bruce perens

Datamation: "Back then, their concern was that the various workstation and server systems had 70 percent profit margins, which they locked in through the use of proprietary APIs.

It was too expensive to port a customer's software to another brand, and thus the workstation vendors were able to hold on to that customer."

Datamation: "The man who prompted that decision could be described as the worst enemy a Free Software project could have.

This is the story of how our community was able to benefit from that enemy."

Datamation: "For a decade, Microsoft was open source's worst enemy, combating it at every turn. But last week Microsoft joined the Apache open source project as a platinum sponsor...Has Redmond given up the fight?

Or is this just their latest strategy?"

 Open source software’s (OSS) success has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs are used in most IT shops today, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and, even, take control of OSS products and standards.

I am one of the 10 jury members for the first international Hackontest.

Basically this is a 24 hour open source coding competition that takes place on September 24/25 here in Zurich. However in order to make it to the competition a first hurdle is to get "past" the jury, which includes Jeremy Alison and Bruce Perens, who get to select the top 3 most promising teams on August 1st.

So if you think you got what it takes, head on over to the Hackontest site and register your team!