Programs do more and more scientific work - but you need to be able to check them as well as the original data, as the recent row over climate change documentation shows
Read more »If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too
http://www.guardian.co.uk –
Web code is already open - why not make it free as well
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com –
Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland's apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly "stealing" code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale "theft" of code from another website. Of course it's not "theft" it's copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with.
Read more »Responsible Open Source Code Parenting
http://www.codinghorror.com –
If you're an ASCII-head of any kind, you will feel immediately at home in Markdown. It was so obviously designed by someone who has done a lot of writing online, as it apes common plaintext conventions that we've collectively been using for decades now. It's certainly far more intuitive than the alternatives I've researched.
Read more »Study: Open source software is improving
http://www.h-online.com –
The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software.
Read more »Amazon code release irrelevant, Kindle is still closed
http://arstechnica.com –
Amazon recently released the source code of some of the components that are used in the Kindle. Contrary to the erroneous reports that are circulating the Web, Amazon is not opening its e-book reader. The code release is purely for GPL compliance while the Kindle's ebook features remain proprietary.
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Compiling Perl Into Binary Code On Linux And Unix. Cool, But...
http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com –
An interesting concept, that's been around for a while. Neat, but...
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FLOSS & the Hacked Ideology
http://kin.calvin.free.fr –
A poem about the impact of the process of software compilation over Freedom. Who can affirm that the meal we give you to eat is in correlation with the recipe we said it was made of ? Provocative thought.
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Category: Philosophy Tags:
Examining the Compilation Process. Part 1.
http://www.linuxjournal.com –
This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product.
Read more »Rising Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Software is Putting Businesses At Greater Risk
http://www.fortify.com –
New data from Fortify Software finds that widely-used open source software packages do not employ best practices for securing code.
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Category: Opposition Tags:
VIA Gives 16,434 Lines Of OSS Code
http://www.phoronix.com –
Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community.
Read more »Category: Industry Tags:
Who Writes Linux? There Are a Lot of Unknowns
http://www.internetnews.com –
In the beginning, there was Linus Torvalds, a single developer who put together the original Linux kernel. Fast forward to 2008 and Torvalds is no longer the lone Linux developer.
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Category: Community Tags:
Sweet, sweet smell of comments in code?
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk –
Arguments rage over the importance of adding comments to your code versus the importance of writing clear code that speaks for itself, thereby potentially eliminating the need for comments.
Read more »FOSS helps Krugle help developers search for code
http://www.linux.com –
In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.
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Know your code, know open source
http://blogs.the451group.com –
It used to be there were only a couple of players in town who combed through software code, specifically looking for open source packages and licenses: Black Duck and Palamida. A year ago, we figured there was plenty of room for additional players, but we had no idea how many companies would end up coming to the open source code scanning table.
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Thank you for the code
http://www.itwire.com –
There are a total of 21,652 packages installed on my home workstation, an AMD64 single core processor box which has been in use since March 2006. It runs the testing stream of Debian. That's a lot of code, all of it free as in beer.
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Category: End User Tags:
