Tim Ferro

“Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.
The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner, which we’ve moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism.” – Source

“In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.” – Source

This was too funny not to post…

“The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.” – Source

Do you grok open source? I grok open source, and it’s awesome. The challenges, depth, commitment, and advances continue to amaze me. There are tons of amazing projects (Firefox, Fedora), books (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), users (Linus Torvalds), user groups (NOVA-LUG), and blogs (linux today).

To grok is more than just to know, it means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed. I think I have done that. I started and open source project (Anchuan.Org), volunteer for Tux.Org, have given speeches about open source (at Marymount University), and am now the chief contributor of an open source software business blog (OSS-biz).

All of these things have enriched my life and given my great feelings of accomplishment. I recommend that everyone get involved with open source anyway you can. It can be anything from just using Firefox to writing kernel code. Open source is a community, and new members are always welcome.

The fight for programming talent… – Source

“The first beta of Red Hat Developer Studio was published yesterday. RHDS seems promising. This IDE is a bunch of Eclipse plugins that comes from the fusion of JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio. The main advantages it offers are: JSF development improved, in particular integrating RichFaces and Ajax4JSF libraries; Seam (next J2EE middleware standard?) integration; and plugins for JBoss, Hibernate… Here are [some] first impressions.” – Source

“In a rare public talk, C++ creator Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup discusses his ideal in programming languages, as well how he sees the next version (and beyond) of C++ developing. He explains the general selection criteria used for adding new features, some of the legacy of C++, and many other interesting topics. Especially interesting is during the Q&A he explains his views of the embrace and extend mentality some implementations, such as VC++, have taken.” – Source

“Projity will release a public beta of OpenProj, a free open-source competitor (of Microsoft Project). Reportedly, OpenProj works with Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OsX. Word has it that OpenProj can also open native Microsoft Project files. The Beta will be released on August 7th, the first day of the LinuxWorld San Francisco show.” – Source