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
I've been following the open source-like farm movement for a while, partially because I have a small urban farm in Santa Cruz, CA, and I'm also a big proponent/consumer of sustainable, local, organic food wherever I go. Thanks for all this info, I just pledged a bit toward the openfarm Kickstarter campaign.
One thing I really like is that a search for "open source farm" turns up quite a bit of stuff that is (possibly) duplicative. Why is this a good thing? Look at open source software -- where there is need and activity, there are almost always multiple solutions. This is because there are many ways to look at the same problem -- Apache is a great multi-tool for hosting web services, while nginx is a great light-and-focused tool for specific HTTP/S needs; KDE and GNOME solve the desktop problem for people in usefully different ways, and the myriad other desktop environments cover the more niche needs very well; and so forth.
I'd *love* to see an ongoing series by Michael looking at the different farming movements following the open source way. (And as always, more on the open source-like music domains, as another passion of mine.)
Thanks for the licensing clarification. That was what the SparkFun site seemed to show as licensing, but in the article above you link to the NC variant of the Creative Commons license when writing, " Products designed by SparkFun engineers are released with schematics and firmware under a Creative Commons license." Perhaps worth a fix?
I understand about the security concerns. I think Red Hat had similar challenges creating Spacewalk, which was the open sourcing of Red Hat Satellite. Satellite was tied to financials, etc., before opening. As I said, it was more in the form of a "wish for you" than a commandment. :) Perhaps, though, you'll find ways to abstract out those modules early so other sections can be ripped open en masse, or something. Good luck!