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Here at opensource.org we get lots of spurious requests for “link exchanges”…what do firearms have to do with Open Source? /me ducks while a thousand commenters type an answer ;-). We also get more than our share of offers from kindly Nigerians). Ours is a very popular internet destination, so it comes with the territory.…

It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0. As I wrote in Open Sources, it was the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point). Having first read and lightly hacked Emacs code in 1985, having read and lightly…

Yesterday I was blog-tagged by Stephen Walli. Does the fact that he tagged for other people mean that I’m not “it”? Oh well…the topic is one that interests me, and I think he started the ball rolling in an interesting direction, so I figure I’ll add my thoughts. For my money, the three ways that…

In 2003, Nicholas Carr shook up an increasingly irrelevant community of CIOs by publishing the article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. I believe that he got it half right: the irreversable trend of information technology was toward commodity economics, and thus the idea of paying rents for proprietary software was preposterous. What he did not quite get…

A few months ago I posted my initial impressions for a draft version of the GPLv3 license, and I am happy to say that as with other licenses developed with community input, the then-good GPLv3 has continued to improve. As I read the “final” draft version of GPLv3, which I think is truly excellent, I…

Alan MacCormack published a new paper entitled A Developer Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center. Whenever I see a statement of developer desiderata, I’m reminded of this timeless posting by One Laptop Per Child hacker extraordinaire Chris Blizzard: