In a new departure, the Open Source Initiative will hold a small open source license clinic oriented towards US Federal agencies. The event will be at the Library of Congress on May 9, 2013 starting at 9am. Places are limited and you’re encouraged to register now.
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Open source projects are increasingly opting to form an independent entity – a “Foundation” – to form the core of their community, rather than relying on goodwill or corporate oversight. Foundations often hold shared assets such as money, trademarks and copyrights, provide infrastructure, and sometimes employ staff.
The idea is seductive, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. A Foundation can’t solve your community problems; it can only make firm the solutions you devise, by providing a canvas on which to paint the trust and governance you have all agreed and to guarantee it for future generations of your community. You need to solve the problems first.
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“I wanted to share these results with everyone so other open source projects might be able to learn from our experience. It was a relatively simple change. Ask for a donation when the download is occurring not when a user is browsing the project site.“
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Eclipse, Fundraising | Comments Off on How to increase donations to an open source project
First client for the new venture…
Open Invention Network is a novel company formed to operate patent defenses for open source developers. It owns a portfolio of patents relevant to key open source technologies, runs a defensive publication scheme and operates a patent cross-licensing network of well over 500 companies. I’m pleased to announce that Meshed Insights has joined the Open Invention Network as a licensee in that network. This move both demonstrates our commitment to minimising patent risks throughout the open source community and also offers us some protection against patent aggression.
We have also reached an agreement with OIN to represent them at mutually agreed events and to assist clients in themselves becoming Open Invention Network licensees. If you are interested in becoming a licensee, which you most likely will be able to do free of charge, please contact us.
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I’ve received confirmation this week that my talk for OSCON 2013 – entitled “Can Evil Corporations Embrace Open Source?” – has been accepted. See you there!
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I remain bemused by Nokia’s attack on the prospects of the VP8 video format becoming an open standard. I can’t see what they & their shareholders get as a benefit, but I can see the harm it does to Nokia in the eyes of pretty much anyone who values open source and open standards. Read more in my InfoWorld column today.
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When the children were small, Easter eggs were a repeat of the excitement of Christmas. But now they are adults, I’ve decided we need a new Easter tradition that’s safer than all that sugar and more authentic than eggs.
There are two data points I’ve considered. First there’s the evidence of Dr Robert Lustig’s research on the effects of sugar. You can watch the video (which is probably the most important hour of video I have watched recently) but the relevant advice in this context is to treat sugar as if it were alcohol – in moderation and knowing it will harm you otherwise. Second, the Gaelic expression for “water of life” is uisge beatha, which has given us the English word whisky.
Joining these together, it does no more harm to drink whisky than to eat chocolate; in fact, since it’s easier to detect the effects of whisky on your body, it may well be safer than chocolate. Whisky is also sufficiently symbolic of the message of new life at Easter to make an ideal token. As a consequence, I’ve decided on a new tradition for the adults in our extended household who consent. Instead of chocolate eggs, they each have 200ml bottles of single malt whisky.
This year it’s Caol Ila, and we’ll be toasting new life with the water of life a little later. Happy Easter!
Filed under: Spirituality | Tagged: Chocolate, Easter, Food, Tradition, Whisky | 3 Comments »
Have you ever thought of migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? You don’t switch just to save on license fees; think that way and the differences in the replacement package – which can never be a drop-in replacement – will kill your migration like they did Freiburg’s.
While the saving on Microsoft license costs seems like the biggest motivation, actually the most important outcome is changing everyone’s behaviour. Among the goals of this change are reducing the rate of change in the tools and file formats and thus making documents accessible for the longest time and ensuring that the features in use across your company’s ecosystem are as interoperable as possible. One simple but big win is to get people to stop distributing editable document versions of any format. open or not. Hybrid PDFs are the first step to freedom.
With that reduced rate of change and a cross-platform interoperability that allows use of Linux, Mac and Windows, flexibility is enhanced and you’re given much more control over your IT environment as a result. It’s important to invest rather than skimp on the migration; the cost savings come later as the flexibility takes effect
Achieving these outcomes can only happen with planning and purposefulness. Continuing their practice of creating resources and “letting the work do the talking” The Document Foundation issued a white paper explaining how to conduct a successful migration. I’ve read through it and summarised it for you in my InfoWorld column this week, along with a few tips of my own.
TDF naturally use LibreOffice as the open source suite to install, but other open source alternatives work just as well with the same ideas. Hopefully the paper will evolve as the community adds its experience – it’s a hybrid PDF after all, anyone can edit it and this would make a great focus for the cross-community collaboration some folk are calling for.
Filed under: LibreOffice | 1 Comment »
Tina Dico at Union Chapel, originally uploaded by webmink.
We had an evening out last night in London at Union Chapel, an excellent venue for acoustic gigs. We saw & heard Tina Dico, who has a wonderful voice and writes strong, reflective songs.
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My Infoworld Open Sources article for this week is now live. It takes the demise of Google Reader as a reminder that without open source software processing open standards, we have no freedom to “rehost and carry on”.
Filed under: InfoWorld | 1 Comment »
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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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