Ragavan Srinivasan from HP Gives a Primer on Open Source Licenses

An extremely well-prepared Ragavan Srinivasan of HP gives an overview of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and the Free and Open Source Licenses. He provided a PowerPoint presentation to go along with the interview, which I have converted both to flash and Open Documents formats. Click on those links and you can follow along with him. Some other links from the interview are here.

For me, one of the real high points of the discussion was his description of the two different ways in which FLOSS is used in schools: "FLOSS in Education," and "FLOSS as Education." "FLOSS in Education" is the use of FLOSS for regular computing tasks, whereas "FLOSS as Education" is the teaching of programming--and collaborative programming--by using FLOSS. Thank you, Ragavan, for giving me a better vocabulary for something I end up talking about a lot..

Another sigificant aspect of the interview was Ragavan's descriptions of where HP as a company has seen significant value in the use of FLOSS internally. HP and IBM are both visibly posturing to show the world their support for Linux and FLOSS, but to hear how HP is actually benefiting from FLOSS itself is pretty compelling evidence of the real-world impact of FLOSS.

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