Pin ItAs of today, The Open Source Census is now LIVE and accepting data! The Open Source Census is a new project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in the enterprise. In short, that just means we want to count how many enterprise installations for each open source [...]
Read More »Pin ItAbhijit Nadgouda says it's been a decade since the term open source was chosen to represent the concept. This is true, but the concept has been around far longer. I remember reading through freely available source code to BBS systems back in the mid-late 80's to discover their secrets. Long before that, software was freely [...]
Read More »Pin ItRuby is a great programming language for many purposes, however, it's weak when it comes to device support for embedded projects. That said, one package that helps bridge the gap is the Ruby-SerialPort which, as its name implies, provides the classes needed to access a system's serial port from Ruby. Ruby SerialPort works very [...]
Read More »Pin ItWhen my parents lived in Japan, everyone thought my dad looked like Harrison Ford. Their noses are kind of similar and they're both American. And I have Caucasian friends that think all Asians look alike. So it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that people think that the women in open source all [...]
Read More »Pin ItOver at Microsoft, they've just celebrated their first Open Source Day. Wow. I think Jamie Cannon was right when he (she?) joked that "Hell has frozen over". I know Microsoft is full of smart, hard working people, but this is still a significant milestone for them, and one that occurred before it's too late [...]
Read More »Pin ItI've helped a lot of companies write open source software policies. The one thing that surprises me the most is the number of companies that require that their companies use an anonymous email address, i.e. google or yahoo, to interact with the community. I try to explain why this is a bad idea. Today [...]
Read More »Pin ItThere is an interesting article in The Campus Word which asks if Trent Reznor's recent efforts with the release of Ghosts are single-handedly fixing the music industry. The record industry's business model has, for a while, been based on physical objects. You are not buying a license to listen to music, you are buying [...]
Read More »Pin ItDo you think that people work on open source software projects for the same reason they participate in social networks? I think there are some interesting correlations and some important differences. They both do it to get recognition from peers. Neither really do it to make money. However, open source software developers are also [...]
Read More »Pin ItI've been a big proponent of Agile Development for quite a while now, mainly since I read all about eXtreme Programming in 2000-2001. I always liked the idea of pushing those tenets in software development, but there were always some sticking points. Mind you, they're not exactly the same list Abhijit Nadgouda mentions in his [...]
Read More »Pin ItJesse Robbins has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar about how IBM is building a new datacenter in Zurich that will use its excess heat to warm a public swimming pool for local residents. He references an article on GreenerComputing.com, which notes that “the Zurich data center will be completed later this year, and [...]
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