Free Software Linux

Starting today, you'll see a few changes around opensource.com. We've made some updates based on community input. Thanks to those who have already taken our quick, six-question survey. Your feedback is very useful--keep it coming.

The most important change to the site was to our main RSS feed, http://opensource.com/feed. Starting today, this feed will be updated with each new article posted to the site, not just the posts appearing on the home page. It's a great way for you to keep up with the latest information from opensource.com.

The contributions and participation since we launched opensource.com on January 25 have been awesome. We've had more than 1,600 users register with the site and make over 600 comments on the posts across all the channels. That's a great start. Whether you joined us on day one or yesterday, we continue to encourage and appreciate your participation.

• Should Be

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer had the idea to make a coffee table book about coffee tables? I always thought that was a pretty elegant idea. Well, a few months ago, some of the smart folks on Red Hat's community architecture team had a similarly elegant idea:

Write a book about building community the open source way... and write it with a community, the open source way. Meaning, open the text up, allow interested users to contribute, and see what happens.

Brilliant.

• Business

TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (http://tikiwiki.org), the open source, wiki-based content management system continues to be one of the most active projects on SourceForge, consistently ranking in the top 15 in terms of SVN code commits (http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/ran...).

It's a good bet that the next generation of defining companies will have corporate cultures built the open source way-- around openness and collaboration, while fostering community and culture that extend outside the company walls.

In fact many of the defining companies of the first decade of this century show these characteristics (with one very notable exception we discussed earlier).

• Business

Red Hat (news, site), one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.

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Interesting article in Forbes about the way Threadless, the awesome t-shirt company, thinks about community-building. For those of you who aren't familiar with Threadless, they do about $30 million in revenues with a unique cultural/business model that merges a community of t-shirt creators and consumers into one happy family (you can read more about them in the Forbes article).

• Business

In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the grand daddy Drupal versus Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.

I am very pleased to report that I have an assignment for OSSWatch, an organisation set up by JISC and attached in a kind of complicated way to the University of Oxford, to report on an upcoming event Building an Engaged Community. I will be covering it in two ways, an article after the event summarising it and also a live stream throughout the day. The live blog will be hosted on coveritlive.com which is really well designed for such events.

Regular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member.

Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also recognizes the work of everyone who helped to make the inaugural conference so successful.

In the spirit of (and heavily inspired by) the original Cluetrain Manifesto and the recent 10th anniversary edition, I offer the following definition and 10 principles of what we at Optaros have been calling the Assembled Web.

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

Submission Due date: October 1st, 2009

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with python?

The PSF is looking for information about successful uses of Python in order to create an updated list of success stories and find organizations that might be interested in sponsoring activities for the community. If you know of a company that uses Python for any purpose, please take a few minutes to answer the questions on our short survey. You don't have to work at an organization to tell us about how they use Python! Don't worry about duplicates, either, we'll take care of them once we have all of the data collected.

I was excited last month to see a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Sears and Kmart adopting OpenID. In that post, Frederic Lardinois writes: