In addition to subscribing to our own podcast, you should also subscribe to Don Marti’s LinuxWorld podcast. It’s definitely more techie and less policy than our podcast, but it has a fair amount of interesting policy stuff as well.
This week’s episode, for example, is an interesting discussion with Brian Aker of MySQL. The first half is a fairly geeky discussion of MySQL features. But in the second half of the podcast, Don asks about the economic motivation for free software. Aker argues that there are fundamentally two motivations, whether the contributions are from an individual or a company: publicity and testing. That is, first, that opening your software up will cause it to be more widely distributed and popular, hopefully leading to more opportunities to sell services in the future. And secondly, if you have more users, and those users have access to your source code, you’re more likely to have unsolicited bug reports and even (if you’re lucky) bug fixes. Aker says that most free software developers—and companies supporting free software—are not doing it out of abstract altruism. Surprisingly for those who think the free software movement is populated entirely by dirty hippies, opening one’s source code can sometimes be a savvy business strategy.
Aker has more interesting things to say, and I bet Don will have more interesting guests in future weeks, so I encourage you to check out the podcast.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.