If open source and the architecture of participation all come down to community, where does that leave those traditionally underrepresented in IT, such as women and minorities? How can such communities become more inclusive and diverse? How can we encourage diversity in the companies who increasingly bankroll many open source projects? On the heels of Black History Month and in the midst of Women's History Month, Fastcompany.com's Lynne d Johnson talks with Scott about possible solutions.

The openLiberty Project is a global initiative formed to provide open source developers with tools for integrating the privacy and security services of multivendor Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services into many new identity-based services. Jason Rouault of the Liberty Alliance discusses openLiberty, and how it could accelerate rollout of Web services, such as presence, contact book, geolocation and calendaring.

One of the things that open source software needs the most is the full protection of the law. Eben Moglen, Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School, congratulates the open source community on their success in becoming an important part of current technology, but also discusses how important it is to protect the user's rights. He reviews the legal atmosphere of intellectual property rights and how more restrictive to sharing they have become in recent years and how the end user has become the biggest loser because of this change.

More than 1300 customers with 6 million paid mailboxes are using Zimbra's open-source message/calendar/document sharing server for Linux and the Macintosh. Scott Dietzen explains how Zimbra utililzes AJAX and mashups to create a more compelling experience, how it removes some of the barriers between email and other apps such as calendaring, and how they make email and calendar available offline.

Open Source is here and control over software has shifted from the CIOs to the developers. They can make more decisions on what software to install and use. But with making decisions comes responsibility and the need to meet the needs of the CIO, the users and the local software environment. How can developers ensure everyone else will also be happy with the open-source software that they are happy with?

What is proper balance between open source and proprietary software? Is there a way to quantify software to come up with a good number? In his short presentation, Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz uses the history of the tomato as a metaphor for open source. Using such historical events as the legal fight to have it classified as a fruit to the development of the first genetically engineered tomato, Lefkowitz compares the consumption of five fruits and vegetables a day in a balanced diet to show that a third of an organization's software should be open source.

Backed by popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet creator Mitch Kapor, fueled by the open source revolution, the Open Software Applications Foundation's Chandler remains a personal information manager in gestation five years after work began. Scott Rosenberg, in the new book "Dreaming in Code," chronicles this process and reveals the hard truths that don't change from decade to decade about creating innovative software. Rosenberg also takes issue with the simplicity of David Platt's call for customers to demand that software should "just work."

Much has been done to strengthen the three major pillars of open source: licensing, business models and governance. Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps looks at the measures needed to ensure the Zen of Free is protected as we move into the next era of software. Along with the "freedom to tinker", the community must defend the "freedom to participate" without undue controls, and the "freedom to leave", an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.

Early January is a busy period in technology with events such as Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). As the Director of Operations for OC Tanner, Kelly Phillipps must stay abreast of new products and software upgrades. He joins Phil, Matt, and Scott in a discussion of what's new or upcoming in the IT world. They talk about the new iPhone from Apple, Linux as a desktop alternative, and how an enterprise decides whether to upgrade an operating system, particularly the newly released Microsoft Windows Vista.

August 12, 2006 was the 25th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. David Bradley, who was involved in the development of the IBM PC, wrote its BIOS and invented the now infamous control-alt-delete key combination, reminisces about his time at IBM. At the 2006 Open Source Convention, listen to a short history lesson on computer engineering at IBM.