Tag: Open Source

It’s not only about the source

Mashable reports that source code for Movable Type is finally open sourced.  Movable Type is a blogging platform competing with WordPress, LiveJournal, and others.

These are, of course, good news for open source community.  The more open source software we have, the better.  And Movable Type is a somewhat high profile piece of software.  It used to be more popular a little while ago, and then many of its fans moved to WordPress and other alternatives.

One thing I wanted to note together with these news, is that it’s not only about open source.  Just putting up the code out there for the general public to grab and modify it is not enough.  It’s about the community too.  Someone has to lead, support, and inspire people to try, test, develop, document, and praise.  Someone has to listen and react.  This last part is one of the most difficult tasks in open source development.  And there are plenty examples to prove it (just look at most of the stuff at Freshmeat.net or SourceForge.net).

WordPress guys are terrific at driving their community.  With Six Apart manage to compete with that?  We’ll see…

The future of SQL

Slashdot lets us know that Google contributes code to MySQL.  Among the comments to that post, there is this one, which is while being rather funny holds some truth to it:

They need to add a GOOGLE function to allow queries to be searched nicer.

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE GOOGLE(‘boobies’);

something similar might be available but it is a PITA to list the fields to search and specify the operators etc

I think here lies the future of SQL…

I am on the right track

Either I am very lucky this month or I am doing something right. First, Google recruiter asked me if I was interested in working for them. And now I got another offer from someone else. This time though there is nothing major. A one time task to transfer a bunch of blogs from Nucleus CMS to WordPress. Since I wrote the script to do migrate my blog, they figured that I might be the right person to help them out.

I am glad. I am glad that my blog starts to bring in a little potential. I am glad that people find stuff that I do useful. I am glad that there is yet another example of how Open Source Software works. I just did something for myself. Than I published it. Few people found it useful and customized it to their needs. And now someone else found it who don’t have the skills or time necessary to do the necessary changes, so they are willing to pay me to do it for them.

That feeds my enthusiasm and helps me both to develop and advocate Open Source Software.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-09-25

New ways of software development

This is one of those things that make me love and feel proud for open source software – innovation. I came across this new way of software development here. In reads like this:

As of today my new hobby is to run up to a developer and say “Hey, I have an icon that I need a program for!”

Beat that you miserable top-to-bottom emptyheads!