Open source sustainability is a topic that is just starting to get the attention that it deserves. So much of the technology sector is run on software that can be used for free without any further obligation. However, as companies profit from using this software for free, the maintainers of the software often struggle to...

Early on, it was a battle to get sponsorship for open source projects. What used to require phone calls and drawn-out discussions has now been streamlined thanks to efforts like Open Collective1 and GitHub Sponsors2. Companies and individuals can now know if a project accepts donations just by looking at the project page on GitHub,...

In part 11 of this series, I described how companies make decisions about spending their money and why they might (or might not) sponsor an open source project. If you haven’t yet read that post, I’d suggest going back to do so now before continuing. Everything in this post builds off the topics discussed in...

In the previous two posts in this series, I described why companies sponsor open source projects1 and how following some basic project hygiene can help attract sponsors2. Now that your project is functioning at a high level and is attractive to companies, it’s time to talk specifics about accepting sponsorships from companies. Making it easy...

When the JavaScript Standard Style (StandardJS) project1 decided to show ads during installation, the backlash was swift and harsh. The project is an opinionated JavaScript style guide, formatter, and linter all in one, and it was also the first npm project to try and raise money by inserting an ad in the command line.2 The...

Chris bought recording gear off an Instagram ad, our thoughts on WebC, CodePen upgrades Yarn, thoughts on the commercial value of open source, Automattic releases an app to install WordPress locally, IBM buys Hashicorp, income tax software, and a hack for getting Safari to respect background colors used in a pseudo selector.

Brian Muenzenmeyer joins the show to talk about his book, Approachable Open Source, ways we can make open source easier to get in, important conversations around funding and supporting open source, and whether money helps maintainers deal with burnout or not?

Facebook is rolling out a tool that lets users in the US and Canada transfer photos and videos from its platform to Google Photos, Amazon says it plans to spend all of its profit for the second quarter, an estimated $4 billion, on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and NVIDIA’s chief scientist rolls out…

The agency hopes that public access to the information will encourage collaboration and innovation across the computer science community.

This article describes a real life experience in picking and using the linux operating system, as well as libraries with Open Source Code licenses.

Cloud native OpenID platform enables true horizontal scalability for the world's most challenging web and mobile authentication use cases.

The new framework uses contrastive learning to improve image analysis in unlabeled datasets.

When you create software that you want to share, or you use a product that you want to adapt, questions about what is and is not legal pop up. Even programs that have an open source license aren’t free-for-alls. If you don’t know the specifics of what the license allows, you could get into legal […]

The post A Quick Guide to Open Source Licenses appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

There is a lot of debate going on right now in the WordPress world about the WordPress Foundation barring all ThemeForest/CodeCanyon (Envato really) authors from speaking at WordCamp events. I don't want to rehash the argument here; the best place to get it is in the original post, and the comments on it. Instead, I want to make a different point: Regardless of whether he is right or not, it's good for WordPress that Matt makes these bold choices.

Every time we contribute to an open source project, in any way, we are answering an important question: Why don’t I walk away and start a new fork? I’ve been working in and with and around open source software for the better part of 15 years, and over that time I’ve seen the rise of […]

The post Walking Away and the Ethos of Open Source appeared first on MOR10.

2019 was the year of the “ethical source” licenses – or ‘open source with a moral clause’ licenses. It was also the year many in the open source movement labeled any attempt at adding moral clauses to open source licenses not only made them not open source licenses, but were a dangerous attack on the […]

The post Value Neutrality and the Ethics of Open Source appeared first on MOR10.

System and method for dynamically composing an integrated open source stack are disclosed. In one embodiment, the method comprises generating a stack specification. The method further comprises extracting a list of products from an open source product repository based on the stack specification and determining a product strength value for each product present in the list of product. The method further comprises generating one or more stack options comprising at least one of the products based on the product strength value and determining a stack strength value for each of the one or more stack options based on the product strength value and the user requirements. The method further comprises selecting a stack from the one or more stack options as the integrated open source stack and composing the integrated open source stack based on at least one of product metadata, adaptor metadata, or product scripts.

This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:34)

• Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)
• This show is Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)

Segment 1 (03:48)

• Richard Fontana's slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)
• Bradley was live-denting Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)
• Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on identi.ca. (04:30)
• Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)
• Fontana pointed out that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how Free Software is completely compatible with many business models. (12:30)
• Fontana pointed out that many of the relationships between companies in Free software have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)
• In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving Josh Berkus credit for the phrase throw code over the wall, a phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)

Segment 2 (48:25)

• Fontana made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity to FLOSS. (50:33)
• Fontana noted later on identica that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement problem. (54:48)
• Bradley mentioned the 60 Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI). (55:30)
• Fontana now talking about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that Fontana didn't mention Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)
• Bradley was glad that Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too easily forgiven business models on the edges of software freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)

Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

When you're all about standards, there's a tendency to set your own pretty high. At least that's the way it worked out for IBM's Andi Snow-Weaver. And apparently that's how Sun Microsystems saw it, too, when it awarded her one of its very first Innovation in Government Technology Awards.

