237 items tagged “open-source”
2019
The Cloud and Open Source Powder Keg (via) Stephen O’Grady’s analysis of the Elastic v.s. AWS situation, where Elastic started mixing their open source and non-open source code together and Amazon responded by releasing their own forked “open distribution for Elasticsearch”. World War One analogies included!
sqlite-utils: a Python library and CLI tool for building SQLite databases
sqlite-utils is a combination Python library and command-line tool I’ve been building over the past six months which aims to make creating new SQLite databases as quick and easy as possible.
[... 1,237 words]2018
PEP 8016 -- The Steering Council Model (via) The votes are in and Python has a new governance model, partly inspired by the model used by the Django Software Foundation. A core elected council of five people (with a maximum of two employees from any individual company) will oversee the project.
for those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs, let me put this to you as directly as possible: cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? The whole premise with your proprietary license is that you are finding that there is no way to compete with the operational dominance of the cloud services providers; did you really believe that those same dominant cloud services providers can’t simply reimplement your LDAP integration or whatever? The cloud services providers are currently reproprietarizing all of computing — they are making their own CPUs for crying out loud! — reimplementing the bits of your software that they need in the name of the service that their customers want (and will pay for!) won’t even move the needle in terms of their effort.
11 barriers to coding in the open and how to overcome them (via) “Terence Eden, open standards lead at GDS, also gave a talk about overcoming barriers to coding in the open”—an intriguing recap of that talk revealing exactly how the UK government have been encouraging a culture of coding in the open and going open source first.
The (broken) economics of OSS (via) This is worth reading: a very well thought-out summary of the challenges of financially supporting open source infrastructure projects in a world of cloud providers. Matt Klein is the creator of the Envoy proxy at Lyft. One of his conclusions is that the open source fellowship model (where foundations provide a full time salary to key maintainers) deserves more attention.
lemongraph. An open-source “log-based transactional graph engine”. Written by the NSA. In Python. It runs on top of LMDB, which is the fast memory-mapped transactional key-value store that was developed by the OpenLDAP project as a replacement for BerkeleyDB.
Open Source gives engineers the power to collaborate across legal entities (companies) without involving bizdev. The benefits of this workaround are extraordinary and underappreciated.
Django #8936: Add view (read-only) permission to admin (closed). Opened 10 years ago. Closed 15 hours ago. I apparently filed this issue during the first DjangoCon back in September 2008, when Adrian and Jacob mentioned on-stage that they would like to see a read-only permission for the Django Admin. Thanks to Olivier Dalang from Fiji and Petr Dlouhý from Prague it’s going to be a feature shipping in Django 2.1. Open source is a beautiful thing.
Datasette 0.18: units (via) This release features the first Datasette feature that was entirely designed and implemented by someone else (yay open source)—Russ Garrett wanted unit support (Hz, ft etc) for his Wireless Telegraphy Register project. It’s a really neat implementation: you can tell Datasette what units are in use for a particular database column and it will display the correct SI symbols on the page. Specifying units also enables unit-aware filtering: if Datasette knows that a column is measured in meters you can now query it for all rows that are less than 50 feet for example.
Typesense (via) A new (to me) open source search engine, with a focus on being “typo-tolerant” and offering great, fast autocomplete—incredibly important now that most searches take place using a mobile phone keyboard. Similar to Elasticsearch or Solr in that it runs as an HTTP server that you serve JSON via POST and GET—and it offers read-only replicas for scaling and high availability. And since it’s 2018, if you have Docker running (I use Docker for Mac) you can start up a test instance with a one-line shell command.
2017
Pull request #4120 · python/cpython. I just had my first ever change merged into Python! It was a one sentence documentation improvement (on how to cancel SQLite operations) but it was fascinating seeing how Python’s GitHub flow is set up—clever use of labels, plus a bot that automatically checks that you have signed a copy of their CLA.
The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.
2014
What’s the best way to keep track of changes to a project you’re not directly contributing to on github?
This is what GitHub’s “watch” feature is for: https://help.github.com/articles...
[... 35 words]2013
Is there an open source (or freely accessible) database of geofence coordinates for common places, such as cities or national parks?
Take a look at Flickr’s openly licensed shapefiles:
[... 59 words]What is the ways to view the examples without download the example files in github?
If you can view the file on raw.github.com you can drop the first dot to view it on rawgithub.com—a free proxy service.
[... 107 words]How could GitHub improve the password security of its users?
By doing exactly what they’re doing already: adding more sophisticated rate limiting, and preventing users from using common weak passwords.
[... 80 words]Why doesn’t Quora open-source its search interface?
See my answer to Simon Willison’s answer to How come Quora hasn’t contributed any significant open source tools?
[... 32 words]What are some good open source projects that VMware is directly part of?
To my knowledge they fund almost all of the development work on RabbitMQ, Redis and the Spring Java framework.
[... 38 words]How come Quora hasn’t contributed any significant open source tools?
Releasing open source software is a lot of work. You need to extract it from your own proprietary systems, clean it up, document it, release it and them deal with support queries, incoming bug fixes, suggestions and feature requests.
[... 192 words]For developers and Startup Founders, what software licenses would you prefer to use instead of open source options, if you had unlimited funding?
With unlimited funding... I’d still prefer to build my company on open source licensed components. It’s not about the price (heck, I’d use my unlimited funding to support the projects my company benefited from)—it’s about the freedom to understand exactly how everything works, fix stuff that doesn’t, and benefit from the community of others solving the same kinds of problems.
[... 91 words]What are the most commonly used or most interesting open-source packages and software?
I’d say the open source browser engines, Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari, Chrome, iOS, Android) are probably some of the most important and widely used pieces of open source code these days.
[... 51 words]2012
To become a better developer ? To read more OR to create/contribute to open source projects?
Contribute to an existing project, rather than starting one yourself. There are a bunch of benefits:
[... 231 words]Is there a free/open-source software source code search engine?
If you want to search through actual code in open source projects, GitHub search is fantastic https://github.com/search—e.g. here’s a search for all Ruby code that mentions oauth https://github.com/search?q=oaut...
[... 71 words]Is Microsoft’s platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early?
I would argue that the cost of the Microsoft stack is a lot more than just the license fees.
[... 546 words]How can a new developer get involved in open-source projects?
I was going to say the same thing. Find a useful project in GitHub (preferably one that clearly has an active maintainer), fork it, fix a bug (look at the project’s issue tracker) then make a pull request.
[... 80 words]Which is the best open source tool to populate my database with test data for my load test?
I’ve seen tools that do this, but to be honest it’s very simple to write your own script for this (especially if you’re using an ORM). The other benefit to writing your own script for this is that you’ll have a much better chance of accurately representing your expected data, sizes etc.
[... 221 words]Do Python programmers have a tendency to write their own software instead of contributing? Why?
I think you’ll find that PROGRAMMERS have a tendency to develop their own thing rather than contributing to an existing project. It’s even got its own TLA: NIH (Not Invented Here).
[... 94 words]What are the pros and cons of open sourcing my website’s code?
I’m afraid if you’re expecting to open source your code as a magic bullet to get others to work on improving it for free you are likely to be disappointed.
[... 250 words]Is there an open-content alternative to Quora?
Stack Overflow releases all of their content under a creative commons license, and even lets people download full database dumps.
[... 33 words]