Open Source
There are 30 entries for the tag
Open Source
Hot on the heels of the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 yesterday, I’m happy to announce that we are releasing the source code to ASP.NET MVC 2 under the Ms-PL license, an OSI approved Open Source license. This continues the trend from nearly a year ago when we released ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under the Ms-PL. You can read my blog post there to learn more about the hard work that goes into such releases. While I’m one who loves lawyer jokes, I do appreciate the work that they do (one of my best friends is a lawyer) and...
First let me begin by assuring you, this is not an April Fool’s joke. Exciting news! Scott Guthrie announced today that we have released the source code for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under the Ms-PL license, an OSI approved Open Source license with all the rights that license entails. You can download the Ms-PL licensed source package from the download details page here. Just scroll down and look for the file named AspNetMvc1.Ms-PL.source.zip. My baby is growing up! A big thanks must go out to everyone involved in making this happen and to those who approved it. It’s...
There’s a great interview on the How Software is Built blog with Brad Wilson, a developer in Microsoft’s OfficeLabs team, but probably better known for his work on xUnit.net, CodePlex, and ObjectBuilder. What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It’s hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. Another reason that Brad gets a thumbs...
Oren Eini, aka Ayende, writes about his dissatisfaction with Microsoft reproducing the efforts of the OSS community. His post was sparked by the following thread in the ALT.NET mailing list:
Brad: If you're simply angry because we had the audacity to make our own object factory with DI, then I can't help you; the fact that P&P did ObjectBuilder does not invalidate any other object factory and/or DI container.
Ayende: No, it doesn't. But it is a waste of time and effort.
Brad: In all seriousness: why should you care if I waste my time?
Ayende’s response is:
...
I think Miguel de Icaza nails it regarding some of the FUD being written about Microsoft’s latest move to make the source code to the .NET Framework available under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). In fact, his post inspired me to try my hand at creating a comic. I have no comic art skills (nor comic writing skills), so please forgive me for my lack of talent (click for full size)... I know some of the people involved who made this happen and I find it hard to believe that there were nefarious intentions involved. You have to...
In his book, Producing Open Source Software, Karl Fogel gives sage advice on running an open source project. The section on how to deal with a security vulnerability was particularly interesting to me last night.
Upon learning of a potential security hole, Karl recommends the following:
Don’t talk about the bug publicly until a fix is available.
Make sure to have a private mailing list setup with a small group of trusted committers where users can send security reports.
Fix the patch quickly. Time is of the essence....
Here’s a little plug for something we’ve been working hard at over at Koders. Everyone knows that if you want to find open source code, you go to http://www.koders.com/ (it recently got a minor new facelift so check it out). That’s my area of responsibility here. However, after many many months of hard work, we released Koders Pro Edition 1.0 this week. I helped a bit with this, but it’s mostly due to the hard work of the rest of the team that this is out there, especially Ben, the product manager for Pro.
Pro Edition is the yin to the...
Ayende recently wrote about Microsoft’s “annoying” tendency to duplicate the efforts of perfectly capable Open Source Software already in existence. In the post, he references this post by Scott Bellware which lists several cases in which Microsoft duplicated the efforts of OSS software. Fear Factor Ayende is not convinced by the fear factor argument around issues of software pedigree, patents, and legal challenges. Jon Galloway wrote about this argument a while ago in his post Why Microsoft can’t ship open source code. In his post, Ayende dismisses this argument as “lawyer-paranoia”. While I agree to some extent that it is paranoia, not all paranoia is bad. I...
Working at a VSIP partner has its privileges. I’ll be up in Redmond at the Microsoft Campus for a two day VSIP Partner Meeting on August 5th and August 6th. We’ll be looking at ways to make the Koders Visual Studio plugins provide a great and well integrated experience.
I’m flying into Seattle on that Sunday to spend time with some friends and do a bit of sightseeing (oh look, that’s what rain looks like!). Hopefully my schedule won’t be too full so I can butt my head in a few offices here and there to bother folks and stir...
A year ago on this day, I wrote a blog post about the demise of NDoc and issued a challenge for users of Open Source Software to contribute to their favorite projects.
So I offer the following challenge. First, ask yourself these two questions:
How much money do I save because of Open Source Software?
Considering how many people spend three bucks for a useless ring tone, is a single dollar too much to contribute to a useful Open Source project?
