Tips For Running An OSS Project From Damien Katz

Damien Katz is the guy behind couchDB the document-orientated database app. He has just posted a great write up on his views on running an OSS project and getting the project to a Version 1.0 release.

A very worthy read.

What Could Open Source Do With $9.1 Billion?

I have just found this article which discusses the fact that Microsoft will spend $9.1 Billion on R&D this year. It makes the point of what Open Source could do with that kind of money.

The one point made in the article and one with which I totally agree is that with that kind of money open source developers could start looking to solve the issues that regularly stump people when using a Linux based system for the first time. As great as a lot of software is some applications do not implement the obvious functionality that a "user" would expect and the usability and documentation leave a lot to be desired.

It's a shame that as a community we can not raise money to drive development. I know we have a number of large companies that drive corporate Linux but perhaps the FOSS community needs it's own R&D budget that projects could request money from to have features added? Sort of Bounties on steroids?

A Week Of New Toys....

So what with KDE 4.1.2, Python 2.6 and now Mono 2.0 and a new free windows Rails environment this week is turning out to be the worst ever for bankers but the best ever for development geeks.

Ruby In Steel is a new free (for personal use) Ruby on Rails IDE based on Visual Studio 2008. Download the installer and it will set up a full environment including MySql and Rails. I have yet to try it but I have seen the commercial version which looked quite promising.

Mono is the other big release (so far) this week. Releasing version 2.0 they have added major support for lots of API's including ADO.Net 2, LINQ, Cairo and System.Drawing 2.0.