Free/Open Source Software

Ask any contractor the most economical way to get a job done, and the answer will be "Time and materials." The reason? You are taking on all the project risk.

Results. Return On Investment. Value. How do you measure these things in a website? There's one thing you can easily measure -- cost. Or at least the amount you actually spend to build and maintain a site. The others are far more troublesome to measure.

If you learned how to make decisions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might get overwhelmed by decision making today. We used to live in a fairly black-and-white world -- East versus West, Pepsi or Coke, Miller or Bud, Democrat or Republican, ABC, NBC, or CBS.

How do you decide? If you're like a great many people in my generation, one tactic might be to create a list of pros and cons for each of the alternatives, and then compare these lists side-by-side. Ok, great! Let's use that to select a content management system. Let's see, what are our alternatives?

A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points.

In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.
So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.

Crowd-funding is a pet favorite topic of mine. It's the opposite of taking control over a shared resource and turning it into profit -- it's building something that benefits everybody, enlisting a large number of people to make it happen.

Starting a sustainable business is like starting any other business in one way: you need some capital to get it off the ground. What differs between different kinds of businesses is how much you need.

I read recently on Dan Shapiro's blog that VCs don't want to invest in profitable businesses, because it means they aren't necessary and don't have the bargaining power to negotiate as good

What an interesting time to be working in and around the internet! Mass protest showed MPAA and Congress that ill-formed, top-down actions like SOPA and PIPA are unacceptable solutions to the challenges facing the entertainment industry.

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on why customers complain about Drupal -- the short version is that they either had incorrect expectations, or "developers" who were in over their heads.

At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.