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The Blender Foundation just posted news of two e-books issued by the government of Thailand, one covering the 3d content creation suite Blender and one covering the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP. I have a special affection for both of these programs, for several reasons. Nowadays open source seems so inevitable, so commonplace, that…

It was a surprise to see Richard Stallman’s signature on a letter to the European Commission calling on them to block the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle with its proposed acquisition of Sun. The surprise wasn’t primarily because of that position. Clearly we are all concerned, and clearly there is scope for free software advocates…

In my previous posts, I’ve drawn an analogy between open source software and organic food, hinting that in both cases the rush to create a working brand lost some of the essence of the vision. I’ve suggested that having businesses identify “open source” purely on the basis of one “input” – using an OSI-approved license…

Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), a training bootcamp targeted for faculty members of technical universities in Asia is being organized from November 9-13, 2009 at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore. Faculty members from Singapore, Malaysia, China, India are expected to participate. The first camp was held in Raleigh, North Carolina earlier this year in July.…

I read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War more than 10 years ago, and there is one bit of advice that I still use daily in my business dealings. It can be paraphrased as “when attacking an entrenched competitor, you need four times the force. Ten times the force is better.” Thus, when Red Hat…

When I wrote about Organic Software recently, I was largely eulogising the community dimension of open source software. But there’s another way in which the idea of “organic software” is helpful to understanding the dynamic in free and open source software. Here are the comments I have been making at Open World Forum here in…

This week I’m speaking at Open World Forum in Paris on the subject of open source and the digital recovery (la relance numérique), and for a change I’m going to try writing down all my references before my talk rather than after it. To speak to the subject of a digital recovery, one must also…

I’m not sure why, but the “there is no open source business model” discussion has woken up again, with Matthew Aslett and Stephen Walli in particular chipping in views. Last time this debate arose was when 451 published a report of the same name. That report made quite a few people in the FOSS communities…

My activities in Open Source have paid for our house, car, etc etc (despite there being no such thing as an “open source business model”). However, I have never really actively attempted to convert my wife, Erica, to use Linux. Mainly, I have never really felt that Gnome (the predominant desktop environment) was particularly non-technical…