augustine

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

The 404 407: Where we pack Vienna Teng's lunch into the PS3 Slim box

On today's show, we've got Vienna Teng--singer, pianist, and former computer programmer. But before we get to her music, we have the PS3 Slim in the studio. Afterward, we talk to Vienna about her journey from software engineer at Cisco to touring musician.

At the top of the show, we do a little unboxing of the new PlayStation 3 Slim. While Vienna and Justin may not care too much about the game console, Jeff and Wilson don't particularly like its new finish. In almost all respects, however, it functions just like the original 80GB model that it replaces, plus it comes with a 120GB hard drive. (No Linux for those homebrew fans out there.)

The star of the show is Vienna, a singer, songwriter, and pianist from the San Francisco Bay Area who graduated from Stanford University. Vienna later took up a job at Cisco as a computer programmer and made the leap to musician during her time there. We end the first half of the show with a track from her first album "Waking Hour," called "Gravity." The song is about the ups and downs of her roommate's relationship.

On the second half of the show, we listen to her song "Radio" from her current album "Inland Territory." And we talk about how now one in four songs sold in the United States is through iTunes. Finally, we end the show with her song "Augustine." You can find her music on iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, Last.fm, and her own Web site. (Editor's note: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)

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When will open source get the SMB market right?

Eating dinner with Larry Augustin in London this weekend, we fell to talking about open source's relevance to the SMB (small- and medium-sized business) market. Augustin is currently CEO of SugarCRM, a company with over 5,000 customers, many of them SMBs.

But SugarCRM is the exception to the rule. Open source has long been billed as a savior for the SMB market, but the reality is that open-source adoption has largely been an enterprise IT phenomenon, despite other exceptions like KnowledgeTree, which recently updated its product suite to further appeal to this market.

Why aren't more SMBs … Read more

SugarCRM CEO Roberts replaced by board member

John Roberts on Wednesday resigned from his post as CEO of open-source CRM vendor SugarCRM, leaving board member Larry Augustin to assume the role of interim CEO while the company conducts a formal search for his replacement.

Roberts, whose grounds for leaving the company and future plans remain undisclosed, has made a huge impact on the open-source world, innovating the "Open Core" business model and helping drive open-source applications into the enterprise.

SugarCRM, despite losing Roberts, will be in good hands with Larry Augustin, who, as founder and former CEO of VA Linux, sits on a number of … Read more

eWeek names its top 15 open-source business influencers

eWeek has put together a solid list of the top-15 open-source business influencers in the industry today. It's much the same that I would have devised had I come up with such a list. Names like Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), and Larry Augustin (most startups known to humankind) make the list. Also John Roberts of SugarCRM, who was really the one who made commercial open source as big a topic as it is today, at least beyond Linux and middleware.

But the list is also notable for its inclusion of some people that might … Read more

Open-source Sunday School: Milk before meat

Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts.

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:

For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. (Isaiah 28:9-11)

Anyone that has tried to ramrod open source into an organization will appreciate this counsel from Isaiah. As a market phenomenon, open source - be it Linux, Apache, MySQL, SugarCRM, MuleSource, or another project - almost always has begun on the fringes of IT. With Linux it was the edge-of-the-network server at first, until it eventually claimed the data center. With many commercial open-source projects, the first entree into an enterprise is at the departmental level (and even before that, with the individual developer's desktop).

Milk before meat. Here a little and there a little. Start small (as with my two youngest daughters to the right) and grow into greatness. Getting there depends on patience, as Marten Mickos and Larry Augustin have individually written:… Read more