Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Open Source'

Nobody Said That Open Source Projects Were All About Customer Service

January 9th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Open Source, School of Customer Service, That's Pretty Messed Up Right There, Web/Tech

These are sort of ancient (two and a half years old), but I just ran across them today and found them to be emblematic of a cultural defect that plagues many open source projects. These are a couple of feature requests (for the same feature) filed against the file-transfer utility FileZilla:
#2648: Feature request: Support Amazon [...]

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Matt Mullenweg: “Wordpress Themes are GPL, too”

July 2nd, 2009 · 5 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Open Source, Web/Tech

Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too
One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies [...]

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Product Managers, Lawyers, and Google Chrome

September 4th, 2008 · No Comments · Google, Open Source, Platforms

Product managers have an interesting relationship with corporate attorneys. In my various product management jobs I had to deal with attorneys quite a bit, but this kind of interaction clearly doesn’t happen often enough, for reasons I can sort of understand (lawyers can be intimidating, they frequently say “no” in a overly authoritative way that [...]

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.NET Developers: Recommend Your Favorite Open-Source Projects Here

April 10th, 2008 · 40 Comments · .NET, Open Source

After literally years of trying, I’ve finally succeeded in getting the VSLive folks to let me do a pure open-source talk at the conference. The talk is called Codeplex’s Greatest Hits. The idea is to take a bunch of different cool open-source projects and provide descriptions of them as well as working code demos. The [...]

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Google Makes Its Entry Into the Wireless World

November 5th, 2007 · No Comments · Open Source, Platforms, Web/Tech

Link: Google Makes Its Entry Into the Wireless World
"John O’Rourke, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile business, said he was skeptical about the ease with which Google will be able to become a major force in the smartphone market. He pointed out that it had taken Microsoft more than half a decade to get to [...]

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Apache At 56%

May 5th, 2007 · 2 Comments · .NET, Open Source

Very interesting thread on Digg this morning called "Apache at 56% – what is wrong?" Apparently a number of factors are converging to erode the dominance of the Apache web server (which, as of two years ago, used to run 70% of web sites by some measures). Lots of interesting pro-IIS and .NET comments in [...]

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Cgen: Simplest .NET/MySQL Relational Wrapper That Could Possibly Work

May 1st, 2007 · 1 Comment · .NET, MySQL, Open Source, Platforms, Web/Tech

Last week I attended and spoke at the MySQL conference. Some of the talks, particularly the ones that targeted system administrators rather than developers were over my head, but that’s useful information in itself — it serves as a reminder that sometime soon I’ll need to either learn the finer points of big-time MySQL system [...]

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Adobe Open-Sourcing Flex

April 26th, 2007 · No Comments · Adobe, Open Source

This is exciting: press release here, developer info here, FAQ here.
When Flex first came out a few years ago, there were mutterings that they’d provide support for languages other than Java — maybe open-sourcing the SDK will open the door to making that a reality (particularly in light of what Miguel said the other day [...]

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Miguel de Icaza on Silverlight, Flash and Open Source

April 20th, 2007 · No Comments · Open Source

Link: Microsoft Happenings – Miguel de Icaza.
"Lacking a viable open source-based competitor today for rich media delivery on the web and given the current state of both Flash and Silverlight, it is in open source’s best interest to ensure that Flash gets ahead of the competition."

This makes sense to me thought I suspect it will [...]

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Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins

March 7th, 2007 · No Comments · Microsoft, Music, Open Source

Link: Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins
Microsoft says it was doing the right thing: paying a German rights holder $16 million to license the MP3 audio format, the foundation of the digital music boom. Then an American jury ruled that Microsoft had failed to pay another MP3 patent holder, and slapped it [...]

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