Karl Fogel is an open source software developer, author, and consultant. In 2005 he wrote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O'Reilly Media), based partly on his experiences in the Subversion project.
He is now a partner at Open Tech Strategies, LLC, where he helps organizations launch and engage with open source projects. He has worked at CollabNet, Google, Canonical, O'Reilly Media, and Code for America / Civic Commons, all as an open source specialist. He is also an Open Internet Tools Project Fellow at the New America Foundation, a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initative, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, an advisory board member at the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, and President of QuestionCopyright.org.
He can be found at @kfogel on Identi.ca and Twitter, and his home page is red-bean.com/kfogel.
Authored Comments
Very nice & compact summary! Also, kudos for being careful to distinguish the two different meanings of the word "fork" (something that seems to cause a fair amount of confusion these days, unfortunately).
Note that another common expansion of "MVP" these days is "minimum viable product", which has obvious relevance here, though it's of course unrelated to the Microsoft "most valued professional" tag in the context above.
[Commenting here first as the original oss-watch post doesn't seem to allow comments anyway.]
Best,
-Karl
21 years, but more importantly: your poll cuts the time period too short :-). Remember that open source existed long before anyone used the term "open source" to describe it. The term "free software" predates "open source", but it was well-understood even then that there was a Thing going on that existed independently of terminology (one clue: many people were actively searching for less ambiguous term than "free software" in the 1990s -- remember "sourceware", anyone? -- and "open source" happened to be the one that succeeded).
There was plenty of commercial activity in open source before the term "open source" too. To name a couple: Cygnus Solutions, which was later bought by Red Hat, which itself was started before the term "open source" was coined.
Bottom line: the thing wasn't invented with the term. The term was coined to describe something that already existed.
[sorry for the apparent double comment -- the login flow didn't work the way I thought it was working; feel free to delete the earlier one]