What licenses do the "big" projects use? What are the community implications? These questions came to mind after I saw Martin Fink, Hewlett Packard Enterprise CTO, give a…
Many companies benefit from open source, and countless companies have opted to open source components of their infrastructure (or even their bread and butter) in an effort to…
Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager at Oracle and leads the North Texas MySQL User Group. He'll be speaking at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC this year (June 10-12…
"Having an expensive camera and Photoshop doesn't make you a professional photographer—not needing them does." I'm not sure who the original source of that quote is, but I…
Chris Prather never metaphor he didn't like. That's what he tells developers, at any rate. And on stage at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC, Prather explained how a deep…
When it comes to running an open source business, the question I’m asked second most often is "How do you market your services?" (The first is "How do you make money selling…
I have been asked to turn "Open for Business" into a monthly column, focusing on applying the open source way to business. Let the reader beware that I am not a millionaire. I…
In a perfect world, the sales process for an open source business would be as simple as answering the phone and taking orders. Unfortunately, reality is seldom perfect, and…
I want to conclude this series of columns, in which I’ve written about marketing, pricing, and sales, with a discussion of what might be the most difficult aspect of running…
Though it might seem to contradict the open source way, I believe it is essential for an open source project to register and protect its trademark. Think about it: You spend…
Last fall, Open Forum Europe (OFE) initiated an effort to help the European Union (EU) institutions live up to their commitments to support open document formats when…
Higher education is increasingly embracing different concepts of openness, from open access to open education resources (OER). But where does that other open concept—open…