Open source zealots fill with venom

While bumbling OLPC bumbles to Microsoft

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Open Season, 19th May 2008 19:09 GMT

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Radio Reg Some pundits out there think you can't get rich off open source software. Well, that's just not true. As evidence, we bring you Mike Olson, the former CEO of Sleepycat Software who milked Oracle for millions.

You can see Mike here, although he doesn't actually work for Oracle anymore. These days he's eating burritos filled with endangered species meat and working on his tan. It's a nice life.

Mike was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to join the Open Season crew for Episode 17 of our glorious show. We talked about the OLPC's defection to Microsoft, the Gates Foundation's good works and CBS's philanthropic move to acquire CNET.

This show also saw Dave Rosenberg waffle around in the sky, telling us no one seems to have got cloud computing right. And then Matt Asay jumped in on Sun's JavaFX effort, saying it's probably too little, too late. Dave and Matt then set themselves up for some really nice e-mails by exploring all the ways in which the open source community hates itself.

Me? I was just happy that no one in the open source kingdom killed or maimed anyone this week.

Now, onto the show.

Open Season - Episode 17

The faithful can grab the Ogg Vorbis file here, those plagued by low-bandwidth can catch a smaller, crappier quality show here and those of you with macho-sized bandwidth can get the big daddy here.

You can subscribe to the show on iTunes here or grab the Arse feed here.