I've always wondered where the word 'oxymoron' came from. What does 'oxy' have to do with 'moron'? What about the words 'commercial' and 'open source'; do these words form an oxymoron when combined in one phrase?

A rollercoaster - as trite as that image may be - is the right analogy for venture capital investing in open source companies. And what a long, strange trip it's been.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to sit back and reflect. Where is the open source movement going? What is the next frontier? In 2005, we explored the business models of the open source movement. We almost got through the entire list, though we still nee...

The other day my 16-year-old daughter came down the stairs in tears. She was holding the new version of the Scholastic Attitude Test and complaining that it was unfair.

At LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, it occurred to me that I had overlooked a very important Open Source business model, the Membership Model. Confronted by a keynote speech by Stuart Cohen, the leader of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (www.osdl.org), it ...

Looking at the open source software industry from the outside, it's often difficult to tell what is really going on. To use a string of clichés, it is hard to peel back the onion, to look behind the curtain, to perceive 'Das Ding an sich' (German for the 'thing-in...