“It’s been a busy couple of weeks,” Matt Mullenweg said with a grin in response to the question about Automattic’s recent $29M funding round. Interestingly enough, this funding trails the initial investment of $1M that wasn’t fully expended.

In this podcast, Mullenweg talks with Brad Baldwin while ...

Their spam guarantee doesn’t mince words: no false positives. David Troup explains how and why they developed their spam appliance and how long it takes customers to believe that guarantee. Troup also tells why he provides spam filtering for companies with 10 mailboxes or less for free.

John Locke’s book “Open Source Solutions to Small Business Problems” in 2004 set the stage for his Freelock Computing company to expand into all areas of Open Source development, administration, and support. Locke explains how his company thrives in Seattle.

Carly Adams, West Coast sales manager for Untangle, explains what the company does, what a network gateway is, and how they support the Open Source movement yet still make money.

At this year’s Tech Museum Awards, presented by Applied Materials, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education was among the Microsoft Education Award Laureates. The Institute founded the OER Commons with the goal of sifting through mountains of free information available online, using technology to ...

Wrapping up the episodes from Microsoft TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona, James and I talk about the discussions and announcements at the event. First, James comments on the seeming maturity that both the attendees and Microsoft itself has after all these years of TechEd. Then we get ask if ...

In this second part of a conversation with Puppet creator and Reductive Labs founder Luke Kanies, we talk about bootstrapping an open source company. More so than just finding a need and the code to fill it, Luke walks us through the personal risk management thinking he went ...

While at the Austin InnoTech conference, I talked with Luke Kanies about Puppet, the open source server configuration automation (or “provisioning” in my personal lexicon) project. Luke first gives us a detailed overview of Puppet: what it does, how it works, and the puppet DSL. We then ...

Helping people engage with ideas and information is how Shantanu Narayen, President and COO of Adobe describes what his company does best. Adobe recently completed 25 years and is expected to about $3 billion in revenue this year.

I caught up with Shantanu, who was on a ...

Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder of Mindtouch, gives us a demo of what makes his wiki tool better than other wiki tools. Specifically its strengths are that it’s open source and that it has a great API.

Sun has become one of the most enthusiastic supporters for open source technologies after a long period of ignoring the movement. Sun recently hosted an Open Source Summit in a bid to identify itself more closely with open source software. This event offered global perspectives and was moderated by Sun’s ...

While it was earlier hyped by some in the press as an “Outlook killer” (probably due to Mitch Kapor’s statements — he funded this open source project) Chandler has evolved to be a new collaborative tool aimed at small groups of people who want to work together. We visited ...

While at SAP TechEd ‘07 Community Day, James Governor talks with Dan McWeeney about the new type of designer/developer role and methodology Dan has seen emerge recently.

Rather than build on an open source or closed source only stack, Dan says, these developers pull in whatever code, projects, tools, ...

While at SAP TechEd ‘07 in Las Vegas, James and I had the chance to get an exciting demo from Dan McWeeney and Eddie Herrmann. Having won the SAP TechEd ‘06 DemoJam, Dan and Eddie couldn’t compete this year, so they cooked up the Wiimote driven ...

More questions are asked of the Office 2.0 vendor panel of Vishal Saxena (development manager, Oracle), Matt Quinn (vice president, product strategy, TIBCO Software), Bert Armijo (VP product management 3Tera) and Brett Adam (VP engineering, rPath). Steve Guengerich (chief learning officer, BSG Alliance Corporation) ...

This week at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium, I had the chance to talk with Innoopract’s Jochen Krause. We start talking about Innoopract’s decision to move to Eclipse several years ago. At the moment, Innoopract is working with Eclipse on the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform project, or RAP, which ...

During the BMC Analyst Summit in Sonoma, James Governor talks with BMC Software’s Kia Behnia about the role and benefits of strong community in the mobile device and IT management worlds. James and Kia first talk about hacking phones, esp. his HTC Hermes. They then move on to ...

Teaching in kindergarten through 12th grades continues to incorporate more technology. One Utah-based company, Timpanogos Technologies, has extended the life of existing district-wide systems while providing teachers and students with software that can create personalized study for individual students. Not only does this help the student learn, but it ...

In what Intel called the “first ever software keynote address,” Intel Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Solutions Group Renee James kicked off Day 3 of the Fall IDF in San Francisco.

James, who manages the global network of teams that interact with all of the software companies ...

Tom Foremski speaks with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, the second-largest open source company, about Silicon Valley and the challenge of managing teams of programmers spread across the world.

I stopped by the VoiceCon conference in San Francisco recently and caught up with Mark Spencer, the man behind the popular open source telephony platform, Asterisk. Spencer, CTO of digium, also created the popular Linux-based instant messenger client, Gaim. Spencer talks about the history of Asterisk ...

Josh Hallett and Alex Kim, from Solution Set, talk about building social media platforms within enterprises and the roadblocks that IT departments create. Lots of good advice on overcoming those obstacles. A Silicon Valley Watcher report from a meeting of the Third Thursday club held at ...

Coté speaks with Divakar Jandhyala of eVapt about what IT management for Software as a Service (SaaS) looks like and needs. Conversation also turns to the effects of SaaS on the IT department, and what the IT department of the future may look like. Finally, they end up ...

Joomla! is a robust and highly customizable open source content management system. While at the recent Linuxworld in San Francisco, I spoke with Joomla! lead developers Johan Janssens and Louis Landry, who shed a bit of light on what Joomla! is all about and who uses it, ...