Opening Move with Scott Mace
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Scott is senior technology editor at HealthLeaders Media, read by 40,000 healthcare executives throughout
the United States. Previously, he wrote and organized Internet-related conferences for Penton Media. Before a stint at Byte Magazine, he was a senior
editor at InfoWorld, ran the networking test center team, served as Washington D.C. bureau chief, covered database management and education beats, and
wrote the first weekly column on computer games. He also wrote features for NurseWeek, as well as columns for Boardwatch, Personal Computing, and
inCider. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he also writes the Scott Mace on Healthcare and Calendar Swamp weblogs and serves on the board of directors of CalConnect,
the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.
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Open source is the foundation of today's gift economy, but have you checked everything that comes inside those packages? Black Duck Software helped one company find and remove a surprising payload from such open source code before it could pop up on customers' screens. Find out what they found in this interview with Black Duck CEO and president Doug Levin and Black Duck customer and advisor Jothy Rosenberg.
Mobile phone shipment volumes are so huge that Microsoft and Apple aspire to capture only a fraction of the total market. Carriers and handset makers haven't made interoperability of mobile devices' address books or calendars a high priority. Funambol is a company and an open source community dedicated to making further mobile device interoperability progress. Will it be enough to overcome the walled gardens of the mobile device industry? Will the era of the iPhone bring further progress?
The Open Solutions Alliance is a new organization made up primarily of commercial open source application software vendors aims to improve interoperability between these vendors' products. Barry Klawans of JasperSoft heads the OSA's interoperability working group. Klawans describes the OSA's goals and paths for participation, and how it embraces companies whose software doesn't strictly fit the Open Software Initiative's definition of open source.
Customers are now implementing solutions based upon the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's OpenXML standard but that's just the tip of the iceberg. OpenDocument expert Gary Edwards believes that adopting OpenXML means lock-in to Microsoft products and services on an unprecedented scale. In this podcast, Edwards defends OpenDocument's capabilities but also challenges the ODF community to out-innovate Microsoft to provide a competitive alternative to Microsoft's lock-in.
OASIS, an international standards consortium, recently announced its Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section, a new initiative to advance standards that simplify Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application development. In this episode, Jeff Mischkinsky of Oracle and OASIS' board of directors explains Open CSA's role in speeding development and assembly of business services. Mischkinsky speaks about forthcoming OASIS-compliant developer tools which will "make SOA concrete."
Scott talks to Bruce Perens about the reaction to his criticism of Novell's financial and development agreements with Microsoft. In this conversation, Scott challenges an earlier Perens statement that the agreement amounts to "SCO all over again." In particular, Scott focuses on Microsoft's recent willingness to engage the open source community in ways SCO does not. Scott also talks with Bruce about the number of venture-funded open source startups who believe in software patents and the prospects for a more effective open source lobbying organization?
Libraries don't always get the credit they deserve for setting information technology standards. Digital library consultant Karen Coyle describes the benefits of this work such as plug-ins for Mozilla browsers and a common standardized layer of metadata across the Web, known as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Libraries are trying to navigate the tradeoffs between such ease of access and librarians' need for control over the data in an authoritative way.
If open source and the architecture of participation all come down to community, where does that leave those traditionally underrepresented in IT, such as women and minorities? How can such communities become more inclusive and diverse? How can we encourage diversity in the companies who increasingly bankroll many open source projects? On the heels of Black History Month and in the midst of Women's History Month, Fastcompany.com's Lynne d Johnson talks with Scott about possible solutions.
The openLiberty Project is a global initiative formed to provide open source developers with tools for integrating the privacy and security services of multivendor Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services into many new identity-based services. Jason Rouault of the Liberty Alliance discusses openLiberty, and how it could accelerate rollout of Web services, such as presence, contact book, geolocation and calendaring.
More than 1300 customers with 6 million paid mailboxes are using Zimbra's open-source message/calendar/document sharing server for Linux and the Macintosh. Scott Dietzen explains how Zimbra utililzes AJAX and mashups to create a more compelling experience, how it removes some of the barriers between email and other apps such as calendaring, and how they make email and calendar available offline.
