SE News

Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I’d see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards. When I joined I decided I’d solve this mystery and post about it but it’s been over 2.5 years and I’ve been busy and somewhat forgot. Fortunately a discussion at work last week reminded me of this again, and a bunch of us got to talking about the phenomenon. Here are the main reasons for open source programmers sometimes disappearing.

Brad Fitzpatrick

http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html

Activiti is a Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow system targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It’s open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.

http://activiti.org/

I have never written a bad line of code.

When I tell people that, they often scoff and offer replies like “so you’re not a programmer then?” and “let me guess, you’re a coding deity or something?” Well let me say, I am a programmer and I am not Codethulu, but in the same manner that Al Gore can fly around the world in a private jet without polluting, I have negated my bad code footprint through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets.

Alex Papadimoulis

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Introducing-Bad-Code-Offsets.aspx

Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, has become embraced by many organizations as a means of improving reusability of software assets; providing better alignment between business and IT; and, increasing agility for responding to demands in the marketplace. This is accomplished by breaking individual units of functionality into services that can then be exposed through open protocols and standards.

Until recently, many of the software technologies used for developing SOA-based solutions were limited to expensive, commercial offerings. However, that has now changed, and a compelling open source SOA platform can be implemented exclusively with open source products. This book identifies a suite of open source products that can be used for a building SOA environment, and describes how they can be integrated by practitioners. It includes a hands-on introduction to the products selected; a multitude of source code examples; and implementation through real-life case studies.

Jeff Davis

http://www.manning.com/davis/

Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company’s future. That decision: to toss away his upcoming product’s Gnu General Public License (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. “We initially started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer to move the license to Apache,” Haynie says.

Haynie isn’t the only business-oriented open source community member to have made, or at least pondered, a move to a GPL-free future. A June study conducted by Black Duck Software, an open source development tools vendor, shows that the Free Software Foundation’s GPL — although far and away still the dominant open source licensing platform — could be starting to slide. The survey found that despite strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants dropped from 70 to 65 percent from the previous year.

John Edwards

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/infoworld/20090810/tc_infoworld/85922

Coverity Inc., the software integrity company, today announced the publication of application architecture data from over 2,500 popular open source software projects at http://www.scan.coverity.com. As an outgrowth of its contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Coverity collected this data via the Scan site using the Coverity Architecture Analyzer product. This new, publicly accessible resource includes application architecture files and generated diagrams that will benefit developers planning to incorporate open source packages in their applications, as well as developers that want to learn the architectures of successful projects to improve the structure of their own applications.

http://www.testdriven.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=773

The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition for which a selected group of architectural offices (unstudio, nox, …) and artists were invited, including myself. The goal of the competition was not to design a building, but the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme ‘Netherlands and Architecture’. The winner will be rewarded with a nice price, but most of all with the honor: his design will be realized and will be a legal coin within the Netherlands.

I approached the subject ‘Netherlands and Architecture’ from two points of view. On one hand I paid tribute to the rich Dutch architecture history and on the other hand to the contemporary quality of Dutch architecture. These form also the two sides of my coin. Traditionally the front of the coin needs to portray the queen, while the back side displays the value of the coin.

Stani

http://pythonide.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-make-money-with-free-software.html

Shared understandings are important for software development as they guide effective individual contributions and coordination of the software development process. However, it is not clear if such understandings can be developed in highly distributed groups that do not regularly meet face-to-face. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary analysis of shared mental models within a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development team. We analyzed mental models using cognitive mapping and process analysis and compared the models of four developers from the Apache Lucene Java project. Our analysis suggests that there is a high level of sharing among core developers but the sharing is not complete, with some differences related to tenure and role in the project. Finally, we suggest directions for further research on shared mental models in FLOSS teams.

Barbara Scozzi
Kevin Crowston
U. Yeliz Eseryel
Qing Li

http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2008/3075/00/30750306.pdf

This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC’s) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur. It introduces and explains basic legal concepts related to the GPL and its enforcement by copyright holders. It also outlines business practices and methods that lead to better GPL compliance. Finally, it recommends proper post-violation responses to the concerns of copyright holders.

Bradley M. Kuhn, Aaron Williamson, and Karen M. Sandler

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html

Sustainable open source is an open source project that supports itself. That is the project is able to cover the costs it incurs, which can be significant even in a volunteer driven project. This document examines some of the models by which an open source project can become sustainable.

Ross Gardler

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/sustainableopensource.xml

This briefing note is intended to answer questions that those new to open source software may have about its security. By definition, open source software is software for which the source code is available to anyone. Source code can be thought of as a kind of blueprint for the software, a form which is ideal for gaining understanding of how a program works or modifying its design.[…] Thus, open source software can be said to invite and facilitate modification, while closed source software tends not to.

In this document, the first section aims to identify the chief ways in which software can be insecure, the second section discusses general approaches to mitigating software insecurity, and the final section compares closed and open source development methodologies in the light of the information from the preceding sections.

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/securityintro.xml

Party of one: Surviving the solo open source project
Tips for structuring, maintaining, and promoting your ‘part-time hobby’

With more than 100,000 open source projects hosted on SourceForge alone, starting a new one is no small undertaking, and bringing it to the masses is hardly a sure thing. In this article reprinted from Pushing Pixels, Kirill Grouchnikov explores the challenges and pitfalls of being the sole developer on an open source project. Whether you’re thinking about starting a solo development project or struggling to maintain one, get tips for structuring your development timeline, managing development priorities, and finding a niche for your project, even in the vast sea of open source software.

Kirill Grouchnikov

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2008/jw-06-oneman.html

Recently, I was talking with the development team at one of my clients about introducing some open source libraries into their product suite, as we work on refactoring it and getting it modernised and the code base under control. As we talked about the various open source libraries available, including several of my own, the guys asked me why I do open source. […] I’d suggest the following reasons, in no particular order of importance, are why I do it.

Matthew Wilson

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=229570

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

The OS FLV Player is an Open Source, embedable player for Flash native video files. The player provides a large amount of options that can be changed in the embed code, a code generator written in javascript, a library of PHP functions, and, of course, fully open source code!

http://www.osflv.com/