Pin ItPaula Bach over on Port 25 talked about how to go hybrid yesterday, but she's not talking about cars. She's talking about how proprietary companies are borrowing techniques from the open source community and how certain successful communities are going commercial. For me, the interesting part is that she specifically calls out usability as an area where [...]
Read More »Pin ItAs Abhijit Nadgouda says in "Benefits of Online Repositories", it only takes a simple command or two in Linux to download and install or upgrade a package. If necessary, even dependencies will be downloaded and installed and you don't have to know anything about these new packages to make it all work in a [...]
Read More »Pin ItThis year at JavaOne was the first time since 1999 that I actually got to attend a bunch of sessions, thanks to not having to man an OpenLogic booth. Overall, it was quite good. There were quite a few parallel tracks and always something interesting in at least one of them. Perhaps unsurprising, but [...]
Read More »Pin ItMicrosoft just held their 2008 "MVP Global Summit" in Redmond last week. This is an internal conference where they recognize awardees in a number of divisions and have over 400 technical sessions on a variety of topics. The interesting bit for me is that Jamie Cannon reports that there's an informal meeting of Microsoft [...]
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 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 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 ItKarri Dunn recently announced DreamSpark on Port25. DreamSpark is a program that provides free Microsoft development tools to students for non-commercial purposes. As Microsoft has wisely done for a very long time, it wants to make sure that college students who will be writing the next generation of software are used to Microsoft tools, [...]
Read More »Pin ItOne well-known issue with Open Source is the so-called "Dependency Hell" problem. Background This situation arises when one package, let's call it "A", depends on a number of other packages, "B" and "C", that have their own dependencies in turn (B depends on D and E). When trying to get A installed correctly, you [...]
Read More »Pin ItI suppose CIOs are an easy target to poke, because they sure are getting beat up over Open Source lately. What they do get about Open Source, however, is how it's coming into their organization. They realize that no matter what kind of mandates and policies they create to keep Open Source out, it [...]
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