OSI Board Blog

In 1997, Eric Raymond first presented The Cathedral and the Bazaar at Linux Kongress. I was not there, but I read the paper, and it struck me as no less revolutionary in thought or effect than must have been Thomas Paine's publication of Common Sense or Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

In my day job at Red Hat I see daily examples of open source best practices, be it at the architecture, infrastructure, or application level.

I wanted to give a quick shout out to our President, who was just listed as one of eWeek's Top Ten Open-Source Business Influencers. Wish they could've gotten a better picture, though...

An Information Week article published last week appears to position Microsoft as trying to do something right when it comes to open source. And it positions the open source community as being not quite ready to make nice after past insults, threats, and abuse.

Are you a patent holder, wondering how to write software which implements your patent? Here's my advice: Patents expire. Towards the end of the patent's lifetime, you want to be trying to transfer the patent's franchise over to the relationship between the patent-holder and the licensee. That can be done with closed-source software, but you risk competitors writing their own software. With Open Source software, as long as you manage the relationship with the user correctly, you end up with a franchise.

March 26 is Document Freedom Day (DFD). On March 26th, events and activities across the world will be held to promote adoption of free document formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF).

For any individual or organization, anywhere in the world, the right to share data without "lock-in" from vendors is as fundamental as the right to knowledge. Open standards and free document formats are integral to protecting this right for everyone.

This is the text of a comment I made on a blog posting by Matt Asay:

Matt,

Thanks for saying what I would have said. I'll go a few steps futher: