Joe Brockmeier reports on the intersection of commercial interests and communities, and offers information and advice about bridging the gap between companies and communities.
As election day nears, it's not surprising that people's thoughts -- and their blog posts and comments on mailing lists -- turn to politics. The question is what's appropriate for discussion, and where?
Asus and Intel are asking users to tell them what they'd want as a "perfect PC" with the promise "you dream it, Asus builds it." It's just crazy enough to work.
Fellow ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn asks the question, "Are vendors vital to open source?" No, not at all.
According to some pundits, Google has replaced Microsoft as the leading "evil" empire. As long as Google is top dog in the search market, there's little they can do to avoid the sour grapes from competitors, but with a little effort they could satisfy some of their critics and improve their services at the same time.
I hope Ron Miller's latest post on Daniweb doesn't go to Steve Jobs' head. According to Miller, Apple knows best, and we ought to just accept that.
The ruckus over the EA launch of Spore, specifically its wildly unpopular Digital Restriction Management (DRM) scheme, seems to have gotten the message across to everyone -- except EA's management. Case in point, CEO John Riccitiello says it was a "vocal minority" that didn't like the DRM.
Open source and business do mix. In fact, according to Matthew Aslett at the 451 Group, you can mix open source into more than 80 combinations of development model, licensing model, and revenue schemes.
Another high-profile departure from Sun, this time MySQL's David Axmark is taking wing -- citing a dislike for working in a large organization:I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them.
What's the difference between a paid contributor to a FOSS project and a volunteer contributor? According to a paper by Evangelia Berdou, quite a bit.
Apple's iPhone is beating the Amazon Kindle at its own game -- what a shame. It doesn't have to be that way, though.