Open Source Delivers

No one knows the importance of communities more than community leaders. Yes, many of us are on Twitter and attending local networking meet-ups such as The Community Roundtable’s CRLive lunches, but I haven’t found a local get-together specifically for the folks who manage high-tech virtual communities in the Greater Boston area to dive deep on [...]

With thousands of open source projects starting up each year, and thousands more struggling to get off the ground, it begs the question why some projects succeed while others do not. Is it about the problem that the project is solving? Is it about the approach to solving the problem? Is it about the vision [...]

At the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit a couple weeks ago, the Linux Foundation announced their annual “Who Writes Linux?” report. Amanda McPherson of TLF blogged about it on April 3, and her comments about what we can extract from the numbers ring true: the Linux Kernel is receiving more and more attention from companies and [...]

Last week I attended EclipseCon 2012 in its new east coast location. It was a great conference, both in terms of speakers and attendees, and over the three days, I had the pleasure of talking with some of the top dogs in the Eclipse world, both in sessions and at the bar. I also got [...]

I just returned from POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina.  For a regional open source event, attendance at 700 was pretty sweet (and so was the Southern hospitality!).  Conference attendees range from large commercial organizations to universities to students.  While there are many developer events on the “left coast” there are few [...]

“Over time, we’ll get more data, more powerful computers, and better predictive algorithms. We’ll also do better at helping group-level (as opposed to individual) decision making, since many organizations require consensus for important decisions. This means that the ‘market share’ of computer automated or mediated decisions should go up, and intuition’s market share should go [...]

2011 was a banner year for the open source community, especially for the Eclipse Foundation, which celebrated its 10th anniversary.  In that vein, I decided to look at 2011 open source project trends and compare them to popular Eclipse projects.  Using Ohloh.net, the free social directory of open source projects and developer resources (N.B.: Black [...]

Developers spend a lot of time searching for things, including FOSS.  So, a question I always ask executives from companies looking for guidance into how to effectively manage open source is “How do your developers go about finding open source software for inclusion in their projects?”  Usually, the answer varies from the honest “I don’t [...]

Steve O’Grady and team from analyst firm Redmonk put on a very different day-long event (Monktoberfest, the “Developer Conference about Social, Tech and Beer”), at a very different venue (the Portland, Maine Library), with a very different lunch and dinner (lobster, beer, duck, beer and beer), a non-typical list of topics, delivered with an unusual [...]

Most software developers have heard of the well-known, large-scale forges from which code of all kinds – most of it FOSS – may be downloaded.  These sites tend toward the general-purpose:  easy-to-use, lots of features, etc.  But while many projects are hosted on these sites, the forges don’t fit the needs of every project or [...]