Blog

Sometime last year, after the 10th Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon; I blogged about OSCON lessons for Africa. I had expressed my hope that the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa – FOSSFA would be given needed support to make an appearance and also have its say. It happened this year.

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! Of course it’s not like there’s never, ever been any support for video on open source platforms. Even…

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. In the final analysis, the question of what is an open standard, and how governments and free markets should…

Legal issues are very important for open source projects. We are providing free panels on open source legal issues at OSCON. These panels have been organized by Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and Allison Randal. The presentations will take place on Wednesday, July 22 at the San Jose Marriott in room Willow Glen 1. For…

An Open Source company, Red Hat (RHAT), is now listed on the S&P 500! Congratulations Red Hat!

According to Techworld, Jonathan Zuck of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) has recently accused the European Commission of having a bias in favor of open source. This is an interesting claim for a number of reasons, not least of which are the questions “who is the ACT?” and “what are they doing in the…

Now that the dish is prepared, is very easy for people to eat it. But to prepare this dish was not a joke. I remember the first meeting we had, at Granja do Torto, which I understood absolutely nothing of this language that this people were deciding, and that was a huge tension between those…

My recent visit to Brazil was a wonderful validation of the belief that I’ve held for more than 20 years: if you give people a better way to do things, they’ll do better things. The Brazilian government continues to expand its adoption of open source, both across more and more ministries and deeper within each…

Yesterday I had a chance to meet the lead singer of O Teatro Magico and then see their show. It was amazing! This creative group of musicians were about to “live the dream” by signing with a record company a number of years ago, but after they recorded the songs for their first album, the…

There’s a lot of good news that does not always reach me at my desk in a single hop. But when I travel around the world, the good news of the region I’m visiting has a way of finding me, such as the news that the ITU has bestowed the World Telecommunication and Information Society…