You feel slighted by a comment on a mailing list, or a forum post has failed to be moderated live. How should you react?
A recent exchange on a user forum caught my eye, one that’s typical of many user interactions with open source communities. Someone with a technical question had apparently had the answer they needed and to help others in the same situation had posted a summary of the resolution, complete with sample code. When they came back later, the summary was gone. Continue reading
Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 426, interviewing the SIMP compliance project for Linux and chatting about the “curing complexity” business model.
Open Source and Public Domain are frequently confused. Here’s why it’s a mistake to treat the two terms as synonyms.
Plenty of people assume that public domain software must be open source. While it may be free software within your specific context, it is incorrect to treat public domain software as open source or indeed as globally free software. That’s not a legal opinion (I’m not a lawyer so only entitled to layman’s opinions) but rather an observation that an open source user or developer cannot safely include public domain source code in a project. Continue reading
The results are in, and effective April 1st (yes!) Simon has been elected back to the OSI Board by the Affiliates after a year off due to term limits. His platform statement is here.
Should you donate money to the open source projects you use? Or is there a better way to help?
Your business most likely depends on open source software. But are you playing your part to make sure it will still be there in the future? For that to happen, the projects where it is both maintained and improved need to flourish. Continue reading
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