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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. Sahana is a free and open source software disaster management…

“There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.“ – from the Commencement Address for Oberlin College given by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., June 1965, Oberlin Ohio

Thanks to Greg DeKoenigsberg, I now know about Gource. You should, too. Watch this movie, which speaks for itself: After watching how a few committed souls can build a vibrant, dynamic community, it reminds me a bit about the “Let’s Do It” campaign of 2008 in Estonia, in which a single visionary and a handful…

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…

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.” David Wheeler beat me to the punch with his blog posting, but he noticed the same thing I did: the first sentence…

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…