Business

One of the things that concerns me most with our society and legal system is not copyright law, it’s not patent law, it’s not our overcrowded jails, … it’s how we treat companies as people. Not only do our laws treat companies like people, but as people tend to do, we anthropomorphize companies. Companies are […]

501(c) organizations are US non profit organizations. 501(c) is actually the name of the IRS tax code that defines non profits. There are actually 28 kinds of 501(c)‘s. I’ll focus here on just two: 501(c) (3) – the GNOME Foundation is a 501(c) (3) 501(c) (6) – the Linux Foundation is a 501(c) (6) They

OSCON and OSBC are two big open source software events. I like both of them but I find them to be very different conferences. During OSCON, I had a conversation with Larry Augustine where we tried to define the difference between OSCON and OSBC. We debated whether it was different companies or people that made

We need a trade-a-ride program for people needing a ride like Paperbackswap does for books. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of commuters when I thought of this. I was listening to a Science Friday program on brewing beer while sitting in traffic and thought, we don’t have good public transportation so people often don’t

Usually I hear people justifying why they should work from home. Seth Godin argues that companies should justify why you should work in the office: If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to

Brand tags shows you a company logo and asks you "what’s the first word or phrase that comes to mind?" Then you get to see what other people said. I saw Pepsi and said "not coke" – turns out "coke" was the most common response. I hope the Pepsi brand people see that! For Pizza

  IMG_2635    Originally uploaded by Storming This is a picture of me negotiating a contract with a Global 2000 company and several attorneys over a pay phone. Friday I had it all figured out. I had a five minute meeting in our home town at 8:00, then I’d drop the baby off at day

A number of people have asked about my “Would you do it again for free?” presentation. It’s a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people