oandre.gal

Category: Software Libre

  • La liberación de patentes que salvó al coche eléctrico

    Hace 1 año TESLA abrió parte de sus patentes en un movimiento inusitado en la industria del automóvil. ¿Cuál es el contexto y cómo esperaba que la liberación le beneficiase?

  • US: open data at the state level

    Here’s how we saved state-level open data es una historia digna de leer. De esas pequeñas batallas por lo abierto que pasan inadvertidas pero que son inmensamente importantes.

  • Why we rock

    While money can help produce good software, clear communication channels between developers and users and a unified team can easily outperform more rigid development environments. – Bruce Momjian, I feel sorry for closed-source developers.

  • Software never lies

    «When you run a business, if your software has a bug, your customers don’t care if it is your fault or Linus’ or some random Rails developer’s. They care that your software is bugged. Everyone’s software becomes my software because all of their bugs are my bugs. When something goes wrong, you need to seek…

  • How Linux is built: 2012

    The Linux Foundation has released the Who writes Linux (2012 data) report. Interesting to see how it has been internalized as a marketing tool to show how vibrant is the community. Check it out and compare it to LibreOffice report and ours on FOSS4G desktop.

  • Analysis of free software communities (VI): coda

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). As you can see in my last posts (Introduction (I), Adoption (II), Activity (III), Work hours (IV) and Generations (V)), I finally managed to translate the paper we presented last year in V jornadas de SIG Libre. It…

  • Analysis of free software communities (V): generations

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Data patterns This indicator gives us some sense on how the leadership changed and how the knowledge transfer was done in every project. The paper elaborates a bit more the points of turnover and integration of new blood…

  • Analysis of free software communities (IV): work hours

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Data patterns This indicator is intended to give us some information on the patterns of behavior of contributors. Specifically, we can track how is a typical week for the core developers in every project: the timeline shows when the integration happened,…

  • Open source vs Open project

    «An open project and its community are the sum of individual people doing what they care about. It’s flat-out wrong to think that any healthy open project is a pool of developers who can be assigned priorities that “make sense” globally. There’s no product manager. The community priorities are simply the union of all community-member…

  • LibreOffice stats

    Have you seen the LibreOffice stats shown at FOSDEM? They have got a lot of momentum from its very beginning and seem doing well. I’d like to see the source of that, though, to compare how they build the report with ours.

  • On meritocracy and self-promotion

    Just as demagogues may subvert democracy, so self-promotion may subvert meritocracy. – Open Source Projects and the meritocracy myth.

  • Desarrollo y empresa social

    Fran ha estado recientemente en las jornadas de economía social hablando sobre desarrollo y propiedad intelectual. No os perdáis su último post. Hago mías cada una de sus palabras. Os recomiendo acompañar el resumen con este video de David.

  • Analysis of free software communities (III): activity

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Data patterns Certainly, not the number of features developed or bug fixes. It is even barely possible to compare activity between projects, as there are a high variability in terms of changesets: some people could send several little…

  • Analysis of free software communities (II): adoption

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Find below the statistics for mailing list activity in GRASS, gvSIG and QGIS during the period 2008-2010. The first one shows data from the general user mailing lists for each project. Take into account that data for gvSIG…

  • Analysis of free software communities (I): a quantitative study on GRASS, gvSIG and QGIS

    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). When selecting an application, it’s very common to consider technological factors -what the application enable us to do?- and economic ones -how much money do we need? And yet, there is a third factor to take into account,…

  • Growing a community: some texts

    I’m a longer passionate on community-oriented products: I’ve researched on how they work, have led one to their goal and participate in some. It’s not a new story what they are considered a powerful way to build your products (sometimes, a better one than doing in through the market or internally in a firm/closed-group-of-people). Nevertheless, I’m still…

  • Los costes de no trabajar upstream

    Imagina el siguiente caso: deseas usar una aplicación que es software libre para construir tu propia solución ad-hoc sobre ella. Y lo harás muchas veces para diferentes clientes/productos. ¿Cómo enfocarlo? ¿Construyes tu solución con tus mejoras para ti modificando lo necesario o integras tus mejoras en la versión upstream, en el proyecto original? Si ése…

  • On lines of code

    If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”. – Edger Dijkstra. Quoted on Are all patches create equal? by Jonathan Corbet.

  • RMS on leadership

    Free software communities have a system much better than elections: you can choose which leader you wish to follow and how much. If you want to be a leader, start leading, and see who wants to help. – Richard Stallman.

  • QGIS 1.7: debates

    No os perdáis este post de Tim Sutton, release manager de QGIS que resumen de algún modo los debates en la comunidad en los últimos meses. A resaltar, 2 de los sospechosos habituales: el complejo balance estabilidad VS nuevas funcionalidades y el modelo de financiación del proyecto. Como post de acompañamiento, toca releer cómo y…

  • Forks: la experiencia de android y el kernel

    «Android is, hands down, the most successful Linux distribution ever produced» — James Bottomley, LinuxCon Japan Con esta frase empezó James Bottomley su charla en la LinuxCon Japón, donde habló sobre la relación entre Android y el Kernel. Los puntos principales? Los forks y el control sobre el producto. James detalla las razones por las que…

  • Tendencia a releases periódicas

    Si primero fue chrome y luego firefox, ahora le llega el turno al kernel. Se impone poco a poco en el mundo libre la tendencia a realizar releases periódicas e incrementales, estilo agile. Detrás de ello: el coste y riesgo que supone a nivel técnico y en relaciones públicas el retraso del proyecto. Es de recibo…

  • Análisis de comunidades de Software Libre (I): resultados de un estudio sobre GRASS, gvSIG y QGIS

    El primer post de una serie, que presenta los resultados de analizar cuantitativamente 3 comunidades de proyectos de software libre, de cara a comprender mejor cómo funcionan.