SpikeSource TestFest

For those interested in testing and Open Source, my employer (SpikeSource) is throwing a TestFest on June 17th at our offices in Redwood City, CA. Our Test Upload Service allows you to test your code (open or closed source) against various platforms. Come eat our food, drink our drinks, try …

more ...

Expertise and Open Source

[forgive the lack of charts, my blogging service is in the middle of an upgrade] I've been thinking about another driver of features in Open Source software given the recent noise surrounding the harmony project.

I'll get back to harmony in a minute. First let's examine another Open Source java …

more ...


Bay Piggies meeting with Alex Martelli

I was lucky to get a seat (and dinner) at the standing room-only presentation by Alex Martelli tonight. The talk, which was a repeat of his PyCon talk, called Python Design Patterns and OOP, was hosted by Google. His theme throughout the talk was that of delegation in OOP (object …

more ...

Freedom forking for features in Open Source

Considering the recent discussions about KHTML and its fork found in Safari, I thought I'd post about forks.

Are forks good or bad? Yes. One might argue that people should collaborate rather than fork. But doesn't most open source development actually happen by forking? (At least at a micro level …

more ...

Fear and contribution to open source

I was talking with an Apache contributor today. He was lamenting that more of the users of his projects could contribute back, but did not. I asked what he believed were the reasons. We discussed two: One was work. People or their employers did not feel comfortable giving back. The …

more ...

Free your mind with Swing (and freemind)

I feel sorry for Java Swing apps sometimes (I don't want to get into a discussion about bloat here, cause I'm not really talking about it). Python is immune from it because it doesn't really have a gui library (I've even heard Guido say that guis are provided for better …

more ...

Flattery and Open Source

So Apple just released their latest OS.

It has all the newest bells and whistles. Which it should since Apple has a lot of really smart people working for them. They certainly innovate a lot over there in Cupertino. And guess what, even us non- apple users benefit from them …

more ...

Marten Mickos keynote observations

Last Wednesday I attended a very interesting keynote given by Marten Mickos entitled "Scale Out". Here's a few gems that I gleaned from it: He stated that the survivors of the dot com era built their infrastructure on top of open source (and mentioned Yahoo, Google and eBay as examples …

more ...