Speaking at the Pentagon on WikiLeaks' disclosure of thousands of classified documents, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the word "trust" fourteen times.

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While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlocking cellphones and jailbreaking iPhones (among other things) in the USA are very welcome, the reaction has been just a touch too euphoric. Not by everyone, mind you.

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Brian Purchia of Burson-Marsteller has a post over on GovFresh about the value of open source to unions. His argument pivots on cost-savings. I think you could make a more expansive argument that includes risk mitigation and innovation, but describing the advantage to unions is an interesting angle I hadn’t seen before.

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I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves.

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I presented “Creating online community the open source way” at the Triangle Drupal Users Group (TriDUG) on the evening of Thursday, July 22 and thought it would be a good idea to share with a broader audience. For this post, I'll use the opensource.com online community as my case study.

Opensource.com is a community for exploring how open source principles like collaboration, transparency, and meritocracy are influencing innovation beyond technology--shaping education, law, business, government, and everyday life. Opensource.com is a platform to share, discuss, and discover how people are applying the open source way, even if they don't call it that.

Many people are familiar with how the

attachments:  TriDUG presentation from July 22, 2010 by Jason Hibbets (PDF)

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I've been toying around with a new hypothesis. Here it is:

Formality in business is dying.

Now I am not talking about Blue Jeans Friday and Bring Your Pet to Work Day all of the sudden cropping up everywhere. I've seen very formally-run businesses where people showed up in jeans with their dogs or whatever. So much superficial informality.

What I'm talking about is a fundamental shift of business culture and management practices from formal to informal in many innovative companies. What do I mean? Let's take a step back.

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August 9, the Monday night before LinuxCon, let's get together. How's ice cream sound?

LinuxCon is happening at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. Right across the street, there's an outdoor Ben and Jerry's cafe.* We'll meet there. How's 6:30? I'll see you then.

And if you're not attending LinuxCon but happen to be in Boston, feel free to join us anyway. You can get off the T at Silver Line at World Trade Center or Silver Line Way.

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Which industry would you improve using the open source principles of transparency, collaboration, and meritocracy? Air travel Health care Automotive Real estate Oil industry Mobile phone Other (use the comments to tell us)

Tell us what the missed opportunities are, that could be improved, based on your vote.

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America held its first billion-dollar political race in 2008 – DVR use soared (no surprise there). A new lineup of over-produced ads and under-researched hit pieces have yet to hit primetime, and accountability advocates are already worried about November.

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Recently the NZ govt announced that it was to remove software from the list of items that can be patented. This decision came after hectic lobbying from the open source community on one side and the proprietary vendors on the other side.

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We got a chance to send a few questions to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. We wanted to explore open source principles like transparency, community, and collaboration in his world.  And we got a chance to ask him about the Open Source World Summit in China--and why both Microsoft and the Linux Foundation want people to pay for Windows.

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The willingness to collaborate brought us free and open source software.  Now we continue to see that willingness to collaborate permeate our government agencies.  A prime example is the Peer To Patent program developed at New York Law School by Prof.

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This is the third in a series exploring the things I have learned from the open source way during my journey with Red Hat.

One of the key tenets of the open source way is “release early, release often.” This means rather than keeping an idea or project "secret" until it is perfect, you go ahead and share it or make it available to others. You get it out there, let people play around with it, test it, expose its weaknesses, you allow peer review.

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Building a community is core to all open source projects. In fact, an open source project that lacks a community is likely missing the point of being open source. So what happens when your open project is designed to create communities?

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Of all of the people talking or writing about the future of business right now, no one has more street cred than Gary Hamel.

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The last time you ate Chinese food, you probably weren't thinking about open source development. But according to Jennifer 8. Lee, author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” the food on your plate arrived there in precisely that way.

General Tso's chicken? Unrecognizable to its creator, let alone the General's relatives. Swap out the butter and vanilla for sesame and miso in that most famous of Chinese desserts, the fortune cookie, and you have something that closely resembles tsujiura senbei, a Japanese fortune cracker. Americans will be sad to learn that much of the rest of the world—including China—is rather unfamiliar with this delicacy.

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LeBron James is an amazing basketball player. But is he also a management innovator? I couldn’t help but ask myself that question as I watched the news reports last week that three of the biggest professional basketball stars have chosen to play together in Miami. Early reports indicate that each of the players will take a pay cut in order to play together.

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School of Web Craft

For working in the open web, people need to know more than one technology. They need to learn, hack, and be creative. Mozilla is driving a project to create a broad, university-style, comprehensive course of study: Mozilla's Drumbeat Open Web Developer degree. Currently, they're calling for tutors and mentors to join the discussion about what this might look like.

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ptorrone writes "A group of open source hardware makers have put together a draft of the open source hardware definition which is now a version 0.3 which hopes to further define the making, sharing and selling of hardware within an "Open Source Hardware license". This fall, the day before Maker Faire New York City, the group hopes to have the license finalized and hit v 1.0 and they are holding the first Open Source Hardware Summit. There are currently dozens of companies making open source hardware and millions of dollars."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MySQL community is mostly neutral or positive about the open-source database's prospects under Oracle's stewardship, according to a newly released study.

Open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor Jaspersoft surveyed its community of about 130,000 users and came away with a sample of 518 respondents.