I must concede: Sometimes I worry Canonical is trying to do too much too soon with Ubuntu. ... But just when I get really worried, the company makes a major move that impresses me. A case in point: Open source expert Matt Asay has joined Canonical as chief operating officer. It's a big move for Canonical, Ubuntu and Asay. Here's why.

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

Asay's job will be make sure operational activities match up to the company's strategic goals and make sure that day-to-day operations go smoothly. He will also head up Canonical's marketing. Asay is extremely well known and respected in open-source business and technology circles. [However, Pamela Jones takes exception to Asay's defense of Microsoft in her NewsPicks comment on this story. - gus3]

This week theme has been "who's going to pay for open source?" It's shown up in a number of blogs, like Matt Asay's.

When Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, stepped down and former COO (chief operating officer) Jane Silber moved up, there was concern that the popular Linux company might suffer from a lack of corporate leadership. Worry no more. Open-source industry veteran and leader Matt Asay has joined Canonical as its new COO.

I’m hearing reports that people in national standards bodies are being told blatantly false information about what they can and cannot discuss during the current JTC1 Fast Track process for OOXML.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers."

Very little, in my opinion. While Matt Asay sees the deal as "a big win for open source... mostly because it pegs the value of an open source company quite high" I'm not sure that's true in this case.

IBM made a slew of announcements and predictions on open source topics at this week's LinuxWorld conference, but one of the least talked about and written about announcements was this one (Matt Asay did single it out). IBM released its HPC Open Software Stack as open source, aiming at cheaper-to-deploy, simpler supercomputers.