I first met Pierre Fricke in late 1998 or early 1999 when he was working for IBM. He was one of four people charged by IBM to research and evaluate the strategic implications of open source software for IBM’s business. Because I was a founder of the world’s first open source company, he was keen to understand what I saw back in 1989, what I saw looking to 1999 and beyond, and whether our experience (which earned upwards of $24M of revenue in 1999) could possibly inform the strategy for a company more than 1000x our size.

We’ve been setting up our calendar for OSCON 2007 Once again the OSI Board will be holding public meetings and also a day-long work session. Michael just blogged the “high…

Innovation requires imagination. Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” Making innovative leaps requires design thinking and a culture…

The Foundation for Economic Education publishes a journal called ‘The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty’. They published this article in January:

Open-Source Software: Who Needs Intellectual Property? by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine

I am proud to be a member of the open source community. I am especially proud when I can use open source to do something really unexpected, like getting my daughter all excited about doing something just a little bit batty, making a promise of success, and then, delivering on that promise, in spades.

I started to respond to David Richards (the CEO of CentricCRM) comment to the thread I started last week, but that thread has generated a number of sub-threads which I think are better addressed separately. (You can be the judge as to whether this thread separation is a good idea or not.) Thus, I gave a partial response there, and here’s really my full response.

David,

First, let me thank you for stepping forward into this discussion.

Dana Blankenhorn’s story How far can open source CRM get? has finally pushed me to respond to the many people who have asked “When is the OSI going to stand…

Stanford Professor David Kelley is one of those rare individuals who has successfully added a new way of thinking to Western Thought: Design Thinking. Indeed, the National Academy of Engineering…

kinshuksunil writes to tell us about an upcoming free Open Source event in Delhi… Information is available at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi. While I can’t vouch personally for this event, I attended the…

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 ;-)….

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…