community

SourceForge, despite competition, remains the leading repository for open-source projects. Many of the world's best open-source projects--JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others--start there, and plenty never leave.

For these reasons and others, each year I look forward to the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, which allow the open-source community to vote on the industry's top projects. SourceForge has just announced that nominations are now open for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards 2009.

While such direct democracy has yielded some odd choices in the past, the competition remains one of the best places to discover up-and-coming open-source projects.

This … Read more

Caroline McCarthy rightly rebuts all the "so-and-so will buy Twitter!" nonsense, but there's a very good reason for this nonsense:

The microblogging service still makes little to no money, and the assumption is that it will continue to fail to do so, absent a big-brother type that can turn its community (that word again!) into cash.

As Google discovered with YouTube, however, big community doesn't necessarily equal big cash. The same is likely true of Twitter.

Some communities simply aren't designed to be monetized directly. Unfortunately, advertising isn't the panacea we once supposed, either, … Read more

Brian Behlendorf of Apache fame once declared the freedom to fork the cardinal rule of open source. He is right, though it's a freedom that is rarely exercised, and even less rarely exercised to good effect.

But on Wednesday a group of developers announced ICINGA, a fork of Nagios, the popular open-source network monitoring tool.

While it's too early to tell whether the fork will succeed, the action already demonstrates both the health and disease of the Nagios community.

Health, because a fork or spin-off of the original project, demonstrates that there is an active community of users … Read more

A recent developer survey from Packt Publishing asks the question, "Does open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive?"

The short answer? No. That also happens to be the long answer.

Much is made of the importance of community in open source, specifically, and in software, generally. But "community" is perhaps the most overhyped word in software, one that doesn't deliver nearly as much value as marketing people would like you to think. John Mark Walker called this out back in 2006, but apparently many people missed the memo.

In open source, we … Read more

With a new product called Vine, Microsoft is tackling the issue that, in the Digital Age, contact management is no longer static--where you are and what you're doing at a given moment can matter just as much as what your cell phone number is. But instead of focusing on roving business travelers, Vine's slant is community management and emergency preparedness. It's in a private beta test right now.

Here's how it works. You download a "dashboard" application, and then you log in with your Windows Live account. Its interface takes the form of a … Read more

Islam is getting a little help from Britain's Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, which says it plans to train government-approved groups to "flood the Internet" with "positive" interpretations of that religion in an online fight against radicalization.

The OSCT plans to coach moderate Islamic groups on how to manipulate the Google rankings of their Web sites in order to boost the online profile of moderate voices in the Muslim community, reports The Register, a British online investigative newspaper.

It is widely understood that terrorists use the Web to radicalize and recruit the vulnerable and disaffected; … Read more

Design is not the answer to everything, but it certainly has an important role to play in almost everything that holds a society together.

In light of the current economic crisis, several U.S. professional design organizations (AIGA, IDSA, and others), design education accreditation organizations, and Federal Government officials have seized the historic opportunity and joined forces to launch an initiative to shape a U.S. National Design Policy. In a moment of great global uncertainty and an erosion of national confidence, designers are perfectly positioned to take on a leadership role in "Re-designing America's Future," and … Read more

As CNET's Ina Fried reports, Microsoft is trying to downplay Internet Explorer 8's performance deficiencies, arguing that "in most cases, the difference could literally be measured by a blink of an eye."

I guess that it depends on who's blinking. Walt Mossberg, the noted personal-technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, rebuked IE 8's performance in an All Things Digital post, noting that in his tests, the new version of the Microsoft browser was slower than Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome. All of them. Considerably slower, in many cases.… Read more

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it's as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies.

Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, just as community helps to keep individuals walking the straight and narrow of societal norms. As The Economist recently highlighted, new research suggests that "having a crowd around often makes things better."

In other words, while we normally point to crowds … Read more