Open Source Delivers

When your name is Linus and you live in Finland, the social pressure to do something open source related is understandably enormous. And so I have spent the past few years researching code forking. I recently had the opportunity to interview Michael ”Monty” Widenius to get “the MariaDB story” for my PhD. Going in, I [...]

Jeff Hammond of Forrester Research talks about the “iron triangle” of software development. “Schedule, features, cost…pick any two,” is the way he describes it. He often brings this up in the context of open source and multi-source development taking the position that open source lets dev teams soften up the iron and improve on all [...]

One of the things I’ve learned the hard way is that there’s more to software development than firing up your favorite text editor. As developers, we often interact with systems which are linked with our work – bug trackers, source control systems, build servers etc. More recently the processes which govern these interactions were branded [...]

You’ve just finished developing a great piece of code; you saved your company a bunch of money using open-source components to be faster and efficient. Your colleagues admire you and treat you like a guru. So far so good! A day later, you receive mail from legal through your boss, updating you that you can’t use these [...]

I had the opportunity to spend the past few days at EclipseCon Boston, talking with many seasoned, talented open source developers. One of the great things about the Eclipse crowd is that they take open source seriously, focusing on building industrial-strength software through the open source development model. In typical conference format, there have been keynote [...]

Sifting through the thousands of new open source projects that start each year is a refreshing, insightful process. As we completed our Rookies analysis of the new projects that hit the scene in 2012, I had a wonderful sense of the kind of impact that open source is making on the world in so many [...]

Yesterday I spoke with Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst serving application development & delivery professionals at Forrester, for our “Open Source Conversations” series.  Please check out the video, below, for Jeff’s take on the following: Cultural changes in development, and in particular, why developers write code outside their day jobs.  Jeff reports that 70-80 percent of [...]

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, for our “Open Source Conversations” series.  In this video, Mike provides a great overview of: Changes Eclipse is making, including broadening their technical focus beyond tooling and Java into JavaScript, C, C++, and PHP, and a new focus [...]

We all get excited about the latest hot open source projects like CloudStack and Boot to Gecko — they’re new and exciting and the possibilities seem endless.  But what about the many long-running projects that have been core to the world of open source for decades? The ones that have truly stood the test of [...]

Looking for a good Linux developer but finding some of the best are already taken? You’re not alone. The Linux Foundation’s 2012 Linux Jobs Report, produced in partnership with Dice.com, shows that 85% percent of hiring managers surveyed say that finding Linux talent is somewhat to very difficult. Not to worry, though. Technology professionals recognize the opportunities [...]