Flourish is University of Illinois at Chicago's free annual conference dedicated to celebrating and elevating open source software and open culture in the Midwest. Through talks, workshops and coding sprints, attendees experience and reconnect with the philosophies and technologies that make the open source movement a key driver of innovation.

Great ideas spring up every day, but only in certain conditions are they able to bloom. Open-source software is, in fact, one of the best places for these great ideas to bloom.

Most people used to the proprietary software world, with no experience in open source software, are amazed that anything gets done. (And lots gets done in the open source, way more than in most proprietary software companies!) And people new to open source are usually at a loss as to where to start.

I had a great job working for a great company, with great people, great pay and great benefits. The company won several awards for the best place to work for several years in a row. But I walked away from it.

Welcome to my new ComputerWorldUK blog, where I'll aim to bring you regular dispatches from the front lines of the free and open source software revolution. Starting out with news seems smart, so I'll use this post to announce my new job.

There is such a wealth of great Free and Open Source software applications it's almost an embarrassment of riches, and we're going to look at 8 of them in this two-part series.

Lately, some articles appeared which stated the open-source way of development didn't bring us any innovation. Jaron Lanier even goes further by saying closed source is the better approach to innovation. However, these people miss a lot of important points and facts about innovation, and therefore the conclusions they make are false. Having read a lot about innovation myself lately, I will try to show that the open-source way of doing things leads to more innovation, and more important, I will give some real life examples showing the closed-source inventions aren't that innovative at all, and pointing to some open-source inventions the other writers missed.

One great benefit of using Linux, Apache, and other open source software is that you can modify the code to make it perfect for your business. But open source licensing restricts how you distribute the modifications. Here's what a CIO needs to know about open source licenses.

Software is only as good as the people that work on it. All of the great open source projects had great project teams. If you want to be the next big thing in open source a good team is essential. Here's the low down on getting a gang together as well as the non-coding roles you'll want.