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matt asay

From Alfresco to Canonical

After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer.

You can read Canonical's announcement of my appointment here, as well Alfresco's here.

I am excited, humbled, and, candidly, torn by this opportunity.

In late 2005, John Powell and John Newton, the co-founders of Alfresco, took a chance on me, an open-source evangelist at Novell. I was the 13th employee and the company's first U.S. employee. My prior history had been with embedded Linux (Lineo) and semiconductors/silicon (Mitsui), but they gave me … Read more

Most influential open-source gurus? Votes are in

Influence in open-source development communities is earned through years of writing and sharing great code. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, influence in the business side of open source is also gained through sharing expertise, and not necessarily from making mountains of cash.

At least, that's the lesson I take away from MindTouch's inaugural survey of 50 open-source business executives. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company, has spent the last few months surveying executives within the commercial open-source community, asking them to name the most influential people within the commercial open-source ecosystem.

The result is effectively an all-star list of open-source … Read more

Open source becomes paid software in 2009

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.

I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Most open source vendors have tweaked their business models to include some kind of additional value only available as part of a subscription. This has brought various cries of derision suggesting that the code is no longer good as the community doesn't get to do QA, along with welcoming arms from investors and developers who want to monetize the code. … Read more

The Soup's Joel McHale on popular culture (and stupidity)

Following up on Matt Asay's post about why Google is making us dumber, I ran across this AV Club interview with Joel McHale, host of The Soup on E!. I watch The Soup every week and I am convinced that I should have that job.

AVC: Do you think the war on stupid culture is unwinnable? Are we headed for Idiocracy? M: Oh, that's a good question. I think the smart people will get even smarter, and the dumb people will get even dumber. But I think they all will enjoy A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, … Read more

Hand-coding HTML is still hip, says NY Times Design Director

Being that my first "real" job was at a web design shop as a code monkey, it warmed my heart to see Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the NY Times state that they still write HTML code by hand. Of course, I have to believe that he was referring to templating and such, as there is no way they could maintain or deliver that amount of content without some kind of CMS.

It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (… Read more

MuleCon Muffins--food matters at developer events

Our big MuleCon user event started yesterday and continues today, capped off with a Developer Campground that we are hosting with all of the worldwide Mule team attending and answering questions.

So far the event has been a big success and I have been too busy to blog. However, thanks to Cote, who is hosting a few sessions here I now have an update: the muffins and pastries are pretty delicious. Pictured to the left you'll see these oddly shaped (but tasty) mini-muffin loaves that have been the hit of the party.

I just can't repress my love … Read more

OSBC presentation: My slides online

In case you wanted the slides from my opening remarks at the Open Source Business Conference, you can access them here. I've stored them with Adobe Share, a cool service powered by Alfresco. (It's also cool that Adobe mentioned what they're using, as Dave notes.)

Unfortunately, I don't yet have the two videos from both days available on YouTube. I have to mux the source because it keeps stripping out the video (leaving only the audio track) when I upload it to YouTube or convert it to .mov, .wmv, etc.

There are some good charts on … Read more

Open Season Episode 11: Some stuff happened and we did a podcast about it

If you've got a half-hour, we've got a podcast for you. This week on Open Season, Matt Asay, Ashlee Vance and I talk about a whole lot of nothing, including:

My MacBook Air (I am still in love) XenSource Sun Lies and damn lies about open source on Intel's website We made an attempt on this 2 weeks back but our petard was hoisted by a shoddy conference bridge. Technology is only occasionally my friend.

Open Season Episode 11

The Register proves journalism still alive with Wikipedia story

Earlier this week I went to lunch with Ashlee and Cade from The Register and they were telling me about this giant story that had been in process for weeks. The story "Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain" is a wild-ride of Wikipedia editing, stock-shorting and false identities that is more like a bad Sandra Bullock movie than it is Web 2.0, but that's not my point.

My point is that for all the naysayers who say that journalism is dying thanks to blogs and social media there is still clearly room for real … Read more