IBM's patent commons announcement is the most significant developments for the Open Source community in quite some time. But will this patent commons have a reach far greater than 500 patents?

My recent Java and Python coding projects gave me real life insights to the relative value of these two languages. Is it possible to code twice as fast in Python as it is in Java?

MySQL is walking a fine line between commercial customers and open source developers. Should MySQL push too hard, who will be the overall winner?

Now that OSCON is over, it's time to reflect on the conference and to muse about some of the trends I noticed.

Friday morning's keynote at OSCON blew everyone away, and David Rumsey's presentation wasn't even about open source -- it was all about... maps!

My favorite OSCON presentation on wednesday was Brad Fitzpatrick's "Inside LiveJournal's Backend" presentation. This year at OSCON there are a number of presentations that focus on high availability, scalability and growing web sites, and Brad's presentation was the most down to earth presentation. When comparing the story of LiveJournal to the story of TicketMaster, it's clear that LiveJournal has...

Damian Conway managed to hurt my brain tonight. Who else could tie the Game of Life, Klingon, demons and perl together? My mind is still spinning from Damian's "Life, the Universe and Everything" presentation this evening.

I'm starting to worry about Perl -- after hearing tons of interesting stuff about Perl 6 for the last two OSCONs we're still years away from a stable beta of Perl 6. Is perl going to be eclipsed by another faster, more nimble language?

Time to head to Portland for this year's Open Source Conference -- I can't wait to geek to my heart's content for the next 5 days.

Larry Lessig's book signing at Stanford yesterday illustrated the core concept in his new book Free Culture -- by releasing it under a Creative Commons license, Larry inspired a wave of creativity. This is the very same creativity that is the central theme for the book.