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2016 Hacktoberfest Ignites Open Source Participation

DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014 to encourage contribution to open source projects. The event was a clear success, and in terms of attendance and participation goals reached, it's also clear that Hacktoberfest has become a powerful force in driving contributions to open source. The lure of a t-shirt and specific, time-limited goals help new contributors get started and encourage existing contributors to rededicate themselves and their efforts. The third year continued the momentum. In fact, early in the month, community management manager Daniel Zaltsman told Opensource.com that 2016 already surpassed last year's results...

How an Open Leader Achieves Work/Life Balance

Becoming an open leader means becoming attuned to the intricate ways that complex and ever-moving systems structure our daily lives. As I've argued, open leaders are masters of balancing multiple parts of those systems strategically—not only as part of various projects at work, but also in other aspects of their lives. In fact, open leaders operate the way they do—and achieve what they do—because of their keen balancing skills. Here's an example of how this works. I remember a time, several years ago, when I was desperately seeking ways to incorporate more exercise into my life. Exercise classes near the office started at 6:30 p.m.—and I found I really enjoyed them...

5 Initiatives That Pushed the Free Software Envelope in Europe in 2016

The public sector tends to lag—some would say drag—behind the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies. This is also true when it comes to adopting free software: Although companies widely see free technologies as a boon, government organizations often are still locked into proprietary software and work with closed standards. That said, some countries are making progress moving toward open source technologies...

Coopetition: All's Fair in Love and Open Source

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MongoDB vs. Cassandra. Solr vs. Elasticsearch. ReactJS vs. AngularJS. If you have an open source project that you are passionate about, chances are a competing project exists and is doing similar things, with users as passionate as yours. Despite the "we're all happily sharing our code" vibe that many individuals in open source love to project, open source business, like any other, is filled with competition. Unlike other business models, however, open source presents unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to competition...

A New Way Forward for Power Utilities: The Open Smart Grid Platform

After energy balancing software PowerMatcher was released as open source at Alliander in 2014, I was able to convince more of my colleagues to invest in making more technologies open source. I started the conversation with a question about the Open Smart Grid Platform: "How open is open? Where can I find the code?" The development of the Open Smart Grid Platform started after research was done on how to give municipalities control over their public lighting switching schedule. This schedule is based on ecomomic sense, and is a list of rules for when to switch on and off the street lights. For example, streets lights switch off ten minutes after sunrise...

Open Source Diversity Efforts Gain Momentum in 2016

If software is pervasive, shouldn't the people building it be from everywhere and represent different voices? The broadly accepted answer is yes, that we need a diverse set of developers and technologists to build the new digital world. Further, when you look at communities that thrive, they are those that evolve and grow and bring in new voices and perspectives. Because much of the software innovation happening today involves open source software, the open source community can be an entry point for new people in technology roles. This means that the open source community must evolve to stay relevant...

Give Back This Holiday: Language Input Needed for Literacy Project

The Christmas holiday is fast approaching and many of us are thinking about ways we can help others, both near and far. The world certainly needs as much help, kindness, and charity as it can get, and some of us give money, or food, and toys to help out. Whatever we can give out of our own abundance to make things just a little bit brighter for someone else. And, what do we have in abundance more than code? When you think of open source, you might think of free desktops, or big data clouds, or even more traditional data center services, but just some simple code can do much more than powering window managers and business communication—it can be life changing...

A Tour of Google's 2016 Open Source Releases

Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they're working on internally as open source. We've released more than 20-million lines of open source code to date, including projects such as Android, Angular, Chromium, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Our releases also include many projects you may not be familiar with, such as Cartographer, Omnitone, and Yeoman...

Halamka on the Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016

You may have missed or not understood the implications of this press release.  Here's a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know: "This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality).  For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement.  The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either of these organizations or any of the named vendors...

How Gratipay Helps Solve the 'Free Rider' Problem

Open source has come a long way, but the "free rider" problem still exists. In a lightning talk at All Things Open, Chad Whitacre shared how his company, Gratipay, is helping companies pay for open source software. While companies like Red Hat have figured out how to make open source development sustainable, Whitacre points out that there are still big parts of the open source ecosystem that aren't sustainable. These projects are plagued by what he calls the "free rider" problem...