The O'Reilly Media founder and CEO presents one of his regular Radar updates, with the focus this time squarely on open source software. The world in which open source now operates is very different from the world in which it started. O'Reilly believes that the problems of scaling caused by the growth of the web and large on-line applications means we need to examine the freedoms we associate with open source in a new light. It's more important than ever that we rediscover the freedoms we care about and learn how to protect them in new and more relevant ways.

Zope is a high-performance application/Web server, content management system. It is a complete, robust, scalable solution. Rob Page, CEO and President of Zope Corporation, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the status of Zope, as well as the company. He reviews the background of the system, including what led them to use Python as part of it. He also gives some examples of successful implementations. He talks about why the company made Zope open source and discusses the challenges of making money in open source.

LAMP applications have a firm foothold in e-commerce and social networking, and the value of information stored in those systems is surging. At the 2007 MySQL Conference, Chander Kant of Zmanda, talks about how his company is taking advantage of this growing economy.

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone established the LiMo Foundation to develop the Foundation Platform, a Linux-based, software platform for open mobile communication devices. In this podcast, LiMo Foundation's Morgan Gillis describes the work the foundation is doing, what sort of mobile devices will result, and what makes this effort different from previous mobile Linux initiatives.

We've all heard the term 'Open Source', but what is it that entitles a project to be called Open Source? Freedom from having to pay for the software? Freedom to improve upon it, or create your own version? In his opening statements at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Tim O'Reilly elaborates on these questions in the ultimate search for what makes Open Source truly open.

The next evolution of Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.

What are the challenges to traditional copyright caused by technology? What new rules must be written to protect intellectual property rights, but not overly limit usage in an age where the computer is a copying device and the internet is a giant network of copying devices? In this episode of Future Talks, Gerd and Glen discuss how technology is leaving old rules behind They also talk about open source and how it relates to possible changes in the current copyright model. They also review how patents are subject to the same technology challenges.

Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Phil and Scott talk to Bruce Johnson, one if its co-creators. In addition to discussing its development, Bruce gives a number of examples of projects that took advantage of GWT.

In this conversation with Scott Mace, Centric CRM's Michael Harvey contrasts Centric CRM from rival SugarCRM, which he says doesn't scale as well because it's written in PHP. Harvey then defends Centric CRM's take on open source: developers who want to build a commercial business on top of Centric CRM must sign a reseller agreement. Harvey also describes "open software-as-a-service" which lets Centric CRM customers easily move their apps from hosted facilities to their own data centers.

The many software development communities that have surfaced over the years have started to see an increasing relevance of social issues around them. They are not just engineering activities but full-fledged social communities. In this talk, Bdale Garbee, the Linux CTO at HP, draws a parallel between real world social communities and open source software development communities revealing similarities in the evolution of both, the issues they're concerned with, from financial viability to gender issues, and the roles and responsibilities of their participants.