My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.)  When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were using open source.  Alan is a tough critic and calls it like he sees it so while I knew there was no guarantee that he’d go easy on the companies, I knew that Alan would do an even handed job of highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.  I also know that everyone I invest in values any kind of feedback – both good and bad – and they work especially hard to delight their customers… Read more

Kevin Kelleher’s article on GigaOm this morning titled 2009: Year of the Hacker made me think back to the rise of open source after the Internet crash of 2001.  In the aftermath of the crash, many experienced software developers were out of work for a period of time ranging from weeks to years.  Some of them threw themselves into open source projects and, in some cases, created their next job with the expertise they developed around a particular open source project.

We are still in a tense and ambiguous part of the current downturn where, while many developers are getting laid off, some of them are immediately being picked back up by other companies that are in desperate need for them.  However, many other developers are not immediately finding work. … Read more

A few weeks ago MIT refreshed its OpenCourseWare project.  This project – in which MIT shares curriculum, lecture notes, exams, and other material from over 1700 projects – is amazing.

The project was launched in 2002 by computer science professor Hal Abelson with 32 courses.  I took 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from Abelson in 1984.  You can take it also – including working through the online version of the textbook! 

While I don’t have a favorite MIT course (that would be an emotionally complex oxymoron), my most miserable was 18.700 Linear Algebra which I dropped about halfway through.  Sloan (management) courses are well represented, including 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process which was my introduction to Eric von Hippel and my lifelong hatred of

Alan Shimel has a good post on a recent release of a formerly “open source” product called Nessus.  With the version 3.0 release, the authors abandoned the GPL license and effectively made it closed source.  While one can debate the rationale of the parties all day long, the fundamental issue surrounding the migration of “successful” open source projects to “closed source” as part of a commercialization phase is one that I think both vendors and customers be thrashing around with for a while. 

Recently, I’ve been exploring some thoughts with my former doctoral advisor Eric von Hippel on the broader issues surrounding Free / Open Source software.  There’s been a flurry of academic research in this arena that is covered nicely in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (co-edited… Read more