I love stories of user-driven innovation. Here's one I just discovered: the Magic Lantern firmware upgrade for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. Trammel Hudson tells the story of his elegant and vital hacks:
This afternoon I heard this story on NPR. It's not the first time OpenStreetMap was mentioned as an asset in the relief effort. It was also mentioned three days ago in a story sourced from the Associated Press.
On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti 15 miles from its capital, Port-au-Prince. On January 14th, the Sahana team, based largely in Sri Lanka, launched its Haiti 2010 Disaster Relief Portal, including a Situation Map, an Organizations Registry, and an Activities Report.
Thanks to Greg DeKoenigsberg, I now know about Gource. You should, too. Watch this movie, which speaks for itself:
Marv Langston served as Department of Defense Deputy Chief Information Officer (CIO), where he helped initiate the Global Information Grid, Public Key Infrastructure - Common Access Cards, and led the Defense Department Year 2000 transformation. Prior to that he held positions as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Navy for C4I, Navy's first CIO, and Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Systems Office. In 1999, Government Computer Week magazine honored him with an Executive of the Year award. More recently he wrote an Open Letter to the US Navy leadership that I believe applies to all who are thinking about the right go-forward IT strategy for the new year and the new decade.
When 2010 was barely one week old, state CIO Teri Takai published ITPL-10-01, which serves to "formally establish the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice."
Greg Stein (Apache developer and all-around nice guy) made an off-hand comment about open source trademarks in an article(How to Screw Your (Open Source Software) Customers). He was talking about how many users of MySQL have actually using a purchased proprietary licensed copy of the software, and not the open source licensed copy. MySQL's business model uses dual licensing: the GPL, and for the folks whom its strictures are unacceptable, a standard proprietary license.
The following is a comment I left on a blog posting by John Mark Walker at OStatic.
I would be delighted to see Larry Augustin acting as the CEO of an Open Source company, but my knowledge of his past actions makes me dubious. Will SugarCRM remain faithful to the open source model? Or will it be carved up into a mixed-up model of giving away freely that which the company deems to be "low value" and keeping proprietary what the company deems to be "high value"?
As families go, the Linux operating system family has become the family among the Top500 supercomputers, running on 89.20% of all systems. Proprietary Unix, which used to the the preferred OS for these supercomputers in the 1990s is down to 5% share, and Windows is reported to be running on exactly 5 systems, for a 1% share.
