Q&A with Matt Asay of Novell and OSBC

Over the past few years, through his work and interests, Matt Asay has built up a network of solid open source advocates. Asay has taken this knowledge of the open source community in a pioneering direction, generating
analysis down the sometimes controversial median that runs between open source and commercial software.

Asay, a regular contributor to ITMJ, is part of Novell’s Linux Business Office and chairs the company’s Open Source Review Board, responsible for evangelizing the benefits of open source within and outside Novell, and for helping to generate Novell’s open source strategy. He also is the co-founder of the Open Source Business Conference, version 2.0 of which will be held next month in San Francisco. Before Novell, he was general manager at Lineo, an embedded Linux software startup, where he ran Lineo’s Residential Gateway business. Asay earned his Juris Doctorate degree at Stanford Law School, spending two of his three years studying software licensing and innovation, and specifically the GNU General Public License, under Prof. Larry Lessig.

ITMJ interviewed Asay to get some insight into his open source advocacy and his views on the direction of the business side of the open source.