Practical notes on AI governance, open source, intellectual property, and the systems that make legal work operational.
I have had a number of business conversations recently where the moral concepts of good and evil have been important to the outcome of the conversation. These have been in conversations about ostensibly morality-neutral concepts like programming language selection, the use of patents, and the best b
Many times I come across companies that have open source policies that are just backwards. For many companies, their default legal position is that they don't want anything to do with open source. They don't want their partners working with it, they don't want their suppliers working with it, and th
Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Capital just released a the results of their "2015 Future of Open Source" survey. The summary is below. 2015 Future of Open Source Survey Results from North Bridge Amongst the high level of bizspeak, a couple things stood out to me: Slide 8: The big numbe
Several months back I put out a call, asking what people would like to learn about the Python Software Foundation in my talk at PyCon. I got a lot of responses, both in email and twitter. My favorite was from David Beazley: I followed this advice and spent time watching a number of Samuel Beckett pl
Matt Asay wonders whether the superior convenience of cloud-based services may reduce the uptake of open source solutions: Open source risks being devoured by the very cloud to which it gave birth, by @mjasay: Google, Facebook, and the other dominant web companies depend upon open source. Born in th
On Economist's View, Mark Thoma asks "Why don't voters penalize politicians for poor economic decisions?" and quotes Paul Krugman: Economics and Elections, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Britain’s economic performance since the financial crisis struck has been startlingly bad. ... Yet as Bri
I had two situations recently in which my goal was to lead a group of people to arrive at and act on a particular conclusion. Even though I achieved my goal in both situations, I acted with almost opposite strategies to do so. In one case I acted decisively, telling the group what to do, and in the
