Open Source Delivers

Big companies have long been using popular open source projects – that’s nothing new.  What is new, however, are big companies taking on support of projects that already have a corporate sponsor. Revolution Analytics recently found itself in this position. The corporate sponsor of the R big data language recently found out that Oracle will [...]

Open source doesn’t work the way media narratives would like it to. You can’t see an announcement of something, then measure its immediate success in the market, and draw final conclusions about an open source effort. It’s not like the iPhone and its seemingly instant market penetration. Few understand this better than Josh McKenty. McKenty, [...]

In most markets it’s clear, as 2012 dawns, that there are usually two strong players. A proprietary company and open source. Windows and open source applications. The iPhone and Android. In each case open source has come up the stack, closer to the point of market control. This year we’ll find that control has been [...]

(with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, whose “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” is now in the public domain) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, and in my home office Not a creature was stirring, not even my mouse; The code strings were hung by the mind’s eye with care, In hopes that St. Linus soon would [...]

Thanksgiving is the most open source of holidays. It supposedly honors a potluck supper of native people and English colonists in Massachusetts, but it’s really just a harvest celebration. And the harvest in this case is personal. It’s about family, about community, about friends and neighbors gathering around food. But it’s about more than food: [...]

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar (whoever wrote it) is one of the great speeches in all of literature. It’s designed to twist a crowd against their best interests, to win them to an empire against the republic, by laying a great man’s acts for [...]

One hallmark of 21st century protest is its technological nature. Iranian protesters blogged about what they were doing and coordinated activities via SMS messaging. Egyptian protesters tweeted. Syrians got out video of crackdowns using cellphones and emails that wound up on YouTube. So when the Occupy Wall Street protests began, it was natural to look [...]

Open source has always had an on-again, off-again relationship with profit. Increasing open source adoption is tough when patented monopolies like the iPhone are ruling the headlines. As many of you know, I’ve been taking this on for a decade by telling the story of Slater’s Mill. Samuel Slater built a cotton mill in Pawtucket, [...]

Most of what’s written on open source has to do with some big controversy, or the Great Game of large companies colliding in court or the marketplace. This is not one of those stories. Instead, it’s about the comforting feeling of normal business being done. It’s about an open source “portal” software company called Liferay [...]