Thousands of strangers working together, almost entirely online, to effectively solve an urgent, global challenge is remarkable—and it’s happening, right now. Recently, we published a post titled, “Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do” examining the collaborative efforts by volunteer groups, universities, and research centers to solve the medical supply … Read More "Just One Giant Lab Co-Founder Leo Blondel on the Power of Community and Open Source During COVID-19"

The post Just One Giant Lab Co-Founder Leo Blondel on the Power of Community and Open Source During COVID-19 appeared first on Creative Commons.

The entire BlueGriffon Tutorial has been updated for the version 3 series of BlueGriffon. Those thinking of using it to create a website can find the complete series online.

strataconf: Read our initial findings of @amplab's open source benchmark for tracking large-scale Query Engines http://t.co/rGgOVeTHQ8 #strataconf

i-doit Open Source CMDB version 1.14.1 suffers from an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability.

The Energy Web Foundation (EWF) this week announced that it has launched the world’s first public, open-source, enterprise-grade blockchain tailored to the energy sector: the Energy Web Chain (EW Chain). As a refresher, blockchain allows for peer-to-peer energy market transactions.

The Energy Web Foundation (EWF) this week announced that it has launched the world’s first public, open-source, enterprise-grade blockchain tailored to the energy sector: the Energy Web Chain (EW Chain). As a refresher, blockchain allows for peer-to-peer energy market transactions.

It’s never been more important to put powerful AI tools in the hands of the world’s leading medical researchers. That’s why we’re introducing MONAI, our latest initiative with King’s College London. This open-source AI framework for healthcare builds on the best practices from existing tools, including NVIDIA Clara, NiftyNet, DLTK and DeepNeuro. MONAI is user-friendly, Read article >

The post NVIDIA and King’s College London Announce MONAI Open Source AI Framework for Healthcare Research appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

In order to proceed with the first phase of their acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc., CPTN Holdings LLC and its owners have altered their original agreements to address the Justice Department’s antitrust concerns.

The Bristol Cargo Bike project is creating a "light weight mega geared micro logistics vehicle of choice for a city of hills."

Prague-based permaculture activist Sophia Novack is raising funds to create a free online resource that can teach 'anyone (including you!) ... how to grow an incredibly productive backyard permaculture garden.'

Can government be like a smartphone? An open platform, waiting for citizens to plug in their "apps" to its operating system? The rise of the millennial generation, along with the spread of the open source software movement, has opened up a whole new

If you're interested in learning how to build your own renewable energy devices, this DIY vertical axis wind turbine is a great place to start.

It's more than just a bike; it is a different way of thinking about design and manufacturing.

When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many technology experts called it the end of RSS feeds.

And it is true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served. But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.

5 open source RSS feed readers

RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days

complete article

It is easy to get news on the Internet these days. In fact, it’s too easy to get news from the Internet to the point that it is also to easy to get the wrong news. Some have considered RSS feeds obsolete and boring but when it comes to getting news straight from the horse’s mouth, nothing still beats this direct and largely open method. Last time we looked at Wallabag for saving your articles. This time we are going to take a look at some open source RSS feed readers that give you those articles in the first place.

complete article

Like many of you I’m working from home for a while. As a mental health strategy, I’m going to do some writing and coding in the hour or so I get back each day from not having to commute. The first post, which will follow today, will be my thoughts on working from home. I […]

Online Resource

Online Resource

Building a full calendar UI is tough work. There are major differences between calendars on the web and calendars for mobile apps, so it’s good to study examples and see what’s out there.

After scouring through CodePen, I’ve organized …

The panelists talk to Brad Green of Google, about Angular.js and managing open source projects.

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

Joe Eames

Special Guests: 

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Dirk Hohndel about Open Source Software. Dirk is the Chief Open Source Officer at VMWare and has been working with open source for over 20 years. Dirk duties as the Chief Open Source Officer is to engage with the open source community and help promote the development between the community, companies, and customers.

