Reposted from my personal blog Open core, Open core,  more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in. When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the [...]

Reposted from my personal blog Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and [...]

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 [...]

Jono Bacon asked on the Art of Community blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them. Governance comes in many shapes & sizes of course. My favourite governance stories are about [...]

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. [...]