I am traveling again, and I am reading again. Today I am in Dubai, and on the way I read two great books: The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson…

Unfortunately, some people don’t realize that “Open Source” has a definition. They think it’s a loosey-goosey term meaning “stuff that people like”, more or less. So they apply it to…

Last week I was quoted by the BBC saying that taken as a whole, the world wastes $1 trillion (with a ‘T’) dollars on information and communications technology. And judging…

I’ve recently taken on a new job, after 17 years of consultancy. I grew restive at my own weak points, and wanted to outsource sales and management, neither of which…

We are always trying to shine some light to our kids, and teach them about right and wrong. A few things are pretty hard to explain. Copyright for one is…

Tom Callaway is the Fedora Engineering Manager, at Red Hat, and he’s one of the key people keeping watch over the many and sundry licensing issues that crop up when…

As a rule, I really enjoy reading the Economist. I find its articles to be well researched and its editorial positions to be well-reasoned. I also have a soft spot…

Wow. Open Source comes to medical instruments. Of course, hewlett-packard makes great ECG hardware, but for western hospitals, price really isn’t their concern. If you could drive the price down,…

Andrew J. Turner (http://www.highearthorbit.com) suggested to me that we need a term for user-created, user-entered, user-discovered, and user-curated data. Of course, if you change “data” to “code” you have exactly…

Sam Folk-Williams recently blogged a response to an earlier blog posting I had written about Open Source and Sustainability. Over the past few months I’ve been having more and more…

There’s an argument commonly heard these days that open-source software is all very well for infrastructure or commodity software where the requirements are well-established, but that it can’t really innovate….

Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article titled The practical problem with software patents, a subject near and dear to my heart. He draws on the same research that I have…