In what began as a heated conversation on Twitter, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson took to the airwaves to debate opposing viewpoints on market share, monopolies, and power in open source communities. Hansson reacted to a statement Mullenweg made in (more…)
Chef co-founder and former CTO Adam Jacob gave a short presentation at O’Reilly Open Source Software Conference (OSCON) 2019 titled “The War for the Soul of Open Source.” In his search for meaning in open source software today, Jacob confronts the notion of open source business models. “We often talk (more…)
Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of StandardJS, has formally ended the funding experiment he started lasted week, which inserted ads in the terminal whenever Standard 14 is installed. Although the experiment met widespread aversion, it successfully captured public attention and put a spotlight on the critical need for a viable model of (more…)
Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of the StandardJS library, a JavaScript style guide, linter, and automatic code fixer, launched an experiment last week that places ads in the terminal in order to fund development. The experiment has since been paused after receiving negative feedback from the developer community, causing Linode, one of (more…)
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jonny Harris. Jonny describes how he discovered WordPress and some of the core projects he’s been working on including, Site Health Checks, fatal error protection, and Multisite. We discuss WordPress’ focus on users vs developers in recent years, Jonny’s (more…)
GitHub has launched a new Sponsors tool that allows open source developer to receive financial support. The program is rolling out slowly and currently has a waitlist for open source contributors or maintainers who want to join. For the first year developers are in the program, GitHub will cover all (more…)
Quirk is a new GPL-licensed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) app for iOS and Android built in React Native/Expo. The app helps users challenge their “automatic thoughts,” a term that refers to thoughts that come to a person spontaneously in response to a trigger, which can often be negative. Quirk lets (more…)
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) took a strong, unequivocal stance on its definition of open source this week, encouraging organizations to sign a public affirmation of its role in maintaining and stewarding the definition. The organization has been instrumental in combatting issues caused by license proliferation, as many open source (more…)
In a post titled “Open Source Has Won,” EllisLab founder Rick Ellis explained why ExpressionEngine is going open source after 16 years. The content management system is an evolution of the pMachine blogging software first released in early 2002. EllisLab previously required a license fee to use the full version (more…)
DigitalOcean, along with GitHub and new partner Twilio, are sponsoring the 5th annual Hacktoberfest. The event was created to encourage participants to make meaningful contributions to open source projects. Last year 31,901 completed the challenge, opening 239,164 pull requests in 64,166 repositories. In previous years, participants were required to submit (more…)
Open Collective launched in 2017 as a new organization that helps groups raise funds and manage them transparently. The service is now widely used by many open source projects. Webpack, one of the first major Open Collective success stories, was able to fund its first full-time developer through the service (more…)