Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
These are good questions. I've seen similar questions all this week, and I wrote this in response:
<a href="http://iquaid.org/2010/01/28/understanding-opensource-com/">http://iquaid.org/2010/01/28/understanding-opensource-com</a>
In summary, opensource.com is about looking at other domains than technology and applying the practices of free/libre and open source software.
I guess it's inevitable that people who prefer the term and definition of Free Software will take umbrage at "opensource.com". I'd <i>love</i> to get a consensus with free/open folks that the reason for opensource.com is that "Open Source" is a brand that people have already associated with non-technology, so it's a gateway to get people in to the realm of free/open. I personally don't see it as a choice made to lessen the other. I'm positive that if we were trying to talk to non-technical people about free software, they could get the point, but would have a harder time making the mental leap to apply the principles to education, business, government, life, etc. Using the phrase, "Just like open source, our community's widget ...," is getting more common because the brand of open source is more accessible to people. They get 'open' where they don't get 'free', at least in English where free means two confusingly different things.
So, to Jeroen's question, I think we <i>should</i> have lots of discussion of freedoms on this site. It's clearly a value of the open source movement. I personally refer to 'free culture' when talking about certain movements, such as Creative Commons, because then you can make the 'free' moniker make some sense. (IMO, people doing creative works are closer to understanding how their freedoms are oppressed, and what it means to be free-as-in-freedom.)
When dealing with the inevitable wrangling between free/open, I have hopes (not high ones, but hopes nonetheless) that opensource.com will help just a bit in bridging the needless gap between people who prefer the term/definition of Free Software v. Open Source.