I’m delighted to announce the availability of GNOME Developer Training at GUADEC this year. It’s been brewing for a while, but you can now register for the training sessions on the GUADEC website. Fernando Herrera, Claudio Saavedra, Alberto Garcia and myself will be running the two-day course, covering the basics of a Linux development environment [...]

I was visiting a prospective client this morning, who was interested in using SalomeTMF as a test management framework, and we were discussing whether there was any risk in choosing it as a tool. To prepare for the meeting, I had a quick look at the project, and while what follows is not a complete [...]

Mal Minhas of the LiMo Foundation announced and presented a white paper at OSiM World called “Mobile Open Source Economic Analysis” (PDF link). Mal argues that by forking off a version of a free software component to adjust it to your needs, run intensive QA, and ship it in a device (a process which can [...]

A collection of recent articles of interest:  From the archives: the best distros of 2000 | TuxRadar: A trip down Linux distribution memory lane – back to the day when WindowMaker was considered “an attractive alternative” to Enlightenment, the old default GNOME window manager. Polymorph: Hacking Business Models: A few months ago, Monty Widenius and [...]

Reposted from my personal blog Recently I gave a class for a friend of mine in Grenoble as part of an “Introduction to entrepreneurship” course he is teaching for a Masters in business studies. He asked me to explain my activity, how I set myself up administratively, and explain the business model and marketing plan [...]

My previous post on free software business models got some really great feedback, but I think that I was arguing against a straw man that I’ve built up myself. That straw man is the “pure open source start-up”  – and I’m not the only person tilting at this particular windmill. The false assumption here is [...]

This is an article accompanying the presentation given by Dave Neary to MAPOS 08 in London on December 9th 2008. Moving the Mobile industry from purchasing to co-development in free software communities Recently, Matt Aslett wrote an article about the way that attitudes to free software evolve over time within a company, using a graphic [...]

Suddenly, it was all clear. The answer was fewer clients. Less money. Caring for them and caring for ourselves. Jerry Maguire “Fewer clients. Less money.” Sacrilege in a world where the goal is to grow the first billion dollar “open source vendor”. But that chimera that Matt Asay holds a torch for may never come. [...]