In February 2007 we met Swapan, the only Red Hat® Certified Engineer® in the islands of Andaman and Nicobar. We thought we’d check in with him now that the year has passed, and see what he’s been up to. » Read more
Last month I was threatened with police intervention after taking pictures of my two-year-old. Why? We were in what you might think of as analogous to an outdoor mall. It’s a former industrial complex that’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Today the area has been revitalized with restaurants and office space, a large greenspace in the middle, and an attractive manmade river and waterfall. Despite there being no signs to indicate such, security informed me that the owners of the space have prohibited photography in order to “protect the intellectual property of the architecture.”
Today more than 15,000 bloggers are participating in Blog Action Day, an initiative that asks bloggers to post on one topic en masse on the same day each year. The 2007 topic is the environment, and open source bloggers are joining in. » Read more
We’re giving away $50 for the best pumpkin related to open source, Linux, Red Hat, Creative Commons, or any of the other things we post about here. Carve it, paint it, however you want to decorate it, as long as it’s creative. If you happen to have a pumpkin that naturally grew in the likeness of Linus Torvalds, we’ll even take it as is. » Read more
Will democratizing sustainable housing be enough to change Canada? It’s too early to tell, but there’s a start. Open source can make sustainable designs available. Nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. The Now House is one sustainable housing design project created by one small team. What would happen if one hundred teams created projects like this? » Read more
This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of his daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern. The community responded that the company had been guilty of the same offense repeatedly in the past. Babble responded on their site that there wasn’t an alleged “long history” at all. He said/she said.
There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically.
After having spent the past year and a half living and working in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how “the community” supports and makes possible the creation of high quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that produces open source software may look like an absurdly small number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a particular office park. It also includes all the contributors, anywhere in the world, in the project’s community. » Read more
