open source

I’ve been going to FOSS (free and open source) conferences since 2006. My first open source conference was FreedomHEC in Seattle, a little 30-person conference for Linux users to protest Microsoft’s WinHEC. My next open source conference was OSCON, which had over a thousand attendees. They were both very different conferences, and as a college student, I really didn’t know what to expect. Going to your first open source conference can be intimidating, so I’ve complied ten tips for people who are new to the conference circuit...

There was a time when working in the library I found it very frustrating (as many librarians do) that there were so few options for software that actually did what I needed. In libraries we're so used to there being this vendor=software model. Where one vendor controls a product and while there might be other similar products, they too are controlled by a vendor. This is why libraries need to take a closer look at open source software. By removing the "owner" (aka the vendor) from the equation we get a lot more freedom to make software that does what we want, how we want, when we want. One of the hardest thing to teach libraries who are switching to an open source solution is that the power is now in their hands to direct the software...

"Documentation is highly valued, frequently overlooked, and a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities," the GitHub team notes in their brand-new Open Source Survey. Based on 5,500 responses, the survey reveals that 93% of respondents say "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem." However, only "60% of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation." These stats won't surprise anyone who has spent more than a few minutes clicking through GitHub repositories. How many times have you clicked on a GitHub repo, skimmed the README, and thought: "Sounds interesting, but what does it actually do?"...