developer

It turns out, not surprisingly, that who you work for largely determines how you work, at least when it comes to participation in open-source development community, as revealed at a recent conference in India (COSS.IN) Two heavies from the open-source community - Simon Phipps (Sun) and Danese Cooper (Intel) talked through how developers can navigate the sometimes tricky waters of writing open-source software while on the corporate payroll.

"The open-source brand has become so powerful that people are trying to wear the brand, without wearing the behavior that goes with it," Phipps said.

Employees are also likely to get caught up in ownership fights on contributions, on whether the contribution should be recognized on behalf of the employee, or the company. Even when employee contributions are recognized, it may be a figurehead rather than all the contributors that are recognized, Cooper said.… Read more

This post has been updated with information about Bebo's implementation of Facebook's code.

And now, for something we didn't see coming: Facebook has announced that the architecture for its developer platform will be made available to other social-networking sites, potentially rendering moot the criticism that its strategy is too "closed"--and potentially dealing a huge blow to Google's yet-to-launch OpenSocial initiative.

Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora posted a blog entry Wednesday with the announcement. "(We) want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform … Read more

This post was updated at 10:18 a.m. PST to add information about Bebo's plans for OpenSocial.

SAN FRANCISCO--When Bebo co-founder and CEO Michael Birch took the stage in a theater at the Metreon complex here to announce the social network's Open Application Platform, he made the eyebrow-raising claim that the new initiative was, "dare I say it, 100 percent compatible with the Facebook platform."

Bebo representatives had hinted at Facebook compatibility last month when the social network officially joined Google's OpenSocial initiative. The new platform officially goes live on Wednesday night. "There'… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Right now I'm in a theater at San Francisco's Metreon complex, awaiting the official launch of social-networking site Bebo's "Open Application Platform." The announcement has not yet been made, but from what I gather, this will be exactly what we think it is.

The Social Times reported Tuesday that the youth-oriented Bebo, which has made its strongest inroads in the U.K., would be "announcing a number of partners including the usual suspects: iLike, Last.FM, Vampires, Where I've Been, Flixster, Horoscopes by RockYou, My Music by Qloud, Super Comments by RockYou, … Read more

Friendster has fully launched its developer platform with more than 180 applications available to its 56 million registered users, the social-networking site said Tuesday.

The company first announced the platform on October 25.

The developer platform was initially piloted by some well-known names in the widget world: Slide, RockYou, Imeem, Jangl, Clearspring, and Gbox. Companies and individual developers participating in the program are allowed to advertise anywhere in the application space and keep all revenue.

According to the social network, the platform is going to be as "open" as possible to make it easy for applications designed for … Read more

I'm not sure how I missed this presentation when it was first delivered in 2006, but I'm grateful to Digg for resurfacing it. In it Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer employed by Novell, identifies and debunks a range of myths about Linux kernel development. It makes for excellent, insightful reading.

Among other salient points, I particularly liked Greg's swatting down of the myth that suggests Linux lacks support for disparate devices. The exact opposite is true, as Greg points out:

[W]e support more things than anyone else. And more than anyone else ever has in the past. Linux has a very long list of things that we have supported before anyone else ever did....… Read more

As part of its Open Content Platform, CNET Networks has created a variety of HTML widgets from five of its Web properties--CNET, GameSpot, Chow, BNET, and TV.com--that anyone can stick on his or her own Web site. After completing a short registration form, publishers can get CNET technology videos (widget), GameSpot game reviews (widget), TV.com interviews and features (widget), business-oriented arcticles and videos from BNET (widget), and food-oriented features from Chow (widget).

The HTML widgets come in a variety of shapes and flavors. Some widgets, such as CNET Personal Tech, TV.com, and Gamespot, serve their content in a standard 300x550 size. BNET provides articles and videos for business managers in three sizes--160x800, 300x500, and 500x360. Most prolifically, there are two different shapes (160x800 and 300x550) of four types of widgets from the food-focused Web site Chow--recipes, stories, videos, and message boards, including localized message board widgets for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.… Read more

Business social network LinkedIn has given itself a New Year's makeover a few weeks early: the site has announced a home page redesign and new features, and has simultaneously launched a developer program that it calls "InApps."

For LinkedIn, which says that it recently passed 17 million user accounts, this move comes at a time when some observers are saying that business social networks are about to take off in a big way. The redesigned home page has not gone fully live, but is now accessible to logged-in LinkedIn members on a beta page. Included among the … Read more

Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.

The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.

Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.

With Volta, developers can make "… Read more