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To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

No, the real story is who InfoWorld chose to profile.

Sure, you get the obligatory Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond call-outs, because these are two of the guys that formed the foundation of open source upon which the rest of us build. But they're the only throwbacks to the "good ol' days" … Read more

TechCrunch suggests that Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, will shortly announce his candidacy to become California's attorney general in 2010. Given how poorly Facebook has handled privacy, it's difficult to see why California voters should assume Kelly would do better in the higher matters of public office.

Specifically, California's attorney general is charged with the following responsibilities:

The attorney general represents the people of California in civil and criminal matters before trial, appellate and the supreme courts of California and the United States. The attorney general also serves as legal counsel to state officers and, … Read more

After 10 years with Red Hat as one of its highest-profile developers, Alan Cox is moving on to Intel, as he announced to the LXer editors:

I will be departing Red Hat mid January having handed in my notice. I'm not going to be spending more time with the family, gardening or other such wondrous things. I'm leaving on good terms and strongly supporting the work Red Hat is doing. I've been at Red Hat for ten years as contractor and employee and now have an opportunity to get even closer to the low level stuff that … Read more

For a variety of reasons, Matt Quinlan, formerly of JBoss, left Appcelerator some months ago. I was glad to hear this week that "Quin," as he's called, has landed at Loopfuse, an open-source marketing automation company. Quin is one of the brightest lights from JBoss, and will be a credit to Loopfuse as its vice president of Sales and Marketing.

It's a great coup for Loopfuse and, more importantly, a return to the open-source industry by a highly respected JBoss veteran. Welcome back, Quin.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Loopfuse.

Markus Rex, formerly the chief technology officer of Suse and currently on leave from Novell, is back in the saddle as acting general manager and senior vice president of Novell's Open Platform Solutions business unit, reporting to Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe, as Novell announced Monday.

Rex had been on loan to the Linux Foundation as its CTO for the past year. He's a fervid community believer, someone who will help balance Novell's interest in driving Linux-based revenue with the need to rebuild its relations with the Linux community that soured on Novell in the wake of its patent deal with Microsoft.… Read more

I had the chance to do a question-and-answer session with Mark de Visser, new CEO of Sonatype. Sonatype was founded in 2007 and bills itself as "The Maven Company." Maven is build and release software for Java. Sonatype boasts all the main Maven developers including the project's founder, Jason van Zyl.

De Visser, for his part, is well-known in open-source business circles as former chief marketing officer at PHP tools maker Zend Technologies and former VP of Marketing at both Red Hat and Agitar. I noted a few months back when De Visser first moved to Sonatype, and I've been wanting to get an update on what's happening in open-source business and why he picked Sonatype.

I think very highly of De Visser. If he chooses Sonatype, there's a good reason behind it. I wanted to hear more.

Asay: Sun's market cap has dropped precipitously, and it's currently around $3 billion. Is this having an effect on Java?

De Visser: Java is a core development language for the enterprise and its portability, flexibility, and scalability continue to be strong points. It's out in the wild. Sun may have problems, both self-inflicted and otherwise, but they're not the only ones having a tough time. Each day brings news of more layoffs in high-tech companies.

Java, the language, however, is growing very quickly based on its strengths. Improving and extending Java will continue to be important.

Asay: So, why now? Why would you choose to start a new company at this point in time? Are you a glutton for punishment?

De Visser: Well, first of all, you give me a little more credit than I deserve for having control over when and how. But I will tell you, now is a great time to be building an open-source company. Software continues to have to be built and companies will be even more motivated to look for efficiency and cost savings during this downturn.

Maven delivers that and Sonatype helps companies adopt Maven with products and expertise. There is no better place in the world to come for support and training for Maven.

It also helps that the product is popular. Incredibly so. The Maven Central Repository has over 70,000 Java artifacts in it, including widely used open-source projects like Apache Commons, JUnit, Lucene, Hibernate, and Spring. The Maven database was linked to 200 million times in November alone. 200 million times!… Read more

Larry Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, is leaving the West Coast to head to the Stanford of the East, Harvard Law School, according to Harvard. Lessig used to teach at Harvard Law School, so it should prove to be a comfortable change, and perhaps in keeping with his shift from "West Coast code" to "East Coast code", to an emphasis on overcoming corruption in politics. (No, not that kind of corruption.)

Lessig was my professor at Stanford Law School, and became a mentor to me there, though I fought his ideas for the … Read more

Microsoft, long the bastion of proprietary thought, is increasingly adding open-source DNA to the fold. And it's adding to its roster of open-source veterans: Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity and ActiveState, announced on his blog earlier this week that he will be joining Microsoft:

I will have the title Partner Architect and will be working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. My open source, open web and digital community experience will continue to guide my thinking. For me, this is an opportunity to work on the identity problems I have been toiling over for the … Read more

MySQL's Michael ("Monty") Widenius cann be a bit of a loose cannon, as I've written here before and as revealed in his recent excoriation of MySQL's 5.1 release, telling would-be adopters to be "very cautious" about using it.

Sun SVP of Database Products, Marten Mickos, attempts to put a happy face on Monty's indiscretion but I imagine his private feelings involve some choice Finnish profanities with Monty's name after them. At least, that's what I'd be saying (if I spoke Finnish).

Transparency, as Mickos notes, is a hallmark … Read more