I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.
Chris Wilson over at Slate claims that the new Whitehouse.gov move to the Drupal content management system is the "triumph of hope over experience," basically slamming Drupal as not u
There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:
So here's what I think happened. A bunch of attorneys got really ticked about their computers crashing all the time.
We have a fundamental problem with the structure of public companies in our business economy. For too long, public companies have been held accountable to one single standard: its stock price.
Open Source software is not new to the computer world, but businesses have only recently discovered the advantages of Open Source software. Open Source refers to the open method of software development and free availability of (human readable) source code. Open Source applications are typically built with a collaborative approach among developers and companies. Closed source, proprietary software keeps source code secret and is developed exclusively by employees.
The software industry is built upon making enormous products that attempt to do everything for everybody, and charging a lot of money for it. This may be fine for large corporations who have deep enough pockets, but what about the rest of us?
It turns out that intelligent programmers around the world have the same needs for managing email, tracking documents, storing files centrally, and running web servers as the rest of us. And in many countries, economics put most of the software products financially out of reach.
Esther Schindler wrote a thought-provoking column on CIO.com last week, Business Social Networking Geography: Does It Matter Where My Contacts Are?
This week I'm at the Open Source Convention in Portland, aka OSCON. First impression, before showing up: it seems all focused on big business. Big ticket price. Lots of enterprise-related topics, and sponsors.
I started writing a response to a discussion in the latest "Linux Link Tech Show" episode, but ended up with something far too long, so I've split it up into 4 posts.
In my early Linux system administration days, when I was first trying to set up a mail server with spam filtering, I ran across a really puzzling bug in Dspam, the software I was trying to get working.
What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there.
