Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Jim Grisanzio.

In this interview we talk with Jim. In specific, we talk about:

• The process of opening a huge codebase to the public
• The unique place of OpenSolaris in the open source community
• Lessons learned from earlier open source projects at Sun and elsewhere
• Trading lessons learned back and forth with the Linux community
• Regional differences in the role of open source technology in Asia
• The reasoning behind Sun’s products and technologies that compete with each other

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Alexandre Julliard.

In this interview we talk with Alexandre. In specific, we talk about:

• Developing an open source project in cadence with Windows
• Philosophies about how Linux should reach out to Windows users
• The leadership model used in the Wine project and deciding what goes in
• Deciding what applications to support and what to leave out
• The difficulties of working with the closed Windows API and Wine’s relationship with Microsoft

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Joe Brockmeier.

In this interview we talk with Joe. In specific, we talk about:

• Where openSUSE fits into the desktop Linux landscape
• Relationships between openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and upstream projects
• The effect of commercial agreements on open source projects
• The future roadmap for openSUSE
• Bringing together technical and non-technical users in open source projects
• Coordinating testing and bug fixes among distros and upstream projects
• Design coherence among distributed developers

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Mark Kortekass

In this interview we talk with Mark Kortekaas from CBS. In specific, we talk about:

• Choosing and implementing technologies for the production environment
• Relationships with open source communities
• Tailoring the organization for maximum benefit from open source
• Building infrastructure for capacity and agility
• Future-looking, cloud-aware data centers

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Kevin Kluge

In this interview we talk with Kevin Kluge from Zimbra. In specific, we talk about:

• Zimbra’s history and finding a niche
• Profitability, ownership, and managing commercial products
• Interacting with the community
• Source code availability and its impact on the public
• Managing customer needs and usability

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Ross Gardler

In this interview we talk with Ross Gardler – Service Manager for OSS Watch. OSS Watch is an organization that helps institutions in the UK make decisions in and around open source topics. In specific, we talk about:

• Different cultures in open source projects
• Notions of value and control in the software business
• Commercial involvement in open source and giving back to the community
• Comparing open source in the UK and the US

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: David Campbell

In this interview with David Campbell we talked to him about:

• How the development methodology of SQL Server has changed.
• How the changes affect the ability of customers to give feedback.
• How virtualization makes it easier for users to test-drive SQL Server.
• As products and open-source projects grow, the developers have to realize that they are not the target user.
• David’s belief that the best product doesn’t necessarily have the most knobs.
• Building a community around a closed-source product like SQL Server.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Justin Erenkrantz

In this second part of a two part interview with Justin Erenkrantz we talked to him about:

• How the Apache project ensures good collaboration.
• The Apache Foundation’s philosphy of having no single person as the leader.
• Apache’s security committee.
• The process of removing someone from a position of responsibility within the Apache Foundation.
• What would make someone want to be part of the Apache Foundation’s group of projects.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Britten Martin

In this interview with Britten Martin we talked to him about:

• The role of support inside Microsoft.
• A walkthrough of how a support request is handled.
• The ways in which the outside community can interact with the internal support processes.
• How a product is supported differently in beta than when it’s finally released.
• How a bug eventually become a fix in the product.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Robert Bray

In this interview with Bob, Architect for Geospatial Products at Autodesk, we asked him about:

• Introduction of open source within Autodesk
• Role of project steering committees
• Decision to create an open source product
• Open source impact on closed source product
• Developer and engineer adjustments to open source process
• Differences between feature design in open and closed source
• Test and documentation for Autodesk open source
• Community contribution to open source projects
• Business reasons for creating open source products

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Jay Pipes

Jay Pipes

In this interview, we speak with Jay Pipes North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL.

We talk about:

• How MySQL Community and Enterprise servers are nothing like RedHat Fedora and RHEL.
• The nuances of MySQL licensing.
• It’s built mostly like traditional software, with 120 developers on staff at MySQL.
• But that’s changing, the worklog system has been opened to the community and they’re starting to take contributions.
• For that to happen, MySQL has to become more modular and support plug-ins.
• MySQL supports so many platforms through a portability layer, which was a lot of work initially, but now it’s pretty well baked.
• Bugs = Gold.
• The tenets of MySQL: performance, reliability, and ease of use.
• It’s easier for proprietary software to make money, it’s easier for open-source to get work done.
• And finally, how to get involved.

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell
Interviewee: Patrick Hogan

Patrick Hogan

In this interview, we spoke with Patrick Hogan about open source at NASA. Patrick has been managing NASA open source projects since 2002, incubating competitive technologies to deliver scientific content. The goal has been to engineer open source solutions that leverage open data standards for sustainable technologies that can be extended in both open and proprietary ways. Several successful projects have come out of this program, including a virtual scanning electron microscope, software that allows the blind to aurally visualize mathematical equations, and the very successful NASA World Wind, a fully navigable 3D geospatial data visualization platform.

In this interview, Patrick talks about:

• The NASA World Wind open-source project
• Preventing a strong fork
• Spec’ing features on an open-source project   
• World Wind extensibility, even for non-programmers
• Not everything the government writes is open-source and/or public domain
• You add value on open source, not in open source

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Interviewers: Scott Swigart, Richard Bowler, and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Marc Miller

In this interview, we spoke with Marc Miller about his views on the current state of open source software.  Marc works for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and in January, Marc took on a role as the open source software evangelist in the AMD Developer Outreach organization enabling Linux kernel and application developers to develop optimized code using both AMD and 3rd party tools and resources. In his role as a software Alliance Manager for AMD 2001-2006, Mr. Miller played a significant role in developing a Linux marketing strategy with a focus on integration of AMD technology with software tools developed by the open source community and industry partners. Throughout his career at AMD, Marc has been a key contact for open source developers wishing to work with AMD, and has been an open source ambassador for AMD, helping to coordinate outbound and inbound communication between AMD and Linux developers.

In this interview Marc talks about:

• Challenges that open source companies have when competing with proprietary software
• Advantages of open source
• Choice also has disadvantages
• Is open-source anti-capitalism?
• The PR value of being open-source
• Open-source is less idealistic and more pragmatic today
• The future is blending open-source and proprietary software

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