Open Source and Linux
Is your culture made of gold or fool's gold?
When I hear people talk about how awesome their organizational culture is, I often find myself wondering what sort of “great” culture it is.
For me, great cultures fall into two categories: entitlement and mission-driven. Those “best places to work” lists don't usually make a distinction, but I do. Here is the difference:
Entitlement cultures
The surest sign of an entitlement culture? When someone tells you why they like their work, they give you an example of a benefit not related to the work itself. Some examples:
Open source science fiction: Thoughtcrime Experiments
Anybody who reads knows the publishing industry has changed. We mourn over print media though we read happily from the strangely pleasant matte screen of the Kindle. We long for our thick summer magazines as we’re catching quick bites from PDAs and tiny laptops. Even people who love books--and I mean /love books/ in a way that’s perhaps a little strange--find themselves faced with new-media ways of doing old-creative things and opportunity where the new road leads.
OLPC and FOSS@RIT--Education innovation the open source way
The Rochester Institute of Technology is a technical university offering undergraduate and post-graduate programs including co-ops, internships, study abroad, and research opportunities to more than 16,000 students in Rochester, NY. One of RIT’s research and educational outreach efforts is the Laboratory for Technological Literacy, a group that focuses on issues of technology and information distribution.
Can open business practices survive an acquisition?
It ain’t easy being open in today’s corporate environment. It’s even harder for an open company to stick to its knitting when it joins forces with a much larger, much more entrenched player in its industry. Is it possible for a small company to stay true to its more 21st century values if it hopes to reach the heights of its 20th century predecessors?
Marketing software skills
If you ask a software developer how to make money writing code, you'll usually get employment or selling applications as your answer. It's my opinion, however, that most are missing the boat and need to think of their skills as a marketable service.
The other answers, while not wrong, have to do with point of view.
Google and the culture of participation
Co-author: Bascha Harris
With the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh the first week of May, a slew of open source rock stars were in our hometown. Chris DiBona, Public Sector Engineering Manager at Google, was able to visit the Red Hat office and talk with us during his trip. The focus of his talk was the enormous culture of participation that companies like Google and Red Hat—and technologies like the Internet—attempt to embrace and extend, despite naysayers and proprietary business habits.
Trust, transparency, and WikiLeaks: Who gets to have control?
Speaking at the Pentagon on WikiLeaks' disclosure of thousands of classified documents, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the word "trust" fourteen times.
iPhone jailbreaking decision is temporary relief
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.
Who had the first government open source policy?
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.
Lockheed Martin goes open source, people freak out.
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.
Creating online community the open source way
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
Managing clouds and the death of formality in business
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.
Going to LinuxCon? Let's have ice cream.
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.
Poll: Which industry would you improve using the open source way?
Tell us what the missed opportunities are, that could be improved, based on your vote.
Patching democracy with open data
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.
New Zealand rejects software patents
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.
Interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin
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.
Collaborating on patent examinations
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.
Fear of failure? Embrace it by failing fast.
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.
Open sound series: Part 3 - Ampache
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?