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When 2010 was barely one week old, state CIO Teri Takai published ITPL-10-01, which serves to “formally establish the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice.” David Wheeler beat me to the punch with his blog posting, but he noticed the same thing I did: the first sentence…

Greg Stein (Apache developer and all-around nice guy) made an off-hand comment about open source trademarks in an article(How to Screw Your (Open Source Software) Customers). He was talking about how many users of MySQL have actually using a purchased proprietary licensed copy of the software, and not the open source licensed copy. MySQL’s business…

The following is a comment I left on a blog posting by John Mark Walker at OStatic. I would be delighted to see Larry Augustin acting as the CEO of an Open Source company, but my knowledge of his past actions makes me dubious. Will SugarCRM remain faithful to the open source model? Or will…

As families go, the Linux operating system family has become the family among the Top500 supercomputers, running on 89.20% of all systems. Proprietary Unix, which used to the the preferred OS for these supercomputers in the 1990s is down to 5% share, and Windows is reported to be running on exactly 5 systems, for a…

A lot of people seem to think that open source is a magic solution to project management and that open source projects will automatically attract a large and healthy community of contributors and users who will improve the software. This, of course, is not the case. In fact, creating a successful open source project is…

The CodePlex Foundation (http://codeplex.org/; Twitter @codeplex_f), which was started back in September of this year, has been trying to gain traction and momentum. Unfortunately, its pro tempore Board of Directors and President are all volunteers already with overflowing plates, so progress hasn’t been particularly visible. Nevertheless, progress is being made. On October 21st, the CPF…

Here are some stunning facts that were published at the end of July in Malaysia: More than 70 percent of Malaysian government offices are running open source software, according to figures released by the country’s Open Source Competency Centre. The centre was established as part of the 2004 Malaysian Public Sector OSS Master Plan, to…

The Open Source movement is consistent with a larger democratic proposition that the more that we can all be involved in affairs that concern them, the better off we’ll all be. But sometimes the involvement of some people, whose concern is the maintenance of monopoly and control, doesn’t serve the great good. Glynn Moody uncovers…

Several years ago, we had the chance to visit a crocodile farm in Queensland, Australia. There were several highlights, not least the chance for the children to hold a crocodile – a very small one, of course, with its jaws taped shut. Even with one that small, the frisson of terror remained and the children…