Podcast Episode 4 - Let’s take a moment and define open source…

August 15, 2006

I listened to a pretty amazing presentation recently from the O’Reilly Media Open Source Conference of 2005 which has audio being only recently released. The talk I listened to was by Kartik Subbarao, who is a high-up in the Enterprise IT market. He also works for Hewlett-Packard. HP has a great method of dealing with open source software because when they improve on a stretch of code, they then release that new code back into the wild, for others to partake. We as educators can often be strictly consumers of open source software and not provide any productive community benefit to the open source community writ large. I propose ways to contribute, even if (like me) you are not a developer and the idea of looking at source code causes your head to swim. I am no programmer, not since the days of Logo. I know a good bit about HTML and PHP, but don’t delve much past that. I spent too much time screaming at the Borland C++ screen some years ago and I think that traumatized me.

So on that happy note, here is podcast episode 4. Enjoy, and as always please feel free to comment or begin a discussion in the forums off to the right.