Topic: Open Source
Confused about what the second draft of the General Public License version 3 means? Let 2006 Google/O'Reilly Open Source Legal Eagle award winner Cliff Schmidt walk you through the changes. Schmidt also speaks about recent moves by the Open Source Initiative, as well as Google, to combat license proliferation. He also talks about some changes to the Apache license, and explains how a non-lawyer such as himself wins a Legal Eagle award in the first place.
Community and collaboration are cornerstones of the open source philosophy and key assets for businesses built on free software. MySQL, the highly successful open source database, depends on the strength of good relations with its loyal base of developers and users. In this talk, Kaj Arno showcases the role of community in his company's quest to balance the making of great software through open source principles and the need to earn a profit.
PHP, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2005, has surpassed ASP to become the most popular Web scripting language. Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, key contributors to PHP, are two of the founders of Zend Technologies, which provides PHP-focused products and services. This opening session from the 2005 Zend/PHP Conference details the growth of PHP in business.
David Heinemeier Hansson discusses some of the guiding principles underlying the development of Ruby On Rails, the open source web applications framework. His goal was to develop a toolset that would make web developers happy and to allow them to have confidence in their code. He believes that Ruby on Rails frees the programmer from repetitive drudgery and unnecessary complexity.
A rich treasure of open source tools awaits anyone interested in exploring the cutting edge of geospatial analysis. Tyler Mitchell, a geographer and open source geospatial advocate, surveys the breadth and depth of free software for the management, manipulation, and presentation of geographic data on the desktop or via web services. Building on open standards, the energetic open geo community is in the vanguard of mapping technologies, making these open tools a competitive alternative to GIS packages from commercial vendors.
With proprietary software companies spending more than 50 percent of their budgets on sales and marketing, open source's alternative appeal continues to expand. Customer relationship management (CRM) software and services is one newly-affected market. Use of SugarCRM is growing despite the current dominance of proprietary solutions from Oracle and Salesforce.com. Listen to John Roberts talk about SugarCRM's origins and business model.
Open-source database management software is in millions of hands. Find out how MySQL profitably blazed this trail, and how Kaj Arno of MySQL is helping define GPL 3.0, and how MySQL lives with the complexity of software patents and multiple storage engines. Kaj also discusses how MySQL both competes and cooperates with Oracle.
It's hard enough protecting your privacy today with threats from identity theft, malware, government surveillance, and consumer profiling. But as storage costs plummet and investment in search technology soars, what does the future hold for the data we're creating right now? How can we best protect our future selves from the quiet hard drives of today, and what might it mean to have an "open data" movement?
The scientific traditions of collaboration, transparency and sharing can be at odds with the constraints of publishers, patents and copy protection. Science Commons is a new project of the Creative Commons with a mission to facilitate the growth of an openly accessible commons for scientific knowledge. In this talk, Paula Le Dieu maps out some of the alternative models for journal publishing, licensing and data sharing which can help promote the flow of scientific results and innovation.
Outsourcing work to other countries presents challenges along with the obvious benefits. Companies must overcome time, cultural, and language differences to compete effectively. In this session of the Software 2006 conference David DeWalt, President of the EMC Software Group, talks about how his company has adapted to changing global business needs and what has gone into integrating traditional software business practices with open source software platforms such as Linux, PHP and MySQL.
