confused of calcutta

For many years I’ve been of the belief that:

when a problem is generic look to the opensource community for the solution
when a problem is specific to a vertical market look to the commercial community
when a problem is unique to your organisation look to your own developers

You don’t have to be legalistic about it, this is [...]

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There’s an interesting study of Linux kernel development that’s been doing the rounds recently. Published this month by the Linux Foundation, it makes for fascinating reading.
While it concentrates on the kernel itself, the report is still exhaustive:

Covers a period of over 3 years
Spread over 14 kernel releases
Relating to 3621 lines added, 1550 lines removed and [...]

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The Because Effect is all about understanding abundances and scarcities. Any firm that truly understands the abundances and the scarcities of a given economic era is bound to prosper, as Gilder noted many years ago.
Opensource is all about The Because Effect, and is a means of making abundant things that were previously scarce. Abundance that [...]

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That’s the subject of a very powerful set of essays published recently in the Edge World Question Center. I haven’t read all of them yet; I was working through them sequentially when I received an e-mail from Pat Kane of ThePlayEthic, pointing me at the answer given by Kevin Kelly. [Thanks, Pat, and I look [...]

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The kernel for this post was an innocuous article in the BBC online, headlined Computer knowledge “undervalued”. I read it some time ago, and for some reason it felt like I’d just sat on a saddle with a burr under it. Slowly I realised that there was no saddle, but that the burr remained. A [...]

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I’ve maintained for years that the core of my understanding of opensource came not from Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond but Jerry Garcia, that my understanding of open markets and democratised innovation came not from Yochai Benkler or Eric von Hippel but Jerry Garcia and his cronies. It goes beyond pure opensource, I think my [...]

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Some of you may have noticed that this blog now has a Random Page feature. The way I heard it, StumbleUpon announced a Site Specific Stumbling facility; someone asked Photo Matt whether there was a WordPress plug-in that did something similar, and soon there was one. Because Matt built it. Thanks, Matt! and thanks as [...]

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I don’t really understand why it happens, but for some reason far too many people think opensource is free as in gratis rather than free as in freedom. As a result, when I ask people why they would use opensource, the answers are framed in the context of cost. The three commonest answers I get [...]

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As you would expect, I spent a lot of time with my wife and children over the Easter break. And then stayed up to watch the golf. When I wasn’t doing either of these things, I was catching up on my reading.
Dan Farber’s True Nature Of Open Source post got me thinking. Go take a [...]

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[With thanks to Ms Safka, and to Malcolm for alerting me to this story via his post here.]
[An aside: Would you believe Melanie turned 60 earlier this week? Happy belated birthday.]
In a HotNews post earlier today, Steve Jobs opened up (pun intended) with his views on DRM. Well worth a read. For me, the most [...]

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