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Here at opensource.org we get lots of spurious requests for “link exchanges”…what do firearms have to do with Open Source? /me ducks while a thousand commenters type an answer ;-). We also get more than our share of offers from kindly Nigerians). Ours is a very popular internet destination, so it comes with the territory.…

It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0. As I wrote in Open Sources, it was the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point). Having first read and lightly hacked Emacs code in 1985, having read and lightly…

Yesterday I was blog-tagged by Stephen Walli. Does the fact that he tagged for other people mean that I’m not “it”? Oh well…the topic is one that interests me, and I think he started the ball rolling in an interesting direction, so I figure I’ll add my thoughts. For my money, the three ways that…

In 2003, Nicholas Carr shook up an increasingly irrelevant community of CIOs by publishing the article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. I believe that he got it half right: the irreversable trend of information technology was toward commodity economics, and thus the idea of paying rents for proprietary software was preposterous. What he did not quite get…

A few months ago I posted my initial impressions for a draft version of the GPLv3 license, and I am happy to say that as with other licenses developed with community input, the then-good GPLv3 has continued to improve. As I read the “final” draft version of GPLv3, which I think is truly excellent, I…

Alan MacCormack published a new paper entitled A Developer Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center. Whenever I see a statement of developer desiderata, I’m reminded of this timeless posting by One Laptop Per Child hacker extraordinaire Chris Blizzard:

The news outlets, radio waves, and blogosphere [1] and [2] continue to buzz with responses to the FORTUNE magazine article where Microsoft claims that many popular Open Source software packages, including the Linux kernel, infringe some 235 patents they own and control. Most of this buzz has shifted from questions about the integrity (and/or viability)…

Note: this is just my opinion. The OSI board may have a different opinion if it speaks as a body. Microsoft is spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with their latest anti-Linux patent campaign. If they had an actual, solid case of patent infringement, they would go to a judge, get an injunction against the…

Rik van Riel posted an interesting insight this weekend about this important difference between those working under the constraints of the proprietary software model and those of us who use and develop open source software: they *have* to target their development to work on marketable features, while we have more liberty to focus on things…

Two months ago I blogged about the best open source presentation ever?, which was remarkable because mostly when I read what other people have to say about open source, I’m much less charitable (for example, this about James DeLong’s latest paid product).