So let’s ban together and declare today, July 26, 2006, Contribute To Open...
Microsoft just unveiled a new web property intended to clarify its position on Open Source as well as provide a one-stop location to find out what Microsoft is doing in the Open Source space. Despite all the (perhaps well deserved) criticism of how Microsoft has not supported Open Source in the past, I think the behemoth is slowly starting to get it. Or at least groups within Microsoft are starting to see that if they don't embrace Open Source, Microsoft will get left behind, much like they did for a while with the web revolution. Embracing Open Source makes good long...
Have you ever wanted to take a look at the internals of the .NET Framework? Sure you can (and should) fire up Reflector and see the Base Class Libraries, but what about the fully commented source code? What about the parts implemented in C++?
A while back, Microsoft released the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (aka the SSCLI aka Rotor). This is a fully working implementation of the ECMA CLI standard and ECMA C# language specification. So it's not quite the entire framework, but it is still quite a bit of code.
Traditionally, to look at this code you would download the...
A little while ago I pleaded with my readers to nominate Subtext for a SourceForge Community Choice Award. The good news is that it worked! Subtext is one of the finalists for a Community Choice Award in two categories: Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information. Other nominees include - Miranda, Pidgin, and FileZilla. Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input. Other nominees include - Azureus, XOOPS, and Zimbra. That’s some heady competition we’re up against. As far as I know,...
I have a confession. I am an Open Source developer and my platform of choice is the .NET framework by Microsoft. Not only that, I actually believe it is a good thing to support Open Source projects in the Microsoft ecosystem. Yeah, really. In response to this tidbit, I have heard and am bracing to hear replies such as... Why would you do that (support Open Source on Microsoft)? Or It can’t be Open Source if it’s on the Microsoft platform. One rationale given is that it ain’t really Open Source unless the entire stack is Open Source. I call this the all or nothing...
Last year when all the hubbub surrounding NDoc was happening, I tried to rally people around the idea of a Contribute to Open Source day on July 26th. Why July 26? Because I happened to write that post on that day. In any case, it looks like Christmas will come early for some lucky open source projects. Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror fame is teaming up with Microsoft to donate $10,000 in support of open source .NET projects. Go and nominate the open source project you find most useful in his comments. What has spurred this recent largesse? Jeff...
Steve Harman posts a request to nominate Subtext for a SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Award. The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it’s that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard. To nominate Subtext, just click on the badge below: Nominations are accepted until June 29th, at which point the projects with the most nominations become finalists. You can nominate a project once per category. The ones that I think best fits Subtext are:...
There’s been a lot written about whether or not Microsoft is doing enough to support Open Source Projects on its platform. In the past, Microsoft’s report card in this area was not one to take home to mom. Lately though, there’s been a lot of improvement, with initiatives like CodePlex as well as the many projects that Microsoft has opened up and moved over there. Many have expressed that there’s more that Microsoft can do and I for one believe that Microsoft is starting to listen. If not Microsoft, at least Sam Ramji of Port 25 is. He’s effectively the...
This just in. CodePlex is planning to roll out TortoiseSVN support!
A little while ago I wrote a comparison of TFS vs Subversion for Open Source projects. I’ll spare you the suspense by telling you that Subversion wins hands down, primarily because it itself is open source and is designed with open source in mind.
It turned out that there was already a work item for SVN support and it was the highest vote getter. On Friday, Jim Newkirk commented within the work item that they are adding support for TortoiseSVN. You can see in the work Item Details (click to enlarge) that it is set...
First week on the job and I’ve already got the keys to the company blog. I just posted my first post at koders.com announcing the latest set of site updates. One thing that I was surprised to learn this week, though it really shouldn’t surprise me, is that Koders uses an open source search engine to create the full-text index. More specifically, it uses Lucene.NET, a port of the Java Lucene project. I’m familiar with Lucene.NET because the Subtext and RSS Bandit projects both use it for searching (though I was not the one to implement it in either case)....
Fortune Magazine published an article in which they describe how Microsoft claims that free software, such as Linux, violates 235 of its patents. Some key snippets (emphasis mine): Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore. ... Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents. ... In the...
Today is my last day of work as a VelocIT employee, a company I helped start and had (and still have) high hopes for as employee #1. No, I’m not being fired for blogging too much or embezzling funds. No, there wasn’t a big falling out with partners in the company throwing books at each other and screaming expletives. Unfortunately, nothing dramatic and tabloid-worthy like that happened at all. I simply lost interest in being a consultant and I blame Subtext. Micah Dylan, the CEO and Founder of VelocIT and my good friend, and I often talked about the idea...
