Mass Tech Leadership Council OSS SIG

Proprietary Software Company Views

The SIG held a meeting June 6, 2006, at Schwartz Communications in Waltham, MA. Panelists were: Bob Sutor, Vice President of Open Source & Standards, IBM; Karen Tegan Padir, Vice President, Enterprise Java Platforms, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; and Omar Tazi, Chief Open Source Evangelist, Middleware and Tools, Oracle Corporation. Bob Zurek and Dan Bricklin moderated. A summary at the end was made by Karen Copenhaver. The meeting was sponsored by Choate, Hall & Stewart.

There was a recording made. See the "Proprietary Company Views" page.

Other Enterprise meeting recording available

The first part of the meeting is now available as a downloadable recording.

You will find a link to the recording on the wiki on the "Open Source and the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption" page.

Open Source and the Enterprise meeting

The SIG held a meeting December 1, 2005, at PTC's Visitor Center titled "Open Source and the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption". The meeting had two parts. The first was a presentation by Nicholas Gall, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research. He talked about OSS, the current state, and trends. It was a preview of a talk to be given at Gartner's Summit the following week. The second part covered user experiences, with presentations by Julie Atkins, Director of IT Operations and Info Security of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and Michael Askew and Charles Pickelhaupt of Fidelity Investments' Center for Applied Technology. In both cases there were very lively give and take with the 30-40 people in the audience.

The two parts were recorded.

The second part is available today, and the second should be available next week after Gartner's Summit meeting (we don't want to steal their thunder releasing the details of the predictions Nick told us).

You will find a link to the recording on the wiki on the "Open Source and the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption" page.

Open Formats meeting with Massachusetts officials

On Friday, September 16, 2005, a meeting was held by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (an organization formed by a combination of the Massachusetts Software Council and the New England Business and Technology Association). The purpose of the meeting was to give feedback to the State of Massachusetts government on the latest draft iteration of their Enterprise Technical Reference Model, specifically the section on document formats.

In attendance were Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance Eric Kriss and CIO of the Commonwealth Peter Quinn, as well as representatives from a wide variety of Council member software companies.

The meeting was recorded in its entirety by the Council and is available for download.

You will find a link to the recording on the wiki on the "Open Format Meeting September 2005" page.

Good informal lunch meeting today

We had an informal lunch get together today. The consensus is that it went well. The attendees were: Dan Bricklin, Ralph Katz (consultant), Peter Moldave (lawyer, Gesmer Updegrove), Scott Peterson (corporate counsel, Hewlett-Packard), and David Rickerby (lawyer, Choate Hall & Stewart).

We discussed lots of legal and business model stuff about the GPL. What came out of it (as suggested by Scott Peterson) was a desire to help developers add the "Here's how I define the unclear areas of the GPL with regards to MY product" side-language to their product's licensing information. This could be noting the areas where there may be questions (e.g., how are the plug-ins to THIS product treated with regards to the GPL reciprocal licensing) and sample wordings for different answers to the questions. This isn't trying to "weasel out" of the GPL. Scott: "We want to do what you want us to do. Just tell me what it is!" The problem is that it is often too unclear and that is holding back adoption of Open Source software. David Rickerby volunteered to start as the point person on moving ahead with this (drickerby at choate dot com).

Open discussion lunch tomorrow

Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 20th, 2005, we're having a small informal lunch at a restaurant in Newton Centre. Dan Bricklin and at least three OSS-savy lawyers will be there (one in-house counsel and two from law firms), and perhaps an entrepreneur or two. If this is worthwhile, we'll try to have other informal lunches and/or breakfasts.

Specifics: 12 noon - 1:30 pm. Sabra Restaurant, 45 Union Street, Newton Center. (On the corner of Union Street and Langley Road, very near the Riverside Green-line "T" stop, and around the corner from the parking lot at Beacon Street and Centre Streets in Newton, Massachusetts.) They have an "all you can eat" lunch buffet of middle eastern food, including many vegetarian dishes. We'll each buy our own lunch.

