Last month I was honored to be a keynote speaker at the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) annual meeting. Open Source has become a major topic on campuses, not just the enterprise, and I was delighted to meet with some of the leaders in setting the agenda for software engineering education.

When I was a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, I did not give to much thought about how the faculty chose to teach Sorting and Searching and not DOS for Idiots or why the core curriculum was constructed in one way and not another. At the time it all seemed like useful and exciting stuff to me, and I learned it all (as best I could).

I recently got myself a Flickr Pro account, and have been using Flickr for more of my photos. I find myself more and more annoyed at the rough edges in the Flickr user interface. For example, when you want to delete a tag from something, you click on the [x] to the right of the tag. Flickr asks you "Do you want to delete the tag?" Cancel/Ok:

For the past several years I've printed various documents at home by sending them to my wife Amy with a request "Please print...". And after several years we both know that Adobe Acrobat version 5 for Mac works far, far better than any subsequent release from Apple or Adobe, at least for the pdf documents I create on Linux. But how crazy is it that I don't have my own printer?

Last weekend I found myself at Staples and I decided to make a $300 bet with myself that I could get good value from an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 printer (with a maximum format size of 13"x19" borderless prints).

Many, many programs written in C or C++ use a file called "config.h" which contains #define statement that control the compilation of the program. These programs are also nearly always built using 'make'.

I claim that these two attributes are in conflict with each other. Or, in layman's terms, "config.h sucks". The problem is that when you have multiple options in config.h, every file which may be compiled differently depending on the values defined therein must be recompiled whenever config.h changes.

The Open Source Initiative ran the first Open Source Awards, but when we dropped them, Google and O'Reilly picked up the idea (yay!). Nominations are currently open, but close in a few short weeks.

We're realizing is that Open Source is more than just free software. Free software is like free rocks. You need rocks, but rocks aren't enough to build a house. You get the Open Source effect only when you have a pyramid of people (roles, actually -- you can still get the Open Source effect if one person fulfills all these roles) associated with the project:

/ Editors \
/ Developers \
/ Contributors \
/ Contributors \
/ Users, Users \
/ Users, Users, Users \

The Editors decide what goes into a project and what falls on the floor. Developers write the code. Contributors write documentation, answer questions, report bugs, blog about the software, review the software, and do everything else which isn't coding. Users just use the code, but of course the role of user is why everybody else does what they do.

Together, these people form a community.

The subtitle of this Computer World report quotes Nicholas Negroponte as saying that insitence on Open Source scares people away.

Boggle.

This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the weeks of March 30th to April 5th and April 6th to 12th, 2008.

These Weeks

• Light OSI community service work (mostly answering private queries on mailing lists, discussing OSI issues at Go Open, etc.)
• Dropped the ball on the RfP - just got too busy.
• Keynote at Go Open in Oslo, Norway