Blog

Earlier this year, arguments and debates raged about whether the open source model was doomed to fail in the 21st century economics of Software As A Service (SAAS). One thread of these discussions centered around the creation of a new type of license that could effectively preserve source code availability and author attribution while denying…

When I first came across the GNU General Public License in 1986, it was nothing short of an epiphany for me. Its revolutionary approach to copyright (all wrongs reversed) and the bold vision of the GNU project (to do nothing less than to make UNIX obsolete by making something that was both better and free)…

If you’re coming to this URL for the first time in awhile, you may think you’re in the wrong place… Nope, we’ve just finally soft-launched our new website. The old one was largely hard-coded (as was common back in 1998 when it was launched). It got to be too hard to maintain, as many of…

I am continuing to process Made To Stick, a Guns, Germs, and Steel-quality treatment about why some ideas survive and others die. I heard the authors interviewed courtesy of our local National Public Radio affiliate WUNC (which does their share of great content generation, btw), and to fit the ultra-dense format of radio, they said…

Nat Torkington asked recently Is “Open Source” Now Completely Meaningless. Certainly not; in fact, there are several reasons this label is still valid and important. I’m a pragmatist, so I’m not going to wave any flags or sing any anthems to argue this, just point out what has worked and continues to work. First of…

That seems to be the opinion of Stephen Walli in this blog posting. I just finished reading Made To Stick, a book recommended to me by my trendspotting wife Amy, and it’s quite obvious that Brent has both a command of the facts, an understanding of the context, and a gift for relating them in…

For some time, the term “Open Standard” has been gaining in market popularity. Unlike Open Source, which has had a concrete definition for almost ten years, the term Open Standard was merely a feel-good term with no actual technical meaning. Nevertheless, decades of poor experiences with proprietary standards (or no standards at all) contrasted with…

There’s an idea that’s becoming increasingly popular here in Chapel Hill, and it’s expressed by one of two bumper stickers. The first is: Ignore Your Rights And They’ll Go Away The second is: No, You Can’t Have My Rights, I’m Still Using Them These apply equally well to the definition of Open Source software. For…

Three cheers for Alfresco for changing their license to the GPL. The first cheer is because they are shifting away from a license which, as a modified version of an OSI-approved license, was not, technically, Open Source as the OSI defines it. We all remember the days when high-flying technology companies reported “pro-forma” financials instead…