Tag: opensource
"Show-stoppers" July 20th, 2006
Lately a large number of questions posted to django-users have included phrases like “this is a show-stopper” or “this is critical”. I think it’s worth my time to point out that this is a lousy method of getting developers to do what you want. It’s the online equivalent of threatening to take your ball and go home, and is about as effective. I understand the impulse perfectly: there’s the fear that we won’t take you seriously if you don’t tell us just how important this is.…
Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck July 28th, 2006
Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck Good lord, I’m exhausted. OSCON was amazing. It’s clear that a sea change is occurring in the open source movement: to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, we’re finally moving away from “free software is better because it’s free” towards “free software is better because it’s better”. This of course makes being a free software author more exciting than ever. Judging by the number of job postings, it’s also easier than ever to actually get paid for work on open source.…
Twenty questions about the GPL July 13th, 2009
foo.py is a Python library released under the GPLv3. bar.py is a library distributed commercially. If bar contains import foo, must bar.py be released under the GPL? Does the answer change if foo.py does not ship with bar.py, but nonetheless requires foo.py to function? Does the answer change if foo.py does not ship with bar.py and does not require its presence to function? libfoo.so is a C shared library released under the GPLv3.…
Contributor License Agreements September 17th, 2009
Mike Malone emailed me an interesting question, which I thought I’d answer publicly: [We’ve released code] under the BSD license. We want to accept patches from the community, but were wondering whether we need to get everyone who submits a patch to sign a release or something saying that their patch is BSD too. [Does Django] require everyone who submits a patch to sign that sort of release? The Right Way is to require that all contributors sign a contributor license agreement (CLA).…
The power of "no" November 2nd, 2009
The power of “no” Last week, I wrote on Twitter: Closed-source software gets worse with each release (Microsoft, Adobe, …). Open-source software gets better (OOo, Ubuntu, …). Discuss. Much interesting discussion did ensue – mostly around the exceptions (Apple, Google). However, I’m less interesting in the exceptions than I am in the general rule. Sure, you can find plenty of examples of commercial software that’s improving over time, and, yes, there’s plenty of open source software that suffers from bloat and creeping features.…
On commit bits November 4th, 2009
Commit bits What’d you do the day you started your job? Got a little tour. Found your desk. Some HR paperwork. Figured out the network. Set up your new company machine. Got your VPN credentials. And got your commit access to the company’s source control. Normal first day procedure, I know. And yet, that day-one-commit-bit is one of the starkest differences between the corporate and the open source development model.…
GvR on commit privileges July 26th, 2010
Guido van Rossum: Maybe we’ve been too careful with only giving commit privileges to to experienced and trusted new developers. I spoke to Ezio Melotti and from his experience with getting commit privileges, it seems to be a case of “the lion is much more afraid of you than you are afraid of the lion”. I.e. having got privileges he was very concerned about doing something wrong, worried about the complexity of SVN, and so on.…
Mark Shuttleworth on Tribalism July 31st, 2010
Mark Shuttleworth: Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”. It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone’s “birth tribe” and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which linux distribution they love. […] Let’s be clear: tribalism makes you stupid.…
man tar August 3rd, 2010
man tar: The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all features of the program.…
Is there a market for paid Django apps? June 28th, 2011
Here’s a thought that’s been rummaging around in my brain for some time now: is there a market for commercial, closed-source Django apps? Suppose someone released a high-quality, well-documented, well-supported Django app… under a commercial license. Assume of course that this app does something you actually need, and that the commercial license isn’t odious. Would you pay for a Django app? I think I would. I have no qualms about paying for good software: in the last month I bought some backup software (Arq), started using a commercial ticket tracker (Pivotal) and time tracker (Freckle).…
Getting features into Django May 23rd, 2013
Getting new features into Django isn’t easy. It’s that way for a reason — I spoke recently about why conservatism is a virtue — but it does happen. I’d like to do a better job explaining how we decide what goes in and what goes out, so here’s a lightly adapted version of something I posted on the mailing list this evening. It’s three things I look for when I’m trying to determine whether something is “right” for Django or not:…
So you want a new admin? May 26th, 2016
Django’s admin site is about 12 years old. It started circa early 2004 as an internal CMS at the Lawrence Journal-World, was released as part of Django in 2005, and has been chugging away ever since. There’s been some substantial re-writes along the way – magic-removal, new forms, the flat theme – but for the most part the admin’s stayed pretty much the same for that entire time. The interface, functionality, and CRUD-oriented workflow haven’t really changed since those early years at the Journal-World.…