Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
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Crowdsourced journalism's promise must be realized by the crowd, so hearing from and listening to the users is key. From Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News.
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Harvard professor Karim Lakhani, a scholar of crowdsourcing and open source, weighs in on how and why it works -- if it does.
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One of the proverbial back stories of IT operations has always been the battle between the "suits" and the "techies." From the techie point of view, the hapless but disturbingly powerful suits are the business guys who put more thought into picking out hundred-dollar silk ties at Nordstrom than they put into million-dollar IT decisions. Worse, the suits gravitate towards outsourcing and service firms that implement big-dollar solutions. Many techies start on the other end of the spectrum with free open source solutions that reflect a substantial DIY ethic. Will the twain ever meet?
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).read more
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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Wikipedia has started to hit the big time.  Accordingly, several critical     articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based     Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very     widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When     Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive".    These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully.  I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia.  (I have since left the project.)    Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue.  These problems     could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem.  If the project's     managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new     management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.
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In areas such as CRM software and portals, open source gained a foothold because users were willing to compromise -- less could be more, because the price was right. In security, open source rushed in because commercial vendors fell down on the job. As security problems in the enterprise outstripped the capabilities of commercial solutions, a number of talented security researchers stepped into the breach via the open source model.
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Without question, open source is one of the most important forces in enterprise IT. Apache is still the reigning champion of Web server software.
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Wired News readers are getting a chance to shape the news: For an article about wiki collaboration software, anyone may contribute using, what else?, a wiki.
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A new feature allows users the chance to make the news.
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Here's a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News. Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs. I hope this isn't too confusing!  "cheesecake" PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they seem to be able to copy each other, so mistakes propogate.  We've made so many accomplishments, both before and after the coining of the term, Karp for example starts with VIgnette. In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn't have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn't believed.)  They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. Jorn Barger used my software to do his "web log" -- why isn't that part of the story? Well it isn't if all you think is important is the choosing of the name.
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Bloggers force CBS News to admit to a serious mistake, and journalists recoil from the thought of so much scrutiny of their work. But isn't this exactly what we need to get better-quality news? Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg.
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John Cox quickly points out that a popular open source community site is now running PHP-powered:   The new Linux.com has been relaunched using Xaraya vice SlashCode. It looks as though they have some performance tuning to do, but the design is nice, and is nice to see the switch.   They've also pulled the NewsForge site back into the Linux.com fold to provide a more unified source for open source information.
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Applying logic might suggest to us that there&#39;s zero-profit likely to be made in free software. On the surface, the open-source movement appears to defy basic economic principles.
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Blog: Open source applications will drive a hefty load of infrastructure purchases in the future.  Proprietary vendors who hide their heads in the sand and try to avoid this trend or make it difficult for would-be open source partners to work with them will fin
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Blogs and the Web may hurt or change newspapers.