Open Source Delivers

There was a great deal of debate this week over whether or not the city of Munich saved money by migrating its software to open source alternatives. The city originally estimated that its LiMux project would save them millions. However, a new report by HP on behalf of Microsoft claims that’s not the case. Get [...]

Last week I was pleased to moderate a panel on Super Communities in Embedded Systems at the Open World Forum in Paris, after which I addressed a group involved in starting a new embedded systems community. Super communities are specific to a vertical industry and are typically based on the idea of competitors and supply [...]

Open source governance is a concept that is sometimes misunderstood or forgotten in new open source projects. Good open source governance can help maintain the long-term health of any open source community, and includes the process of writing down how decisions are made, rules of engagement for projects and how the rules can be changed [...]

Pixar and Disney were both drawn to open source this week! With the opening of Pixar’s beta program for OpenSubdiv and Walt Disney Animation Studios releasing the source code for the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) Explorer, artists and film producers have new tools to help elevate their animations.  These stories and more are featured [...]

Lately it seems like everyone’s heads are in the clouds and eyes are on the skies, waiting to see what shape the big open source cloud platforms will take. The focus has intensified this week after Eucalyptus made a huge open source play, announcing that it will publish the source code for Eucalyptus 3.1 on [...]

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Geoffrey Moore – I’ve always wanted to meet Mr. “Crossing the Chasm” himself – present at a seminar on entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.  He was talking about “Escape Velocity,” his name for a critical challenge faced by established enterprises – how to move beyond past success and [...]

Although the cloud industry buzz has continued from last week, this week also saw new open source announcements. Certainly the most talked about news was Google’s Open Networking Summit announcement that it has updated its internal networks with an open source technology called OpenFlow. Read more about OpenFlow and other open source stories from this [...]

I just returned from POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina.  For a regional open source event, attendance at 700 was pretty sweet (and so was the Southern hospitality!).  Conference attendees range from large commercial organizations to universities to students.  While there are many developer events on the “left coast” there are few [...]

In my posting about a DoD meeting I attended concerning open source acquisition, I mention “discussion about a couple of ‘corner cases’ where certain licenses had clauses, which could conflict with federal law.” There were two that came up in the meeting: one having to do with disclosure of confidential information and the other an [...]

Nowadays it seems everyone is engaged in social activities through Facebook, Google+, Twitter and an onslaught of other social offerings. Most of these offerings are proprietary, managed by large commercial entities. And while they often propagate ‘open’ standards, integrating with or even building your own software environment on top of these is a daunting and often [...]