what are we doing today, brain?

Jeff and I have just launched the worlds biggest research project into the Open Source industry and community. We are looking at the size, strength and dynamics of the companies and individuals involved in Open Source. The final report will be freely available online and will hopefully show both Government and the general populace that we as an industry and community totally rock

So what are you waiting for! Stand up and be counted!

Check out the Census website for more details.

AUUG have just announced that this years AUUG conference will be the last one ever:

We expect this to be the last AUUG conference, so come and have a party.

I’ve been to two of the AUUG conferences, and they are usually pretty good. Seeing this is the last one, it’s a good chance to meet and greet with people who have been involved in Unix and Linux for quite a while. The call for papers is still open till September 10, so get a paper in

It’ll be in Melbourne, 13-14 October.

Sharepoint is scary. People that use it quite like it and are blissfully unaware of the sticky technology and licensing trap they’ve allowed into their environments. It provides some useful functions that could be found in many applications or bundled applications, however the trap is that once you deploy it, Microsoft have you pretty much under their thumb. You have to use their technologies, you have to use their office suite, their operating system, their data formats. It is very hard to move away from.

There are loads of articles written about this. I’ve put only a few interesting ones below:

• The Future of Lock-in, Microsoft’s two faces of SharePoint & While you were sleeping (The Sharepoint trojan horse) - Matt Asay
• Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - Wall Street Journal

So Sharepoint is something that needs careful consideration. What are the alternatives? I don’t profess to be an expert in this space, however I’ve put a list of useful applications below that give you loads of great collaborative functionality:

• Alfresco - Enterprise Content Management (interesting article
• Clearspace by Jive (not Open Source, but looks interesting)
• O3Spaces - document centric collaboration
• Metadot - Open Source portal server

Plus of course all the other applications that are great for collaboration including Wikis, chat applications and loads more.

A few days ago I did a short 1 hour talk on FOSS for about 30 IT teachers in Sydney. It was a lot of fun and it reminded me how spending just a little time can have such a great effect! Finding people who are keen to hear about and who can really use FOSS really helps the chances of success in your message having an impact. Thus far the people I’ve found to be most open to hearing about FOSS and also the concepts of Software Freedom, Free Knowledge and a digital democracy are teachers, activists, people in the NGO/non-profit sector and students. Politicians are also good to chat to, and there is a growing community of FOSS saavy lawyers too.

Any opportunity you get to talk to these people can often have a great flow on effect to their spheres of influence. I’ve had many occasions where someone I spoke to comes back to me months or years later to help them take it further, or to assist in some great scheme they’ve created with others.

It has been flat out recently. Jeff and I are working hard and getting some great new work (more news to come!), FOSS is really taking off in Australia in Government, corporate and education, and apart from being so flat out, life is really good

Software Freedom Day is only 5 weeks away, and the website (which is hosted by Canonical) is down and has been for 2 days. Terrible timing! We expect it to be back up soon and it isn’t slowing down our shipment or other plans, but we’ve no way to let the teams know that yet.

A good friend of mine and very cool chick Maureen O’Sullivan is giving a talk at UNSW hosted by the Unlocking IP crew next Wednesday. Details are all here so come along if you can She is a great speaker and has some pretty interesting ideas about copyright, IP & FOSS. Thanks to the housemates at the Unlocking IP house of commons for putting it on

I’ve been working on putting up the online Software Freedom Day shop, which at this point includes tshirts for the event and CD packs of The Open CD. Teams running SFD events (that register prior to the 31st July) get a 50% discount so spread the word!

We also have more and better free schwag for teams than ever before including balloons, CDs, shirts, stickers and more. We also have more sponsors than ever before but more on than soon

We already have 125 teams registered from all around the world and it is only July! This year is looking to be huge!

More information soon to come Comments on the shirt design are welcome.

It is almost 3 months away from Software Freedom Day 2007, and we already have 83 teams registered! This year a lot of work went into the new registration system to make it easier for teams and for everyone else to find information, see all the teams, and get a feeling for what a truly global and participatory event this is. Check out which continents all the teams are from, it is fairly evenly balanced. As usual, Australia is doing well with 10 teams already registered!

Teams that want special SFD goodies including CDs, shirts, stickers and balloons need to be registered by the 31st July, so get in soon and register your team. Last year we had about 200 teams all up (including all the ones that registered after the free goodies date had passed), so we hope to have 300 teams this year!

The new Software Freedom International Board which includes 3 top SFD team leaders from 2006 is totally awesome, being extremely active, enthusiastic and full of new ideas.

Rock on and remember, freedom isn’t just for geeks, so let’s all get out there and help spread the important ideas of software freedom. I’ve got a short “About Software Freedom” page for anyone interested.

Don Christie of Catalyst in New Zealand has asked me to be on the panel of judges for the New Zealand Open Source Awards, which is pretty exciting!

This looks like a great initiative, and certainly something we should look at doing here too. Jeff has already made the suggestion, so lets make it happen!

Rock on New Zealand!

Having spent a long time in the FLOSS world both in community and industry roles, I started to see a serious disconnect between the industry and community perspectives on FLOSS about 5 years ago. I mean a disconnect that went beyond philosophical and into the practical, and this is largely because is a rapidly expanding userbase and industry around FLOSS. Community participants in FLOSS have a different understanding and expectation of openness than people in industry, and this difference is unfortunately being used to undermine the core values that make FLOSS more than just another technology set. The issue is that for all the well meaning of the 4 freedoms of the FSF or the Open Source Definition of the OSI, people can simply take those licences and not subscribe to any of the other attributes of openness that are expected of a FLOSS project and still get the good name of being a FLOSS project.

Openness has been proven time and time again to be the way forward. We saw it with TCP/IP, with HTTP, and now with FLOSS projects like Apache. Openness provides a platform for innovation, collaboration, an open and competitive market, and a sustainable approach to a digital future. In the same vein, a more closed approach may in some cases also be appropriate. For instance some popular and successful FLOSS projects have relatively closed development models controlled by an individual or a single company. An understanding of the degree of openness in software helps people understand the implications of the software model and also the implications in using the software.

In the spirit of discovering the core principles of openness, Jeff and I spent some time working on a model to help explain openness in such a way that it couldn’t not be undermined. We came up with 5 Foundations of Open:

• Open Source – the conditions surrounding the project source code. Usually defined within the licence terms.
• Open Standards – the data, communication and other standards used within a project, for example, APIs, protocols, & documentation norms.
• Open Knowledge – the documentation, project information, decision making, communication archives and any other content related to the project.
• Open Governance – the structure of the organisation that defines who participates in a project and the terms of participation. Includes decision making, and any practical or policy limitations on participation.
• Open Marketplace – the ability for any organisation to build a business around a project. Includes practical, legal and technological limitations to building an open marketplace around the project.

As we can see, above is a far broader understanding of openness than is generally subscribed to. A project may decide to have a more closed approach to any of these 5 vectors, and sometimes for good reasons, however by looking at all software (not just FLOSS) using these vectors people will be able to have a good understanding of how open the software is and what that means for using it, developing on it, building a business around it and so on and so forth.

I’m currently building some metrics around this to help determine the openness of any software, and will announce here when it is done.

Edit: This is an idea Jeff and I have worked on for some time, so I can’t take all the credit Thank you Jeff!

Check out this interview with James Cameron about the OLPC by the ABC. Nicely done!