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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 a pretty complicated thing. My daughter has frequently asked me about movies and music. Her friends tell her that they can download any music or…

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 thousands of software packages come together to make a Linux distribution. Love them or hate them, Tom was and is one of the key architects…

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…