August 1, 2008 @ 1:35 pm
Open Source is Facinating
It’s true. Open source is is fascinating. Consider these questions (which have been asked by many):
How does open source work?
Why does open source work?
What motivates the developers?
Who is making money and how?
What are the open source business models?
How ubiquitous is open source?
What is the future of open source?
Whats with all of these licenses?
The questions are asked and answered every day. In books, in podcasts, and in hundreds if not thousands of blog posts. I have been looking for these blog posts and I have found a lot of them - but certainly not all of them. Since I was looking for them and finding them, I figured I might as well share them with everyone else who is interested in what makes open source tick. I setup OssSpyglass.com.
OssSpyglass.com
Each day I go out and find these new posts and quote them and link to them on this site. But there is so much out there, I had to find a focus. Here is what i came up with, from the about page:
We aggregate open source news and analysis from the blogosphere. You’re not going to learn about the next FireFox release here, but you might read about their open source distribution model, or how they transparently develop cutting edge software.
We are interested in how open source works, why it is successful. We are interested in its past, and its future. We want to know whats going on in the open source communities, and what open source users think. We are interested in analysis and development of the open source movement, culture, and process.
So hopefully these are topics that interest you or that you find important for the future of your career. If so, come check out the site, and consider bookmarking it or subscribing to the feed.
OSS Job Base
A second project that I setup off of OssSpyglass is OSS Job Base, using the open source job board JobberBase. The premise is that there are thousands of open source projects out there looking to find development help be it with coding, documentation, or even testing. There are also developers looking to get onto a project, but don’t want to scour bug lists to find issues to fix.
This job board is setup for leaders of open source projects to post a task. A typical task post should consist if a couple lines to introduce the project, followed by the description of a task. Then developers can subscribe to these job lists and finally find a worthwhile project to put their time into.
If you’re an open source project leader, come post a task or two. You might be surprised at how many people want to help you, but just don’t know that you’re looking for help. I am aware of sourceforge’s job list but they are anything but free, and if you have a job listed there I invite you to also post it on the OSS Job Base.
So come check them out. Comments are are appreciated.
Now that you've read what we think, what did you like about the post? Where do you think we went wrong? Join or start the discussion.
Filed under 72 Miles, OSS Spyglass, Software Development Permalink
About the Author
Mike Nereson has been a professional software developer since 2000. He thinks open source is rad, and is an active volunteer Fire Fighter.