BIOS LEVEL is a software and hardware review site with an open source slant. While we don't focus solely using hardware and software with open source, we do including testing and such using it. We often post videos along with our product reviews.
Dr. Alexander Bandar is a theoretical metallurgist. He started the Columbus Idea Foundry, a workshop for folks who would like to learn how fashion something from metal, wood, or other raw materials, or for folks who know how to do this and need facilities in which to practice their craft.Bandar says, "If you get a good idea, propagate it. We all stand on the shoulders of giants--those who came before us who propagated their ideas."A problem that Bandar sees is that the means of production, as ...
Patrick Wagstorm explained How to Be a Wonk. That is, how to be someone is a policy wonk--someone who is an expert in their field, and who talks to legislators about their field. Comparatively, most open source users are likely experts in their field, so they are generally knowledgable enough to talk to Congress and other levels of government objectively and informationally.Wagstrom holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy and Computation, Organizations, and Society from Carnegie Mellon ...
Tom Callaway of Fedora explains some of the intricacies of licensing and ensuring that a software package included in Fedora and Red Hat is actually verified to be open source. He provides an overview of the various open source licenses, including the MIT, BSD, GPL, LGPL, and Apache licenses, plus the public domain and many more. He mentioned that Red Hat/Fedora tracks more than 180 valid open source licenses--more than the Free Software Foundation or Open Source Initiative does. He cites prob...
Ross Turk, Director of Community for SourceForge, described some basic business models, ideas, and procedures for making money from open source software.He described the advantages and pitfalls of open core business model of Zimbra where there's a free, barebones version and paid, feature-full complete, the services and support model of Red Hat and MySQL where the product is given away for free but companies contract for support. He also talked briefly about the various proprietary models in w...
Shawn Powers, associate editor of Linux Journal, delivered the morning keynote speech at the 2009 Ohio Linuxfest. Powers stressed the need for the Linux and open source community not to bash proprietary products, but to showcase the strengths of open source software and improve it so that it's simply the best choice for people and businesses. He also urged educators in the audience to teach concepts, such as word processing and image editing, instead of specific programs such as Microsoft® Wor...
Jorge Castro of Canonical gives a very enlightening talk about building a community around the development of Gwibber, a client written in Python by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica for microblogging sites such as Twitter and Identica.Some of the points Castro really drives home include:Recognizing what you as a developer are not good at and finding others to augment your skillsDelegating tasks or authority to others to ease project stress/managementSetting behavioral expectations for developers, con...
