This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. Thanks to Thomas King, a writer for Linux.com and LXer, for doing the rough editing for this series of interview segments!

This series of 11 interview segments features John William Templeton, a widely published historian, journalist, and business commentator. John is president and executive editor of eAccess Corp. in San Francisco. As editor of the San Jose Business Journal, he helped pioneer coverage of technology industries in the 1980s. His popular book, "Success Secrets of Black Executives," highlighted the pivotal role of African-American technology executives. Since 1999, he has presented the 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology list and published the annual Silicon Ceiling report on equal opportunity in technology. He is an honors graduate in journalism from Howard University, and completed the Minority Science Writers Seminar and the Stanford Professional Publishing Course.

John is also a leading historian of African Americans in business, and his Digital Tipping Point interivew connects current efforts by African Americans in Free Open Source Software to the deep history of African Americans in the broader technology field. One of the primary themes that emerge from John's interview is the appeal that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) holds for African American entrepreneurs. He says that FOSS holds the appeal of lowering the barrier for entry of African American innovators creating small to medium businesses, which is where most new jobs are created. He thinks that FOSS appeals to African nations intent on preserving culture and language that would be lost to the predominantly European languages in which proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. FOSS allows African nations to localize Free Software into the 5,000 small-population languages spoken in Africa, thus preserving the thoughts and cultures of the speakers of those languages. John's experience as an expert witness in the anti-trust trial against Microsoft reminds us of the perils of entrusting culture to a monopoly whose interests are not always parallel to the interests of the users of software.

This footage is our raw rough-cut footage. It lacks transitions, music, special effects or finish rendering. It is our "source code". Please feel free to rip, mix and burn this footage consistent with our Creative Commons license as disclosed on this page.

In segment 08 (Tape 159~005), John talks further about how Free Open Source Software can help lower the barriers to entry for new businesses. He uses his own business as an example. He provides content for education software. His sales are impacted by the cost of royalties for Microsoft Windows. He says that you end up having to raise venture capital to give to someone else, like Microsoft, rather than to make the software better. Free Open Source Software would allow him to by-pass that requirement of providing royalties to a company like Microsoft. He says that in order for Free Open Source Software to beat Microsoft, it is going to have to compete on a feature-for-feature basis, and provide better features than Microsoft-based products. He says that it is also important to target overshot customers such as people in developing countries that don't have cell phones. [They are overshot because they are price-sensitive and not able to afford expensive solutions involving landline networks, and because they could benefit from innovative solutions such as renting out access to cell phones on a per-call basis]. He says that innovations such as handcrank-powered receivers such as those offered by WorldSpace could offer Linux-powered solutions that are readily tailored to meet the unique needs of this kind of customer. At the end of segment 08 and the beginning of segment 09, he repeats for the camera his sound-bite about Jason Jackson saying that Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have used Linux because of the freedom of expression that Linux permits.

All of John Templeton's interview segments can be found here:

http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv158_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_006_007.ogg (segment 01
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv158_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_008.ogg (segment 02)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv158_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_009.ogg (segment 03)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_001.ogg (segment 04)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_002.ogg (segment 05)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_003.ogg (segment 06)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_004.ogg (segment 07)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_005.ogg (segment 08)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_006.ogg (segment 09)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_007.ogg (segment 10)
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv159_sf_02_john_templeton_historian_008.ogg (segment 11)

If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt@gmail.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_159

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 005, John Templeton
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Thanks for viewing our video!

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews