Open Source Delivers

No one knows the importance of communities more than community leaders. Yes, many of us are on Twitter and attending local networking meet-ups such as The Community Roundtable’s CRLive lunches, but I haven’t found a local get-together specifically for the folks who manage high-tech virtual communities in the Greater Boston area to dive deep on [...]

I’m an engineer because I want to understand how things work and I love to expand on that knowledge to make new things work. Recently I stumbled upon an analysis of web browser architecture. It is not surprising that most details in this analysis are from open source browsers (e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox), as opposed [...]

Recently the space shuttle Enterprise make its final flight, circling the Statue of Liberty while sitting atop a 747. It was a breathtaking sight, and also a reminder that NASA, at least for the time being, is focusing its energies closer to home. One of the next frontiers for NASA is open source. In February [...]

In last month’s Open Source and Innovation webinar, Editor-in-Chief of CRM Outsiders Chris Bucholtz, and I had the opportunity to speak with the Olliance Group’s Greg Olsen, about various aspects of the cloud including its future, the issue of security in the cloud, and the cloud’s role in the open source community. Naturally I was [...]

At the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit a couple weeks ago, the Linux Foundation announced their annual “Who Writes Linux?” report. Amanda McPherson of TLF blogged about it on April 3, and her comments about what we can extract from the numbers ring true: the Linux Kernel is receiving more and more attention from companies and [...]

Last summer, the US Department of Veterans Affairs launched OSEHRA, the central governing body of a new open source software community focused on electronic health records. The community is growing rapidly, with more than 750 members from industry, government, and academia so far. VA has contributed its VistA EHR software, and many community members are [...]

The big stories this week were the reunion of Android with Linux in the new kernel 3.3 release and the news of the Icelandic public sector’s year long program to move all its software from proprietary to open source. Read about these stories and more: Stephen Shankland reported on the inclusion of Android code in [...]

Last week, Ford introduced its open source platform, OpenXC, developed by Ford Research & Innovation along with New York-based Bug Labs to allow developers real-time access to vehicle data and sensors, GPS and speed while keeping this platform isolated from the control system (great idea!). It’s awesome to see Ford driving this type of open [...]

FOSDEM is unlike any other conference I attend. This year in Brussels, it was bitter cold and snowing outside.  But when nearly 5,000 dedicated free software developers get together, the resulting intellectual sparks can’t be extinguished even by copious amounts of excellent Belgian beer. Actually, the beer helps a lot! It costs nothing to attend [...]

In preparation for an upcoming webinar regarding best practices of using open source throughout the software lifecycle, I decided to look back on a webinar I presented in 2010, and realized that we have come a long way. Long ago, we stopped questioning if open source should be adapted into mission-critical systems, and rather talked [...]