Tag: opensource

GIMP sucks a little bit less


while i wasn’t looking, the GIMP turned from a paint.exe replacement into a tool with bipolar issues: as a host to amazing image processing suites like Gmic while still having the worst UI. for a while, there was seashore on the mac to paper over the UI, but development has stalled in 2011.if you work around the bugs / put in the hours, you can get pretty decent image processing for free these days.

Open Source jerks

a sad state of affairs, but for many areas, open source is dead both because it is technically obsolete, but also because it is full of jerks who drive off the productive members. this was true for an open source project i worked on in 2002 and it is still true today:

The author found that the project he was involved in, PostNuke, had many demanding consumers, and few producers. The consumers felt entitled to the fruits of the producers’ labor without contributing themselves, and were very vocal about their wishes.

Tirole wins Nobel

since tirole is a successor to coase in some sense, here’s one of my favorite papers, by Yochai Benkler on how open source could help revolutionize the nature of production:

we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets

the paper has remained under-appreciated since it came out in 2002, and deserves to be more widely known.

OpenSSL

note lack of any tests for the change that added heartbeat support to openssl. the open source “quality” process has a long way to go.
2014-04-17:

No central architectural authority, 6740 goto statements, Inline assembly code, Multiple different coding styles, Obscure use of macro preprocessors, Inconsistent naming conventions, Far too many selections and options, Unexplained dead code, Misleading and incoherent comments: it became the default landfill for prototypes of cryptographic inventions

2014-05-20: good overview of how the cleanup of openssl progresses, 1 month in.
side note, is this the state of open source slide programs? static images without accessible text? oy

Open Source Brewing

If you contribute an idea in the early stages of recipe formulation (e.g. a hop variety to use, an adjustment in a malt bill, changes to water chemistry, etc…) that we end up adopting, we’ll invite you to participate in one of our tasting panels once we’re up and running. If you can’t make it out to the brewery, we’ll acknowledge your contribution for all to world to see in a suitably awesome way.

Once a recipe is in production, we’ll up the ante. If you bring us a homebrewed version of our beer that we like better than our own and provide details of what you did differently, we’ll invite you to brew the beer with us at the brewery. Suffice it to say, we’ll make sure you have a great time and are crowned king of Modern Times for the day.