Dirk provides historical facts about open sources to current processes. The discussion covers vision and technological advances with languages, security, and worries of using open source software, view/consumption and burnout on maintaining a project. This is a great episode to learn about more different avenues of Open Source.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What does the Chief Open Source Officer do?
• What is really different and has stayed the same in open source?
• Technological advances
• Good engineering and looking ahead or forward
• 100 million lines of code running a car…
• This is in everything..
• Production environments
• Security
• Bugs in the software and the security issues
• Scaling and paying attention
• Where should we be worried about open source
• Notation and data sets
• Write maintainable software
• How does VMWare think about open source?
• View and Consumption of open source
• The burnout of open source projects - how to resolve this abandonment
• To much work to maintain open source  - not a money issue
• Scaling the team workload not the money
• Contribution and giving back
• Companies who do and don’t welcome open source
• What to do to make a project open source?
• Adopting an API
• And much more!

Links:

• @_drikhh
• VMWare
• Drikhh - everywhere!
• https://github.com/dirkhh

Picks:

Aimee

• De Contact 
• Dodow 

Dirk

• Track This Critical Thinking

Charles

• Nicholas Zakas - Books 

Corey

• Fun Fun Function Show

Joe

• Dice Forge
• Concept of empathy

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• AJ ONeal
• Joe Eames

Special Guests: Henry Zhu

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Henry Zhu about Babel and open source software. Henry is one of the maintainers on Babel, which is a JavaScript compiler, and recently left this job to work on doing open source full time as well as working on Babel. They talk about where Babel is today, what it actually is, and his focus on his open source career. They also touch on how he got started in open source, his first PR, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Henry intro
• Babel update
• Sebastian McKenzie was the original creator of Babel
• Has learned a lot about being a maintainer
• What is Babel?
• JavaScript compiler
• You never know who your user is
• Has much changed with Babel since Sebastian left?
• Working on open source
• How did you get started in pen source?
• The ability to learn a lot from open source
• Atrocities of globalization
• More decentralization from GitHub
• Gitea and GitLab
• Gitea installer
• Open source is more closed now
• His first PR
• JSCS
• Auto-fixing
• Prettier
• Learning more about linting
• You don’t have to have formal training to be successful
• Codefund.io
• Sustainability of open source
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Babel
• JavaScript
• Gitea
• GitLab
• Gitea installer
• Prettier
• Codefund.io
• @left_pad
• Henry’s GitHub
• henryzoo.com
• Henry’s Patreon

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

• Orphan Black
• Crucial Accountability by Kerry Patterson

Aimee

• Desk with cubby holes for cats
• The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind blog post

AJ

• Gitea
• Gitea installer
• Greenlock

Joe

• Solo
• Justified

Henry

• Celeste
• Zeit Day talks

Today the panel is discussing iterating on open source projects. Aimee and AJ recall a conversation they had in the past on this subject and AJ talks about some of his experience iterating with open source. AJ believes that we have an obligation to capture the value of what you create so that we can reinvest and create more value, though he admits that making money in open source is a unique challenge because donations only really work if you have a project that gets billions of downloads a month. As your project grows, it has to change in order to survive, and eventually you will need to get financial support from your project. The panel agrees that some of the main issues with iterating in open source are maintaining the code and getting feedback from users, financial backing, and roadmapping and integrations.

The panel discusses their methods for getting feedback from their users. This feedback is valuable because it can show you things that you missed. They acknowledge that there can be conflicts of interest between those who only use the project and those who financially support it, and you have to make a choice. Unfortunately, someone is probably going to be inconvenienced no matter what choice you make. When making these decisions, you have to consider who it helps, who it frustrates, and who it may cause problems for. The panelists talk about different ways they’ve handled making these decisions in the past. The JavaScript experts talk about the importance of having data on your user base in order to make good choices for your users. They talk about different methods for notifying your users of upcoming changes and how it will affect compatibility, and some of the challenges with communicating with your users. AJ talks about an iteration he thought was a good idea but that a lot of people hated and how he noticed that the new users liked it but the old users did not. They panel agrees that people in general don’t like change. AJ talks about what he learned from this experience. 

Another common issue is integrating with other services. Integrating with cloud services, or at least giving people the option to integrate gives you an opportunity to reach more people and maintain the project long term. AJ gives some final thoughts to close the show, namely that most projects never go anywhere, and that’s ok. If you’ve got something that starts going somewhere, think early on about how you can better serve the community and remember that these people are mostly grateful and semi-willing to support you. He believes that if you are helping people create value, you deserve to see the fruits of your labor. He advises listeners to stay true to your open source ideals, think about your users perspective, and that the earlier you can think about this and make these choices, the better it is for your project

Panelists

• Aimee Knight

• Steve Edwards

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

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Sponsors

• Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

Links

• How-npm-am-i

• React

• Vue.js

• Let’s Encrypt

• Async/await

• Node

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• Debug Like a Ninja

Steve Edwards:

• Jack Ryan 

AJ O’Neal:

• Why I, as a black man, attend KKK meetings

Charles Max Wood:

• It’s a Wonderful Life

• Mr. Kreuger’s Christmas