Donald Rosenberg

IT managers who are about to reach for the aspirin as they try to figure out their open source corporate position should grab this book with both hands instead. As the title suggests, it's pragmatic and deals in realism, not ideology. The first major benefit is the book's centering on case studies of real implementations, including quantities and dollars. The second is that this case experience is then organized into a plan and a check list to guide any IT manager into exploring what part of and how much of the corporate system can profitably be migrated to open source software and commodity hardware. Profitably is the operative word, and the theme of the book is the return on investment (ROI) method as a means of evaluating migration potential and of persuading management to consider the merits of and need for the migration. The book examines and puts aside total c... (more)

Book Review: Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property

According to Larry Rosen, "One of the challenges to writing about licensing in a book not specifically written for licensing professionals is to make a very dull subject interesting." A Complete and Thorough BookRosen has met that challenge in his exciting guide to the Open Source licensing zoo. As an extra fillip he offers a set of five Open Source Principles so clear and brief that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) would be well advised to adopt them, plus two new licenses intended to solve not only the weaknesses of some of the current Open Source licenses, but resolve the many... (more)