Next week Microsoft hosts its annual MVP Summit. So what better time for me to host my first GitHub Drinkup – MVP Edition at the Tap House Grill! Not an MVP? Nonsense! You are in my book, so show up! If you are an MVP, you’re still welcome to slum it with the rest of us schlubs. All the details are posted over at the GitHub Blog post. What is a “Drinkup” you ask? It’s pretty simple. It’s a meetup where we drink and share stories of valor in the face of code complexity....
UPDATE: I have a follow-up post that addresses a few criticisms of this post.
It all started with an innocent tweet asking whether ASP.NET MVC 3 is “open source” or not? I jumped in with my usual answer, “of course it is!” The source code is released under the Ms-PL, a license recognized that the OSI legally reviewed to ensure it meets the Open Source Definition (OSD). The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recognizes it as a “free software license”1 making it not only OSS, but FOSS (Free and open source software) by that definition. Afterwards, a healthy debate ensued on...
Mary Poppendieck writes the following in Unjust Deserts (pdf), a paper on compensation systems (emphasis mine), There is no greater de-motivator than a reward system that is perceived to be unfair. It doesn’t matter if the system is fair or not. If there is a perception of unfairness, then those who think that they have been treated unfairly will rapidly lose their motivation. Written over seven years ago, the paper is just as insightful and applicable today. For example, let’s apply it to the recent dust-up about the legitimacy...