Well Jon and I arrived safely, driving into Vegas around 4 PM last evening. Upon arriving, we met up with Miguel De Icaza, the founder of the Mono project, and headed over to the Mashup Lounge where we ran into John Osborne, a senior editor with O' Reilly.
Being the small world that it is, John was a reviewer for the Windows Developer Power Tools book and happened to review the section I wrote on Tortoise CVS/SVN.
We were joined by Eric Kemp, one of the members of the Subsonic team and fun conversation on Open Source, Mono, Politics, etc... ensued.
Later on in the...
Tim Heuer has been on a tear lately submitting some great new skins to the Subtext Skin Showcase, which is part of SubtextSkins.com. The Showcase is the part of the site in which we display user submitted skins and allow others to download the skins. The other part of the site displays the default skins in Subtext. It appears that Tim has been porting some of the nicer designs in the Open Designs website, a website devoted to open source web design. Tim happens to also be the creator of Origami (which you can see...
Rob Conery is soliciting our feedback for a panel on Open Source that he᾿ll be participating in at Mix07. He᾿s joined by some big names in the world of Open Source Software including Miguel de Icaza. Hot Damn! I won᾿t lie, I did want to be a part of the panel when I first heard about it (in part to get a free ticket, but also be cause I love hearing myself talk about Open Source) but did not make the cut. Now I see why and I᾿m kind of glad I᾿m not up there risking looking like a fool next to...
Jeff Atwood writes a great summary of Open Source Licenses. As far as I’m concerned, there’s really only four software licenses to worry about (open source or otherwise). Proprietary - The code is mine! You can’t look at it. You can’t reverse engineer it. Mine Mine Mine! GPL - You can do whatever you want with the code, but if you distribute the code or binaries, you must make your changes open via the GPL license. New BSD - Use at your own risk. Do whatever the hell you want with the code, just keep the license...
A recent confrontational thread within the Subtext forums that I shared with Rob Conery got us into a discussion about the challenges of dealing with difficult members of an Open Source community. There are many approaches one can take. Some advocate not engaging disruptive community members. I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt at first. Rob often commends me for my paticence in dealing with users in the forums. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other. It’s a matter of style.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about running an Open Source project, it’s that it takes two key qualities.
First, you really...
When searching for source code in a particular language, what do the words being searched on tell you about that language?
Koders.com publishes an interesting Open Source Zeitgeist which focuses on search trends and patterns within open source code. This is very similar to Google’s Zeitgeist, but grouped by programming language and specific to open source code. This might help us gain some insight into answering the above question.
For example, compare this screenshot of the top Ruby, Java, and C# searches.
It’s hard to draw any conclusive conclusions based on this sample, but let me offer a few uninformed thoughts, and you can tell...
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know I tend to go on and on about the virtues of blogging and participating in Open Source projects. You might even start to suspect that I think we could end wars, poverty, and hunger and sit around singing Cumbaya together in harmony if only everyone would blog and participate in Open Source. Really now. I’m not that naïve. I’m sure we could pick a better song to sing around the campfire. All kidding aside, I really have put my money where my mouth is. In the past, I’ve talked about the...
UPDATE: I remember that Scott Hanselman proposed that Microsoft put together an organization like INETA for Open Source Software in an editorial aside a while back while discussing NDoc. Hanselman Editorial Aside: It's a shame that Microsoft can't put together an organization like INETA (who already gives small stipends to folks to speak at User Groups) and gave away grants/stipends to the 20 or so .NET Open Source Projects that TRULY make a difference in measurable ways. The whole thing could be managed out of the existing INETA organization and wouldn't cost more than a few hundred grand -...
Update Corrected my pop-culture iconography mix up.
Thomas Eyde brings up a great point in the comments section of Scott Hanselman's post about SandCastle and the death of NDoc.
It's sad to see good projects die, especially when programmer support is a main reason.
But on the other side, it's not that easy to join these projects. How many of them advertise? How often do we see "Developers wanted on [your favorite project]"?
I think these projects must advertise what they need. Do they need C++ expertise? Java? C#? UI design? How do we know what to do? Where are the tasks listed? How...