Reposted from gnome.org One of the most important documents a project can have is some kind of elaboration of what the maintainers want to see happen in the future. This is the concrete expression of the project vision – it allows people to adhere to the vision, and gives them the opportunity to contribute to [...]

Reposted from gnome.org I’ve been thinking a lot recently about mentoring programs, what works, what doesn’t, and what the minimum amount of effort needed to bootstrap a program might be. With the advent of Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In, more and more projects are formalising mentoring and thinking about what newcomers to the [...]

My article on “Shy Developer Syndrome” a few weeks ago garnered quite a bit of interest, and useful feedback. Since a lot of it adds valuable perspectives to the problem, I thought I should share some of my favourite responses. On gnome.org, Rodney Dawes argued that developers tend to stay away from mailing lists because [...]

One of the most common issues I have seen with experienced professional software developers who start to work on community software is a reluctance to engage with public communication channels like mailing lists. Understanding the reasons why, and helping your developers overcome their timidity, is key to creating a successful and fruitful relationship with the [...]

Dave Neary recently wrote a guest article for VisionMobile, charting the first months of the MeeGo project. From MeeGo Progress Report: A+ or D-? The end of October saw the release of MeeGo 1.1, the second major milestone release of the platform since it burst onto the scenes in February 2010. The MeeGo project was [...]

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license. Why the change of heart? My intention was never to [...]

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid [...]

Matt Aslett continued his series on Open Core yesterday, and pointed to my post on the subject. He says, and I agree, that we can’t expect companies to call themselves Open Core as a means of differentiating from Open Source if we use pejorative phrases like “crippleware” to refer to Open Core projects. But that [...]

Reposted from my personal blog Open core, Open core,  more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in. When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the [...]

Reposted from my personal blog Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and [...]