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I’ve been invited to speak at the Irish Web Technology Conference 2008, in Dublin a week from today, on the subject of Open Source Licensing. If you assume that this is the Dublin in Ireland, and not any of the Dublins in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, or Virginia, you would be…

Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free blog posting has some useful insights for people trying to profit from their Open Source development. He speaks of “Generatives”, which are attributes of something which are not, and cannot be, part of a free distribution.

On January 31st 2008, Mary Jo Foley posted an insightful blog about Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy. On the morning of February 1st 2008, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6B hostile for Yahoo!, and by the end of the day, Microsoft had lost $20B in market capitalization. Where does this leave Microsoft’s open source strategy…

I just wrote a blog posting at my other blog, ( parent . thesis ), about a new application for the XO laptop: the Sahana disaster management system. Many CNET readers remain very skeptical about open source and/or the XO laptop, and I think that what the Sahana team has done exemplifies the concepts of…

I’m starting to think that the dynamics of Open Source production are such that user licenses are crap. Yes, I’m saying that everything that we’ve put into licenses, all the thought, all the drama, all the durm-und-strang, is wasted. You might wonder why.

Andy Updegrove posts yet another insightful analysis on the evolution of standards in the modern technology. He reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided 3-to-2 that a licensing promise made in a standards development process trumps the private right to hold licensees for ransom when a 3rd party later acquires the patent.…