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April 26, 2005
More podcasts worth listening to
In the last week or so I listened to two podcasts that may be of special interest to people concerned with Open Source.
David Berlind of ZDNet just posted his interview with JasperSoft's CEO Paul Doscher. JasperSoft "acquired" the Open Source product JasperReports. In this 30+ minute MP3 David asks lots of questions and Paul explains how they intend to maintain the LGPL code of JasperReports while selling a high-end related product, support, etc. It's an interesting model. David is most intrigued by the specter of Open Source products suddenly moving "private", but listening to this whole conversation shows how that might be quite good (for the "Free World") through increasing the development money and support behind OSS projects (the part that stays free), while at the same time creating some very targeted proprietary code that is mainly used by people who want to pay for it. The recording shows the sensitivity they have to the community. Of course, only time will tell.
Read David's report here, and listen to the podcast stored here.
The second podcast is from the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference and is on ITConversations. It's a speech by Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, followed by a panel discussion. It's mainly about personal fabrication, where you "make things". However, it gets into the drive behind making things you need personally, and how there are people who follow that drive. It also (at minute 32:00) includes a bit about applying the ideas of Open Source to hardware and fabrication. I find that this is helpful in getting your hands around what makes people participate in Open Source and the benefits of having tools that are very widely available.
The information about downloading is on this page.
Posted by danb at April 26, 2005 11:46 AM