Open Source and Linux
MIX: Gary Hamel's experiment in reinventing management the open source way
Of all of the people talking or writing about the future of business right now, no one has more street cred than Gary Hamel.
Fortune cookie says: To succeed, you must share.
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.
LeBron James: A management innovator?
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.
Crafting an open web qualification
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.
Open Source Hardware Definition Hits 0.3
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Most MySQL users OK with Oracle
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.
Open source hardware defined by credit
A “gold” (Version 1.1) definition of Open Source Hardware has been released, and it’s pretty interesting.
While open source software is mainly defined by usage rights, it seems, open source hardware is defined in large part by credit.
(Shown is an Adafruit starter kit, from Adafruit.com. Think of them as the Heathkit of the new age. If you’re really clever you can be the Steve Jobs of open source hardware. Or at least the Ed Roberts.)
Of course, open source hardware as a class is nowhere near where software is. The effort spearheaded by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, Phil Torrone of Make, David Mellis of MIT Media Lab, Limor Fried of Adafruit and Ayah Bdeir of Eyebeam is only setting standards for what will become open source hardware licenses.
They’re at the Tim O’Reilly, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman stage of open source. And perhaps in keeping with this the first Open Source Hardware Summit will be held September 23 at the New York Hall of Science on the grounds of the old World’s Fair. (Mets game afterward optional — I’m hoping the Braves will have clinched by then.)
As Daniel Terdiman notes over at CNET, this is well overdue, because open source hardware companies are actually starting to make some money.
The group acted in part because open source hardware has been moving in a FOSS direction. Right now someone could take a design from say, Adafruit, produce a clone, and Adafruit would see nothing from it.
The idea is that innovations should build communities, innovators should get credit, but that the innovations themselves should be available. Just as with open source.
Right now hardware is very much stuck at the patent office. People can’t see something new, often, until the government has a copy and has begun the long drawn-out process of protecting the invention. The hope is that, with standards and eventually licenses, open source hardware can move more quickly.
It’s a wonderful dream. Can it become reality?
Reminder: Our Life needs you. Write for us.
Here on the Life channel, we've realized there are a lot of stories about everyday life that are using open source principles—collaboration, participation, sharing, transparency—what we call the open source way. But we can't find them all. And we certainly can't tell them all. That's where you come in.
Participating in a gift economy: Are you giving enough?
Open source communities are often compared to gift economies. You participate. You solve shared problems. Others do the same.
In many ways, you give to get.
Spotify ports its music streamer to Linux
Spotify is previewing a Linux version of its popular music-streaming service.…
Bilski and software patents
The Supreme Court case of Bilski v Kappos was billed as a case over business methods, but at its core it was over an application for a patent on software, and the denial of that application sets a good example that may lead to the denial of other software patents.
SCO says its claims not dead yet
But they are. (You can tell white folks at a trot, because they all like Spamalot.)
SCO CEO Darl McBride’s brother Kevin has finally posted the code he says IBM “stole” for Linux from the Unix SCO claimed to own. (The court decided Novell, not SCO, owned the Unix in question.)
It turns out to be much ado about very little. (Except that the McBrides really, really hate Pamela Jones of Groklaw, which I consider a point in her favor.)
Most of the code snippets are very generic, as though SCO were claiming to own basic coding.
It’s sad, in a way. IBM, Novell, and the entire Linux community were dragged through the courts for seven years over this? Really? Really. And for much of that time open source, as a concept, was under a cloud of legal suspicion, a cloud the McBrides would still like imposed on it.
Their case is worse than Bilski’s, and even the Robert Supreme Court saw fit to throw out those claims (even if they left the rest of us hanging).
It’s like Spamalot with non-traditional casting. Maybe Lawrence Fishburne as King Arthur. (And Fishburne in Spamalot is a much better idea than the McBride jihad.)
Can we finally let this story go?
The truth about government and open source
The new Conservative government in the U.K. is teasing the idea of switching to open source, but for entirely the wrong reason.
(Shown is Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, from his parliamentary Web site.)
The claim, supposedly from two government employees, is that the move will save money. In some ways that’s right. But experience teaches a different lesson.
Open source does save a lot of money on the front-end. If you’re not paying license fees, you can say you’re saving money.
But in an enterprise environment that’s only half the story. You need to learn how to get value from open source. Developing with open source means paying developers. And open source requires a different attitude toward your people — all your people — if you’re to gain the most value from it.
I love open source, but a wholesale, immediate switch for an enterprise will always be a fiasco. You’re going to dump people who have knowledge, just because that knowledge involves proprietary products. And you’re going to have to gear up to hire people who have different types of knowledge.
