Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
Simon, your article carves a nice pathway between the English lexicon mess around free and open. In my opinion, there still exists a need for an OSI to be a vanguard of open source, open data, open access, open... Specifically because there continues to be so much appreciation for software freedom while being afraid of the wording, while there is so much confusion around 'free' and 'open' and 'fauxpen' and 'things that claim openness but really aren't', I think we need the open source terminology for a while longer.
As Michael Tiemann has said, the 'free software' brand has worked great for hackers, and the 'open source' brand has worked great for business. It is a good thing to have the OSI extend to other technology domains needing clarity of practice around applying the open source way.
Not sure what there is I can do, but I also would like to help, with the caveat like Venky's -- let's find a way that this helps folks like us combine time slices (three birds, one stone.)
Travis, I enjoy reading your articles. You write with a clear, impassioned voice about really important matters.
However, I confess that I cringed in the first paragraph of this article, even though I think you tried valiantly to work around such reactions. So, a bit of unsolicited advice from one open community writer to another, there is no need to dance around gender word choices ("business person" works fine) nor <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_could_do_it">user-capability stereotypes</a> - just edit them out <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth_at_Linuxcon">before you take it public</a>. :) No matter who we are, it's worth a <a href="http://iquaid.org/2010/03/25/diversity-check/">diversity check</a> before publishing when your goal is to reach the widest audience.