open source software

December 4, 2018

Free Software without a Free Lunch or Free Beer

Economists like to say that there are no free lunches. How does that attitude apply to free software and services? It is no secret that many prominent platforms give away services, and so do many widely used open-source projects. The answer should help us understand our world. While it costs next to nothing to replicate …

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July 14, 2017

Y2K Everyday?

[This post appeared on HBR Online on 14th July 2017] Almost 20 years have passed since the corporate world woke up to long-term problems in computer code, which became known as Y2K. Over the previous decades, software developers had used the date 01-01-00 (January 1, 2000) as a convenient hack to make it easier to debug software. The …

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