More important, an organization using open source can’t be driven from the top down. The most successful open source implementations are bottom-up affairs. You have to empower people to get into the guts of your organization and support them, even when they make mistakes.
In other words, some of what you save on the front end you lose on the back end. And you have to start trusting your people. Open source won’t work if your people are mushrooms — if you want to leave them in the dark and shovel manure on them.
Another important point is your relationship to the community, which in this case is the whole country. You’re taking software from a commons. You need to donate back. You need to accept the contributions and ideas of complete outsiders, maybe even foreigners, maybe even Americans.
And you have to participate.
These are lessons American enterprises are still learning. Many large American companies that have supported open source projects still aren’t getting full value, because they won’t allow contributions to the commons from employees and they won’t allow free communications with the community.
There’s a lot of change to get your head around, and you have to believe in it.
My advice, based on what I’ve learned on this beat, is it’s best to go slowly. Evolve toward open source. Don’t impose it. And accept the values of open source if you want to get full value from it.
If you can do that you can make lasting change in any organization, even a government.
Do you aspire to build a brand community or a community brand?
In my day job at New Kind, I spend quite a bit of my time working on brand-related assignments, particularly for organizations interested in community-based approaches to building their brands.
Panel: Copyright Needed In Music, But Should Benefit Musicians
This story was written and originally posted by Kaitlin Mara at Intellectual Property Watch.
Copyright is critical to the survival of the music industry and its creators, but lack of respect for copyright is not why artists are struggling to make ends meet, argued a recent panel of media lawyers and music industry experts. The blame for that lies squarely on the corporate-focus of the music industry, and how it has bent copyright law to serve companies rather than composers, said a panel at the University of Westminster.
OSCON: Will Health Care Partners Embrace Open Source?
The health care sector is set for a technology-driven transformation as the federal government pushes adoption of electronic health records and pursues national health information exchange. Hardly surprising, the Open Source Convention (OSCON) has a health care track that will focus on open EHR/EMR software and the government’s standards-based Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) among other topics. What’s in it for VARs? Here are some clues.
Resellers could find themselves involved in implementing or hosting open source health software. Building applications that take advantage of NHIN is another possibility.
So here’s a summary of what you can glean form OSCON 2010, slated to run July 19-23 in Portland, Ore.:
- Open EHR: One discussion will focus on open source VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), one of the most widely used EHR systems. K.S. Bhaskar, senior vice president, Fidelity Information Services, Inc.; Ben Mehling, senior director, research and development, Medsphere Systems; and David Whiles, director of information systems, Midland Memorial Hospital, Midland, Texas, will provide an introduction to the technology. Bhaskar was a co-founder of WorldVistA, which aims to improve VistA for use beyond the VA. Mehling has been facilitating collaboration among clinicians, developers and business partners on OpenVista. Whiles managed the deployment of OpenVista at Midland Memorial Hospital.
- Another session will target the modernization of VistA, which some observers contend is difficult to deploy and relies on outmoded technology. David Uhlman, chief executive officer of ClearHealth Inc. will discuss the lessons the company has learned from legacy technology and how it has adapted VistA’s strength into a Web-based practice managed and EMR system.
- Also at OSCON, Fred Trotter, a consultant/advocate for open source health software, will talk about companies aiming to take VistA to the next level in his overview of open source health solutions. The talk will cover applications such as OpenMRS, OpenEMR, Tolven and ClearHealth.
- NHIN: David Riley and Brian Behlendorf, both of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, will discuss CONNECT, an open source gateway for health information exchange. CONNECT uses NHIN standards to link up providers, insurers, and government entities.
- Arien Malec, a contractor with the Office of the National Coordinator, will discuss NHIN Direct, an open government initiative that intends to promote public/private collaboration in the development of health information transport standards. Trotter, meanwhile, will also cover CONNECT and NHIN in his session.
Still, The VAR Guy’s blog team wonders just how much momentum open source will gain in the health care industry — especially as companies like gloStream attract VARs and MSPs onto a Microsoft-centric EMR platform.
We’ll be listening to learn if OSCON attendees embrace the open source health care pitch.
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There are a few things you should know about democratically run “cooperative” businesses. First, they're not all that unusual. They're also respectably profitable. And working in one doesn't require you to be a Marxist or wear patchouli.
Claimed Proof That UNIX Code Was Copied Into Linux
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
REMnux, the Malware Analysis Linux OS
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A new fix for stock media
I see the current stock media situation as a dried-up well. It has some great work and a lot of junk being sold, abused, stolen, and recycled, roundup after roundup.