Small Business: Interviews

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame.

Greg Royal founded Cistera Networks six years ago to provide a convergence server platform that connects a company's enterprise applications to telephone users, using voice over IP. Greg continues at Cistera as CTO and EVP, and writes a blog We spoke to Greg to discuss his company and its embrace of Linux in his industry.

David Heinemeier Hansson was a 23-year-old student at Copenhagen Business School when he began work on Ruby on Rails a little over four years ago. His goal was to write a simple Web application framework that would free developers from the misery of repetitive coding that he sees as inherent in widely used platforms like Java and .Net.

Computer Sweden reporter Linus Larsson interviewed the hacker behind the recent Internet frauds perpetrated against Sweden's Nordea bank. The hacker claims responsibility for many more intrusions. "Ninety-nine percent of all bank intrusions are kept secret," he insists.

Carsten Haitzler, who is perhaps better known by his alias, Rasterman, has been the lead developer for the open source desktop shell Enlightenment for the past 10 years. Since attaining a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of New South Wales in 1997, Haitzler has built a career around his interest in graphics software, and has worked as a core developer at Red Hat and an engineer at VA Linux Systems in the U.S. and Japan.

What's the link between eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of modern economics, and the open-source software movement? According to Marten Mickos, the chief executive officer of open-source database company MySQL, it's Smith's concept of an "invisible hand," which guides individuals pursuing their own betterment to achieve goals that also benefit society at large.

Intellectual property issues have become a paramount concern in software development projects lately, with a great deal of the angst arising from the use of open source software. Forging a business model to address this problem, Black Duck Software provides a platform to identify intellectual property during the software development process. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Black President and CEO Douglas Levin, a former Microsoft executive, about Black Duck and issues pertaining to intellectual property and open source.

Two years ago, Japanese Linux server operating system developer Miracle Linux decided it needed to better promote its local Linux distribution. It developed two aims, according to Miracle's president, Takeshi Sato.

Astronaut, entrepreneur and founder of popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu -- Mark Shuttleworth is in Sydney this week for the Ubuntu Down Under conference. He was also one of the speakers at Linux.conf last week and took some time out with LinuxWorld to discuss life, the universe and everything open source.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer, spoke with Computerworld this week about Solaris 10, the open-source plan and other topics.

After eight years at the company, Kevin Rollins was appointed president and CEO of the US$41.4 billion computer juggernaut Dell last July. Many still think of Dell as a desktop supplier, but the company has become a powerhouse in server and notebooks as well and is making strong moves in the printer and storage markets.