Recently in open source Category

An interesting example of the mob mentality that is becoming more prevalent on certain parts of the internet (and, indeed, in real life).

Yesterday Digg published a story claiming that O'Reilly editor Steve Mallett had "stolen" the Digg's CSS definitions for his own sites. The response from Digg's readership was immediate, nasty and, ultimately, completely wrongheaded.

Steve didn't steal anyone's code. He used an open source project called Pligg to build his sites. Pligg builds on another project called Menéame and it was this project which had used CSS that originated with Digg. A few hardy Digg readers pointed this out, but the vast majority chose to ignore the facts and overnight over three hundred comments were posted to the story - most of them calling for some kind of retribution against Steve.

This morning I see that wiser heads have prevailed. A new story which corrects the facts has been posted and that is now getting a lot of attention. Hopefully Steve's reputation will recover.

But there are two issues raised by this. The first is the number of people who just commented on the story without actually reading any of the other comments and realising the facts (Martin recently pointed out another similar case on his blog). The second issue is a bit more fundamental Of all of the Digg readers who were getting angry over Steve's "theft", I can't help wondering how many of them swap illegal copies of MP3s.

Not passing any judgements here. Just wondering.

Have you ever been reading something that you are enjoying when suddenly you come across something which is so stupid that you lose all confidence in the author and can no longer take anything they write seriously?

It happened to me this morning as I was reading the introduction to Open Source 2.0. In the middle of a perfectly sensible piece introducing some of the ideas behind Open Source I came across this nonsense.

Outside the United States, people find it odd that we use the same word, "free", to mean two very different things "with no cost" or "liberated".

"Outside the United States"? Does that sound a bit strange to you? Can anyone think of anywhere outside the United States where they might understand the two meanings of "free"? Like perhaps anywhere that speaks English!. There is more to the English speaking world than just the USA.

Then they compounded their error a couple of pages later when they claimed that Larry Wall has led the Perl community for "more than 20 years". The first version of Perl was released in 1987. Don't these people check facts?

Luckily this was just the introduction which was written by the book's editors. Most of the book is essays written by other people. If that wasn't the case I don't think I could read the rest of the book.

Oh, I've just seen that the introduction is online. The "outside the US" bit is on page XXXVI and the Larry Wall bit is on page XXXVIII).

A couple of interesting books on Open Source Software that I've read recently.

Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software should be essential reading for anyone involved in an Open Source project (or planning to get involved in an Open Source project). Fogel has been an important contributer to a number of major Open Source projects and this book distills his experience into three hundred really useful pages. It covers everything from the technical infrastructure that a project needs to the politics of working with a team of volunteer developers. The whole text is also available online but you should really support the author by buying a copy.

Then there is Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani's Open Source for the Enterprise. This book looks at ways that companies can make more use of Open Source Software. The main premise of the book is that the major difference between Open Source and proprietary software is in the level of "productionisation" (horrible word, but I can't think of anything better). The authors think that most proprietary software is easier for people to use as it has better installation mechanisms and more detailed user documentation. Comparing successful end-user Open Source projects like Firefox and OpenOffice with their proprietary rivals Internet Explorer and Office, I don't think that this is a completely convincing argument, but it's certainly an interesting viewpoint and the book is well worth reading.

Computer Weekly has an article about LAMP systems. It's nice that they're defining it as a "hot skill" about five years after everyone else was talking about it.

Or, on the other hand, it's easy to think that everyone knows about LAMP just because I everyone I know has been working in this area for years. But maybe Computer Weekly is a more accurate reflection of what the UK IT industry is thinking about and maybe most companies still haven't heard about LAMP.

The internet is 10 this week. Well, no, of course it isn't. It's been around in some form or another since 1969. But a leader in today's Guardian says that this week is being celebrated as the tenth anniversary of the internet as a mass phenomenon - and I can't really argue with that.

Interestingly, the leader goes on to emphasise the connections between the internet and the Open Source movement.

Although, contrary to the instincts of its early protagonists, the web has long since been colonised by commerce, it still nurtures its founding community spirit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the startling success of the open source movement which enables enthusiasts and professionals all over the world to work together from remote locations to produce services that are freely available for anyone with a computer linked to the internet. The thousands of products so far released include the Linux operating system (a free alternative to Microsoft's pervasive Windows), OpenOffice (an alternative to Microsoft's Word and Excel) and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, with well over a million entries written entirely by its readers.

Ten years ago you would never have read about Open Source software[1] in the leader column of a national newspaper. Now that's progress.

[1] Or, as it was called back then, "free software".

Not that it will come to much of a surprise to anyone who has thought about it for more than a second, but the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has published a report saying that schools could save significant amounts of money by using Open Source software instead of commercial software.