A primary motivation for writing the Open Life book, as well as this blog, was not only to write about open source software, but to encourage applications of open source outside the world of software. Part four of the book covers such topics from Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg to a mining company releasing it's mining data to the public. Some of the chapters also propose some ideas that had not been done yet at the time of writing. One was open source movies.

The Open Content revolution has happened! ...it just didn't happen in the way we expected it.

I was recently interviewed for a London music blog Music 4.5: What the music industry can learn from the open source movement?1 Somewhat surprisingly, I gave Youtube as an example of a website where music and video is re-used in an open source fashion:

1. 1. Funny story, I was introduced to Charlotta Hedman by my former MySQL Ab collague Mark Baker, also from London, without him knowing that we are both from the small Finnish city of Jakobstad and I even worked for her dad as a teenager.

Last week Red Hat announced what seems to be a significant effort to bring open source thinking into non-technical areas of life and society. This was very interesting to me, as it is a topic I have also put much thought to in my book. While the welcome announcement is dated last week, it seems the sight has been pre-seeded with posts from different Red Hat employees so that it already looks like an active community site.

One post I stumbled upon is written by Red Hat's Pam Chestek, titled Letting Go: