This Wiki, hosted on the Nyetwork server, has a firm dedication to Open Source Software, as the variety of pages listed here shows. As such, here are some links and ramblings that we feel may be of interest. --Wim
A site covering the definition, history, news, and so on about Open Source can be found at http://www.opensource.org. Quote: "The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing."
The Open Source Migration Guide
Something needed for a while, I would say; this could easily be turned into a series of books. "It's about what works and how businesses and organisations can migrate from an excessive dependence on proprietary software to a situation where they have more control of their own destiny."
Book: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/
This book is a couple years old now, but still very much worth
Common Myths
This link is probably everywhere now, but here's some really nice parodies: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031106164630915
But seriously, there is a ton of fear and myths out there about anything Open Source. Last week I was at the quarterly Crystal Decisions User Group in Vancouver. There were a couple (2) of small workshops there, so I attended the one about migrating from Seagate Info 7.5 to Crystal Enterprise. None of my customers use SU, but the discussions amongst the users about feature gaps between SI7x and CE8/CE9/CE10 were interest. The Crystal Product Manager that did the presentation made some remark which I rebutted of course. He said something like "We can't use <some open source thing>.... because we don't want to open source our software". Obviously nobody there has research the GPL, Perl, and so on licenses. Using open source tools, or linking against GPL libraries doesn't require you to provide source for your own code. Not sure if that sunk into him, but even if it did, I doubt a big software devel shop would really wake up to the benefits of OSS. --Wim
The "Australian Linux/OpenSource Magazine" has a lot of interesting material: http://www.linmagau.org/index.php
Freedom
http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html
Interesting OSCON presentation from some guy on copyright, free code, DMCA, MMPA (Mickey Mouse Protection Act), patents, etc. Kind of long but a pretty good listen.