246 posts tagged “open-source”
2013
What are the most commonly used or most interesting open-source packages and software?
I’d say the open source browser engines, Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari, Chrome, iOS, Android) are probably some of the most important and widely used pieces of open source code these days.
[... 51 words]2012
To become a better developer ? To read more OR to create/contribute to open source projects?
Contribute to an existing project, rather than starting one yourself. There are a bunch of benefits:
[... 231 words]Is there a free/open-source software source code search engine?
If you want to search through actual code in open source projects, GitHub search is fantastic https://github.com/search—e.g. here’s a search for all Ruby code that mentions oauth https://github.com/search?q=oaut...
[... 71 words]Is Microsoft’s platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early?
I would argue that the cost of the Microsoft stack is a lot more than just the license fees.
[... 546 words]How can a new developer get involved in open-source projects?
I was going to say the same thing. Find a useful project in GitHub (preferably one that clearly has an active maintainer), fork it, fix a bug (look at the project’s issue tracker) then make a pull request.
[... 80 words]Which is the best open source tool to populate my database with test data for my load test?
I’ve seen tools that do this, but to be honest it’s very simple to write your own script for this (especially if you’re using an ORM). The other benefit to writing your own script for this is that you’ll have a much better chance of accurately representing your expected data, sizes etc.
[... 221 words]Do Python programmers have a tendency to write their own software instead of contributing? Why?
I think you’ll find that PROGRAMMERS have a tendency to develop their own thing rather than contributing to an existing project. It’s even got its own TLA: NIH (Not Invented Here).
[... 94 words]What are the pros and cons of open sourcing my website’s code?
I’m afraid if you’re expecting to open source your code as a magic bullet to get others to work on improving it for free you are likely to be disappointed.
[... 250 words]Is there an open-content alternative to Quora?
Stack Overflow releases all of their content under a creative commons license, and even lets people download full database dumps.
[... 33 words]2011
What is the typical time overhead in using an open source package vs. an equivalent commercial package?
It totally depends on the software in question. If you are moving to popular, well maintained open source packages (things like nginx, solr, MySQL) you can often expect a large improvement in developer productivity due to the increased amount of tutorials, forums, mailing lists, irc channels and stackoverflow/quora posts you’ll have access to.
[... 76 words]What are the main conferences taking place in the US dedicated to Open Source?
We have a list here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/open-so...
[... 63 words]Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters. Jon Stokes speculates that Facebook plan to use open source hardware to compete with Google at datacenter efficiency . This isn’t a new pattern. Years ago when I worked at Yahoo! I was furiously jealous of the secret sauce technologies that allowed Google to build big applications faster than anyone else, such as BigTable and map/reduce. Today, the open source world has created better, free alternatives—sponsored in part by Facebook, Yahoo! and other Google competitors.
How do you stay up to date with Open Source products and technologies?
Lots of blogs and RSS feeds—in particular, I subscribe to the feed of the authors of the software that I’m using, if I can find them.
[... 61 words]2010
What is the story of Advogato?
There’s a Google Tech Talk about Advogato: http://video.google.com/videopla...
[... 21 words]Which major companies are using Solr for search?
The Guardian newspaper uses Solr for its Open Platform Content API. http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-p...
[... 27 words]Slide, Inc.—open source. slide.com have open sourced a whole bunch of interesting Python libraries, most of them involving C extensions or greenlet non-blocking I/O. wirebin (fast binary serialization of native Python types) and meminfo (an extension for finding precise in-memory sizes of Python objects) look particularly interesting. No documentation yet—not even a readme.
tobeytailor’s gordon. Another Flash runtime in pure JavaScript project, released back in January. Not quite as advanced as Smokescreen yet (it doesn’t have an audio implementation) but already available as open source under an MIT license.
Django 1.2 release notes (via) Released today, this is a terrific upgrade. Multiple database connections, model validation, improved CSRF protection, a messages framework, the new smart if template tag and lots, lots more. I’ve been using the 1.2 betas for a major new project over the past few months and it’s been smooth sailing all the way.
RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching. Google have open sourced RE2, the C++ regular expression library they developed for Google Code Search, Sawzall, Bigtable and other internal projects. Unlike PCRE it avoids the potential for exponential run time and unbounded stack usage and guarantees that searches complete in linear time, mainly by dropping support for back references.
Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free. With Symbian now open source, are there any widely used operating systems left (besides Windows) that don’t have an open source core?
The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source. Yehuda Katz shares my own philosophy on Open Source licensing—stick BSD or MIT on it to maximise the number of people who can use it. The projects I work on are small enough that I don’t care if someone makes big private improvements and refuses to share them. I can see how much larger projects like Linux would disagree though.
2009
Semantic Versioning. Tom Preston-Werner provides a name, specification and URL describing the relatively widely used Major.Minor.Patch versioning system. This is really useful—by giving something a name and a spec, people can say “this project uses semantic versioning” and skip having to explain their backwards compatibility policy in full.
EtherPad is Back Online Until Open Sourced. Fantastic news. EtherPad just got acquired by Google and announced the team would be joining the Google Wave effort and the existing service would be shut down. Lots of people complained, so they’re going to keep it alive until they’ve open sourced the code!
Opening Up Librelist.com Code, Looking For Volunteers. Zed Shaw’s Librelist is a new service for open source project mailing lists, aiming to be donation supported in a similar way to Freenode IRC. The code is all available, and is written in Lamson and Django.
Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool. An ultra simple website monitoring tool written in Django which makes it easy to manage a list of Twill scripts for testing different sites. It was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World—Eric showed me a demo if this a year or so ago and I’ve been hoping they would open source it.
Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. Write a plugin for YUI3, BSD license it and sign a CLA and Yahoo! will push your module out to their CDN and make it loadable using the YUI().use() statement. They’re coordinating the submissions using GitHub.
Introducing Resque. A new background worker management queue developed at GitHub, using Redis for the persistence layer. The blog post explains both the design and the shortcomings of previous solutions at length. Within 24 hours of the release code an external developer, Adam Cooke, has completely reskinned the UI.
Traffic Server. Mark Nottingham explains the release of Traffic Server, a new Apache Incubator open source project donated by Yahoo! using code originally developed at Inktomi around a decade ago. Traffic Server is a HTTP proxy/cache, similar to Squid and Varnish (though Traffic Server acts as both a forward and reverse proxy, whereas Varnish only handles reverse).