Monday, September 8, 2008

More Hiring for Reporting Developer

We had great success with hiring the two Drupal position mentioned earlier (We Are Hiring!), and we are now expanding further with a developer for BI/data-mining/reporting.

You can find the most immediate job posting under "Slice and Dice: Open Source Database Report Developer Wanted" on Craigslist.

As always, please contact me if you are interested, know somebody who are interested, or have any ideas about how to best hire the right people for the job.

Monday, July 7, 2008

We Are Hiring!

We are now expanding our development team and hiring for new positions.

You can find the most immediate job posting under "Are you ready to push the Drupal limits?" on drupal.org. The question is there simply because pushing the limits is what we want our developers to do!

Please contact me if you are interested, know somebody who are interested, or have any ideas about how to best hire the right people for the job.

Is hiring great talent












Sunday, July 6, 2008

Out of Stealth Mode

After many months of hard work, our new startup is out of stealth mode. We have launched our platform, we have launched paying customers, and we have many more in the pipeline! Our goal with the new company is to revolutionize Continued Medical Education (CME) - you can check out our web-site for more information. Needless to say, we could not have pulled off such a feature rich solution in such a short time with heavy use of open source software. I will get into more details later...



In 2008: Time from Company Launch to Paying Customers?











Monday, March 10, 2008

Moving on From Black Duck

As Doug Levin mentioned in his recent The “Great Dane” moves on posting, I left Black Duck Software after nearly 5 years serving as CTO, in order to join a couple of friends in a new venture!

It was a very hard decision, but I am very excited about this new venture. Black Duck is not forgotten as I can still continue to contribute good (and crazy) ideas as an advisor.

Black Duck has come very far from the beginning when I met Doug in a Starbucks in April 2003 (it really was that long ago!) until today where we have a very established organization with customers and offices worldwide. I am very proud of what we have accomplished so for at Black Duck, and I am looking forward to seeing Black Duck continuing to expand and dominate the market.

The new venture is still in stealth mode, but I can say that we are working with many open source projects in order to put our product offering together.

Monday, February 4, 2008

A Brief History of Open Source and A Sneak Preview of its Future

This was the title of a talk I was part of giving at MIT Friday along with a long-term friend and colleague Valérie Frayssé. It was part of the Computational Research in Boston (CRiB) seminar series and was quite well attended, as we nearly filled up one of the auditoriums in MITs Stata Center. I would like to thank Alan Edelman and Steven Johnson for inviting us and organizing this event.

There were many questions about open source licensing and I was quite impressed by how much effort some of the researchers have put into understanding the licensing issues. The questions also reflected different concerns by different people - a couple of very different concerns were clearly illustrated by the following questions: "How many lines of code does it take to be considered a copy?", "How do I choose a license that assures that I always get acknowledgments?", "How can I enforce my license (especially wrt acknowledgements)?", and a discussion about how licensing works for sharing government contracting work while keeping it at different security levels.

I loved the fact that the questions were very different from the ones I typically hear in a commercial environment, but they do reflect the concerns of a very interesting portion of the open source contributors. What do you think they particularly care about?


Researchers care about a license which




Monday, January 28, 2008

Collaborative Innovation According to the World Economic Forum?

The World Economic Forum launched this years annual meeting with a press release named World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2008 opens with calls for Collaborative Innovation and session topics like The Power of Collaborative Innovation. With a start like this, you would think that the IT section would be filled with examples of collaborative innovation and open source software.

However, reality turned out differently. Peripheral mentions of open source software were present in sessions like Developing Strategy in a Networked World and My Idea, My Design, but Whose Property?, but this came along with a more conclusive statement that "Open source results in robustness but not innovation" from the Update 2008: Defining Innovation session. Maybe they are on to something or maybe they simply forgot to read my previous blog entry Open Source Software - Innovative or Just Free?

Open Source: Robust or Innovative?












Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Open Source Software - Innovative or Just Free?

Over the holidays, I had a couple of discussions with people who - although they clearly understand many aspects of open source software - still equate open source to a free (as in free beer) alternative to proprietary products. When you see postings on message boards for "An open source alternative to [Pick your favorite product]" or check out dedicated web-sites for open source alternatives, the free beer aspect is certainly what the majority of people have in mind.

The view that the open source community only creates free versions of proprietary products is also illustrated in Jaron Lanier' article Long Live Closed-Source Software! It is certainly true that many innovations come from proprietary companies (and I do encourage that to continue!), but I believe this is a very limited view.

Although most discussions about whether an open source project is innovative or simply a different version of a proprietary product can result in a flame-war, we have to remember that significant innovations are directly linked to open source projects. A prominent example is the World Wide Web where many open source projects have been instrumental in its success. This includes the first text browser, named WorldWideWeb, the first graphical browser, Mosaic (later licensed to Spyglass and further to Microsoft for the first versions of Internet Explorer), the first major web servers, NCSA httpd, and the main derivative, the Apache HTTP Server.

In addition to the open source projects directly linked to innovation, the availability of free (as in free beer) and freely adaptable (as in freedom) software enables innovation from developers without the economical means to buy a proprietary infrastructure as described in Open Source Economics Driving Web 2.0 Innovation.

What do you think?


Are open source projects innovative