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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 for it, as the Economist was the first “mainstream” business magazine to treat the topic of open source software with any degree of seriousness. (WIRED…

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, that opens up better medicine to many many people.

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 what the Open Source Initiative is already doing for software. We could do the same thing for data. Write an Open Source Data Definition, which…

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 discussions about this topic with IT executives, and I have been meaning to write and update on the latest. Sam’s posting provides the perfect prompt…

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. I laugh when I hear this, because I remember when the common wisdom was exactly the opposite — that we hackers were great for exploratory,…

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 cited in the past, the book “Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk,” by Boston University professors, James Bessen & Michael…