Valleywag
one child per project
Posts Tagged “
Open Source
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one child per project
jackpot
What kind of $80,000 car did your Firefox bug fix buy?
What kind of car does Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker drive? Not sure. But here's one possibility — a 500 horsepower BMW M5 tagged with the vanity plate "Mozilla." Sure, the car costs about $80,000, but that's plenty affordable for Baker. Remember, she earns $500,000 a year overseeing free labor.
freetards
1 out of 50 open-source programmers are female
Open-source developers may not be the pinkos you thought they were, but they are just as overwhelming male — about 97.8 percent— as you assumed. Somebody should tell Leah Culver that the odds are even better at a SourceForge LAN party than they are on Kevin Rose's 94-percent-male Digg. (Photo by wickenden)
freetards
Open-source programmers actually raging greedtards
Open-source developers are motivated by personal development and building their reputation, according to Psychology Today. Which of course means that they're a self-serving, greedy bunch — just like the rest of us. If such self-interest leads to new software like the Firefox brower I'm using right now, good for us. And if fame-seeking keeps open-source developers from getting screwed over like Wikipedia users — who, according to Psychology Today, edit Jimmy Wales's comprehensive list of English soccer stars for more altruistic purposes — well, good for him. (Photo by jagelado)
open source
Microsoft buries programmers in 30,000 pages of documentation
To fend off European regulators, Microsoft has released 30,000 pages of documentation about its development practices. Company spokespeople insist the online reference library will make Microsoft more "open" — a word used 17 times in the press release today as Microsoft complies with a ruling it fought tooth and nail. Amateurs. The White House would have cranked up the pagecount to at least 3 million. (Photo by AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
"I never cease to be amazed when supporters of Open Source, Open Standards and the relative anarchy that such regimes allow turn to the government sector and want to do just the opposite: centralize everything." — macbeach on "free culture" advocate Lawrence "Larry" Lessig's proposal to publicly fund election campaigns.
open source
Schmidt: NASA should adopt freetard model
NASA could learn a thing or two from open source software such as Linux and MySQL, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday, according to PC World. Speaking at event to mark the space agency's 50th anniversary yesterday, Schmidt told the crowd, "assume that you don't have all the answers." (If only Schmidt would apply that lesson to himself.) More »
matthew szulik
Fly guy takes over Red Hat
Matthew Szulik is out as Red Hat's CEO. CNET reports that the widely admired Szulik is stepping down because of his wife's health problems. But don't worry, open source cultists, the man replacing Szulik, Jim Whitehurst, has years of experience ... in the airline industry. As Delta Airlines' former COO, Whitehurst carefully guided the airline back from bankruptcy. Which is just like running a company with 28 percent revenue growth.
bad ideas
"Open source products are often high on innovation but low on user experience," self-proclaimed "Web strategist" Jeremiah Owyang notes on his blog. "They come across as geeky, not user friendly, and sometimes, just ugly." The solution? These guys! Who are so just the opposite. Oh the teeth, oh the hair, oh the neck beard and chin strap, too.
"Open Marketers for Open Source" -- just as terrible as it sounds
"Open source products are often high on innovation but low on user experience," self-proclaimed "Web strategist" Jeremiah Owyang notes on his blog. "They come across as geeky, not user friendly, and sometimes, just ugly." The solution? These guys! Who are so just the opposite. Oh the teeth, oh the hair, oh the neck beard and chin strap, too.
hackers
SourceForge hacked yesterday, but "no harm done" -- for now
A tipster told us that SourceForge had been hacked yesterday, with the site unavailable for part of the morning, so we pinged people at the open-source code repository to see what went down. Says Ross Turk, the site's "community manager":Hey, Jordan! Your tipster's accurate. We played a game of cat and mouse with a "security enthusiast" from Europe yesterday. :) No harm done, though, and everything's running smoothly.Yesterday's incident wasn't the first hacking attempt on SourceForge. Last year, users were told to change their passwords. And suppose that the next intruder is more than just enthusiastic? If really talented hackers broke in, would we even know what they changed in the code? A chilling thought.
politics
An open-source political party, are you serious?
Ken Goffman, editor of the long-defunct cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000 who goes by the pseudonym RU Sirius, hopes to create a new political movement based on the principles of open-source software development. For some reason, Goffman thinks wikis, social networks, online conferences, games and fun shindigs, melded with some off-brand party like Unity or the Libertarians, will make a difference. Of course, this is no different than any other fringe political movement — it's just geekier and fringier. More »
jackpot
Mozilla chief makes $500,000-plus a year
Mitchell Baker, who joined Netscape in 1994 and now serves as both chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and CEO of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, clocks over a half million in annual salary and benefits, according to a
open source
Yahoo provides supercomputer, fugly T-shirts
Keeping up with its competitors seems like too much to ask from Yahoo these days. But not-for-profit initiatives? All over it. Today, for example, Yahoo announced it would allow Carnegie Mellon University researchers access to its newest supercomputer. Called M45, the computer is 4,000-processor computing cluster. It runs Hadoop and other open-source distributed computing software. If you know what that means, you belong in the accompanying photo. And if that's the case, sorry about the ugly T-shirt. But don't look so sad, little fella. You can take it off in a minute.
A British member of Parliament thinks that the U.K. government uses too much Microsoft software. John Pugh charges that Microsoft is involved in "predatory pricing and stultifying competition." He also wants the government to transition to more open-source software. I know nothing about John Pugh, but he sounds like a British cross between Ralph Nader and Richard Stallman. [CNET]
open source
Thunderbird's wings clipped by own developers
Do we need email software anymore? That's the question raised by the turmoil at the Thunderbird project, an open-source effort run by the Mozilla Foundation, also the backers of the popular Firefox Web browser. The foundation runs the Mozilla Corporation as a separate, for-profit business, and spun off a similar company three weeks ago to house Thunderbird. But no sooner than Thunderbird gained its wings did it go into a swan dive. Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu, Thunderbird's only paid developers, are leaving David Ascher to head up a company of none. Neither developer gave a reason for departing the company that Mozilla set up, but Ascher tips his hand that the pair will be starting their own venture. Perhaps a wise move. Why, after all, do we need Thunderbird? More »
open source
Dell's Linux laptop is "free" as in "more expensive"
The reason to buy Dell's $800 Ubuntu notebook, according to a freetard New York Times piece today, is that it beats Microsoft-equipped machines on price, because the buyer doesn't pay for a Windows operating system license. But how much is that license? Fifty bucks. More »
microsoft
Open-source trap or sign of weakness?
Open source conspiracy theorists warn that Microsoft's effort to make the code behind .Net, its software-development framework, open to the public to view — but not modify— is a trap. The goal? It's aimed, they claim, at tainting Mono, an open-source implementation of .Net, with the software maker's intellectual property. And why does this matter? Mono, you see, allows programmers to easily port software meant to run on Microsoft's Windows to Linux and other competing operating systems. But really, might Microsoft's critics be giving it too much credit for cleverness? More »
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