open standards - Page number 5

(...hint: it might not be what you expect!)

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch. Before founding the company in 2005, Fulkerson (and co-founder Steve Bjorg) worked in Microsoft's advanced strategies division. After leaving Microsoft, the duo recognized a growing need for a scalable, easy-to-use open source collaboration platform for business and focused their efforts on a pet project, Deki Wiki. Within three years, Deki Wiki was rated as one of the Top 5 OSS projects by SourceForge.net and ultimately grew to become the company known as MindTouch today. MindTouch offers a robust enterprise collaboration platform with more than 16 million users and 400,000 web visits each month.

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If you're like me, it seems like every time you log into Facebook, you see another message or two from friends deleting their accounts. Then you check Twitter, and there's yet another rallying cry for open standards in social networking.

Wait. I just got déjà vu.

Wired (among many others) has been making that call for years. Years. But like so many noble causes, it took a sufficiently motivating, negative catalyst to spread the messsage. » Read more

Do the cultures of proprietary companies impede innovation? Do open source companies need a different sort of leadership? I've got my theories, but I don't have much to compare it to from my own experiences. I've been at Red Hat, a very open culture, for seven years and did a two-year tour at Alcatel before that. So I caught up with Cheryl McKinnon, Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, an open source enterprise content management company, to explore open culture, leadership, and history. » Read more

I always look forward to my conversations with Jan Wildeboer. Simply put, he helps me look at the world a little differently. A little more.... openly.  » Read more

The battle for Open Standards in Europe

Today, people and groups around the world are celebrating Document Freedom Day. This is an international day to raise awareness of Open Standards and free document formats. As the event takes place for the third time, the previous focus on the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is broadening to include other free formats such as Ogg. » Read more

With Document Freedom Day 2010 approaching, this is a good opportunity to consider the reasons why the public sector has increasingly opted for ODF, the document freedom that it enables, and why ODF is an essential feature of any “open” eGovernment strategy. » Read more

By Chander Kant, CEO Zmanda.

Have you ever tried to retrieve a public record from your local, state or federal government? Despite their name, many public records have not been simple or free for citizens to access. Until recently, obtaining copies of even the most basic records has been a grueling process.

There are two layers of barriers in getting to data stored at a government agency: » Read more

An acquaintance emailed me a .docx file last week that my older word processor wouldn't open on the first try.  Before you start sending me fixes, don't worry.  I got it open eventually after much grumbling about proprietary formats that aren't really standards.  But I digress.
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By Roger Burkhardt, Ingres CEO.

We have to speed up energy innovation to the pace demonstrated in the growth of the Internet if we are to prevent irreversible climate disruptions that will irreparably harm the planet for our children and all those that follow. The scale and speed of change required to ward off disaster cannot be achieved using conventional models. We need to constantly compress seven years of innovation into one – the pace described as innovating on “Internet time”. » Read more

After a decade-long battle, terms of a settlement agreement were finally reached last week between the European Commission and Microsoft regarding anticompetitiveness. » Read more