Topic: Business
Knock-Off Printer Cartridges (Lexmark v. Static Control). Lexmark, the printer manufacturer, attempted to use copyright law and
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent companies like Static
Control Components from making compatible toner cartridges or
refilling used cartridges. A
district court agreed with Lexmark, which would mean that nearly any
company that made replacement devices, such as oil filters for cars,
could very easily be sued under copyright law. Luckily, the Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected those arguments. This case is loaded with implications for virtually all IT professionals. ["The Importance of Law and IT" with Ernest Miller on IT Conversations.]
Memory Lane with Halley Suitt: David Orfao, a managing director at General Catalyst Partners, joins Halley to discuss his current work as an investor in software solution and technology platform companies and his entrepreneurial beginnings in a number of start-ups, where his strengths in sales and operations gave him solid experience in building and leading successful companies. He shares with Halley his insight on the challenges entrepreneurs must learn to navigate in the current business environment, as well as where he sees opportunities for building businesses and the future of innovation.
Special guest: Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) and guest Gang member, Michael Vizard (CRN Magazine). Solaris goes open source. Is Sun the low-cost provider because their oeprating system cost-of-goods sold are essentially zero? Will IBM buy Novell to acquire SUSE Linux?. Will Schwartz succeed in prioritizing its sales (and compensating its staff) according to the NPV of products and services? Will Wall Street let him do it? The Gang assesses the futures of Sun and its new president.
Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Lane assesses the economic impact of open-source software and its benefits of no vendor lock-ins, significant cost savings, shift of IT spend from infrastructure to applications, and open standards based architecture. He also describes open source's impact today, where it will reach in next 5 years, steps to accelerate its adoption and to exploit it to the fullest extent.
Panel members include: Sarah Friar, Goldman Sachs (Moderator),
Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Linux,
Technology Group, Computer Associates,
John Fowler, CTO, Software, Sun Microsystems,
Stephen Walli, Business Development Manager, Platforms, Microsoft,
Doron Gerstel, CEO, Zend
Open source can help accelerate the adoption of open standards and help drive new business opportunities like web services and grid. But it's still about solving customer problems even in an open source world.
Come learn about how the HPC marketplace is using SGI Altix platforms to innovate, create, and understand their world better, faster, and more cost effectively.
Learn when to use open source software profitably in your business, how to pick a license, how to build relationships with the open source community, and how to manage open source projects in your organization, along with your proprietary software. This talk is based on Hewlett-Packard's experience with open source and Martin's book, "The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source."
As has been the case with every transformational wave of fundamental technological innnovation since the Canals, the short-term greed of the Internet Bubble financed a Darwinian explosion of exercises in building out the necessary infrastructure and of experiments in finding commercial uses for it. When the bubble inevitably collapsed, it left behind two sets of road maps: at the application level, the business models that worked, such as Ebay and Yahoo! and Amazon; at the infrastructure level, a set of challenging technological requirements needed to deliver a distributed computing and communications environment as scalable and secure as it is robust and easy to manage.
As anyone who's taken on a large-scale multi-party integration project will tell you, "the plumbing is the easy part." By far the greatest challenges come from reconciling semantic differences between systems and organizations. In this interview, Dave answers some of the hottest questions in today's world of semantics.