Writeup on Groklaw

The event was written up on Groklaw. After listening to the four recordings, PJ has lots of comments and is working on getting transcripts. There are many comments posted by people reacting to Marc Fleury's keynote.

See "The MA Software Council's OSS SIG Kickoff Meeting".

Slides for the keynote

Marc Fleury sent me the slides for his keynote. He sent a Powerpoint file and I also made a PDF.

www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-4-slides.pdf (PDF, 1.8MB)

www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-4-slides.ppt(Powerpoint, 1MB)

For a list of all the recordings, associated slides, etc., see the wiki page for this meeting.

Recording of the meeting's luncheon keynote

The luncheon keynote is now available. It's 1:01:18 long and takes up about 28MB.

This is a talk (with discussion) by Marc Fleury, JBoss Group Chairman and CEO. Marc is known to be outspoken and he was. We were back in our original room, eating a bagged lunch that was provided as part of admission.

To listen to this, download it to your computer and play it. To download it, right-click on the link below, choose "Save Target As..." (or "Save Link As...", or "Download Linked File As...", depending upon your browser), and specify a location on your computer (such as in your "My Music" directory). Use your computer's music player software to listen to the file (on many machines you can just double-click on the filename), or load the file onto an MP3 player (such as the Apple iPod) for listening while you walk, exercise, etc.

If you tell other people about this file, send them to this posting and not directly to the URL of the MP3 file since it may be moved in the future. If you think you will send lots of people there to download (like more than 1,000) I'd appreciate it if you'd mirror it somewhere else, too, and link there (but let us know about it).

Recording of the kickoff meeting luncheon keynote: www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-4.MP3

For a list of all the recordings, associated slides, etc., see the wiki page for this meeting.

Nat Friedman's blog post about his talk

Nat wrote a blog post about his presentation, including filling in a part when the tape cassette was turned over and some material was missed.

See nat.org/2005/june/#OSS-Projects-Talk

Slides for the third session

Nat Friedman sent me the slides for the session that he and Miguel ran. They are available in three formats: PDF, Powerpoint, and Open Office. Each file is about 1MB in size.

www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-3-slides.pdf (PDF)

www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-3-slides.ppt (Powerpoint)

www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-3-slides.sxi (Open Office)

Wiki for the SIG

I've put together a preliminary wiki for a more organized view of the information about the SIG. That way you won't have to go through all the posts in this blog to find recordings, meeting notices, etc.

The wiki is currently at: www.softwaregarden.com/cgi-bin/oss-sig/wiki.pl

Initially it has a homepage and one devoted to the Kickoff Meeting.

I have started with it uneditable except by the SIG organizers and activists until we can get someone to maintain it, watch out for spam, etc. Contact Carol Greenfield (name: carol, domain: masoftware.org) if you want to become more involved with the SIG.

Despite the wiki, I encourage people interested in the SIG to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog: oss-sig.softwaregarden.com/blogs/oss-sig/index.xml

Recording of the third part of the meeting

The third session is now available. It's 53 minutes long and takes up about 24MB.

This is the "Open Source Technical Discussion" session with Novell's Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza. If you are interested in starting an Open Source project, or understanding how one is organized, this should be very helpful.

Recording of the third part of the kickoff meeting: www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-3.MP3

For a list of all the recordings, associated slides, etc., see the wiki page for this meeting.

Eric Newcomer's writeup of the meeting

Eric Newcomer of Iona posted a writeup of the Open Source Summit on his blog.

Recording of the second part of the meeting

The second session is now available. It's 59 minutes long and takes up about 27MB.

This is the "Open Source Business Models and Strategies" session with representatives from IBM, JasperSoft, Optaros, Iona, and RedHat.

Recording of second part of the kickoff meeting: www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MSC-OSS-SIG-KickOff-2.MP3