An essential issue for making sure the good survivalist benefits of FOSS are not swamped by the corporate agenda abetted by authoritarians, is that FOSS (and open standards intended to allow FOSS) has to be architected for hackability. People are used to thinking that a technical standard is bad when it disenfranchises normal geeks (in favour of an elite or minority) rather than good because it enfranchises non-geeks.
Alex Martelli, a well-published Python developer and Google's Über Tech Lead, has some fairly strong convictions about code reviewing, and he's not afraid to share them. Alex believes that there's not enough code reviewing being done in the open source community, and enumerated several of his convictions for O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008. He also addresses the increasing availability of tools for organizing code reviews, and some lessons that even the largest companies can take to heart.
Mark Shuttleworth's life to date seems more like the daring hero of a science fiction pulp magazine than that of a programmer. A South African programmer working on the earliest Debian code, he founded a company called Thawte which specialized...
The ability to create an "instant" communications experience through the Web is the strength of the Comet recipe. The use of long-polling via the XMLHttpRequest is a critical technology to meebo. It enabled meebo to implement low-latency bi-directional communication on any modern computer that can access the Web, without the need to download software.
The question about open source in the enterprise is no longer "if", but "how". Bernard Golden is the author of a new O'Reilly research report about adoption statistics and usage of open source in professional development and business -- who are hiring more open source people than ever.
O'Reilly blogger Nathan Torkington spent some time with James Turner of O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008 in Portland. He shares some of the trends and technologies that he thinks will play a big role in the near future, including open source biology and the rise of mobile computing.
Damian Conway has a well-deserved reputation as the mad scientist of Perl. His opening night keynote at OSCON 2008 combined Perl programming, the difference engine, quantum mechanics, and general relativity to produce variables which travel backwards in time.
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