the BBC saying that taken as a whole, the world wastes $1 trillion (with a 'T') dollars on information and communications technology. And judging by the various blog postings that have been generated in reaction to that, I estimate that fewer than 20% have any quibbles at all with that number, meaning that more than 80% are ready to see a change in how we do software and technology in the 21st century.

I've recently taken on a new job, after 17 years of consultancy. I grew restive at my own weak points, and wanted to outsource sales and management, neither of which I am very good at. I'm now working for Cloudmade, which is a for-profit company seeking to advance the use of OpenStreetMap data. Open Data is very similar in manner to Open Source. It's data that nobody can own, because its value is in the community that creates, cares for, and nurtures it.

We are always trying to shine some light to our kids, and teach them about right and wrong. A few things are pretty hard to explain. Copyright for one is a pretty complicated thing.

Tom Callaway is the Fedora Engineering Manager, at Red Hat, and he's one of the key people keeping watch over the many and sundry licensing issues that crop up when thousands of software packages come together to make a Linux distribution. Love them or hate them, Tom was and is one of the key architects of Fedora's legal policies.

And now he's mad.