Chattin' with Whurley(tm) at Innotech
This morning I got to help kick off Innotech of Austin's inaugural Open Source track by participating on a panel called Operating your Business on Open Source. Later in the day fellow Sun-ites Glynn Foster and Sara Dornsife from the Indiana team also sat on panels, theirs both moderated by none other than Whurley.
Whurley, who Ive learned over the last few months, besides being a fun
guy to hang with in bar is also a pretty impressive fellow both in his
background and what he's doing in the open source space. I nabbed him
between sessions and other interviews he was doing, grabbed a seat on
the floor in a remote area of the hall and chatted, or more accurately
tried to direct the man as he held forth.
Listen to the Interview
Extended ogg vesion (21:40) Shorter mp3 version (14:10)*
*Missing Whurley's back story.
The many faces of William Hurley. (Thats NOT me in the tie)
What we talk about, when we talk about open source
We spend the first 8 minutes talking about how Whurley went from being
in a funk band to being the Chief Architect of BMCs Open Source
strategy. Along the way he discusses his time at Apple from starting
in phone support to ending up in their R&D labs and then being a
Master Inventor at IBM. And on top of all this according to CBS News
along the way he helped bring vigilante justice to cyberspace.
For the rest of the interview we turn to matters affecting IT and Free
and Open Source Software. I tried to employ a structural device of
word association but I think we only got through three words in twelve
minutes. That being said we covered a lot of ground. To entice you
to listen here are some snippets and sound bites for the second half:
- Its not about the code, its about the community
- Open Source licensing is not the place to try and affect social change
- Different licenses are appropriate for different users and goals and thats why for BMC permissive licenses like BSD make sense and for some smaller companies GPL is the way to go.
- Its not about the leaders its about the results they deliver.
- Smack talk and the debates about Free vs Open are not helpful.
- Whurley's rule of 5 (after today Im on 3)
- Austin rocks -- 1.5 million Mexican Free-Tail bats cant be wrong.
- Why he ditched his Segway for a longboard.
Innotech was co-located with a Thomas the tank engine event. Listen for a guest appearance by Thomas during the interview.
Pau for now...
