Top 5 of the week: Free book on GitHub and open cloudy weather

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Top 5 articles of the week on Opensource.com

By Urbanzenvia Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 / Modified by Jen Wike Huger

Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you the best of last week's open source news and stories on Opensource.com, this week: November 10 - 14, 2014.

Top 5 articles of the week

5. GraphHopper: a fast and flexible open source trip planner

Creator Peter Karich tells us about his route and trip planning software, Graphhopper. The code is licensed under Apache 2.0, and you can take a look under the hood on GitHub. The team at Graphhopper is on a mission to provide a world-wide instance for car routing, biking, and walking called GraphHopper Maps. For the more techy of you out there, follow Peter's instructions in the article to host it on your own servers to avoid network latency. And, as typical of open source software, GraphHopper gives a shout-out to two giants whose rich open data this new project has build on: OpenStreetMap and NASA.

4. Is the business of FOSS really community software?

A discussion began at the TYPO3 Eastern Europe conference this year around rebranding, or extending, the terms "open source" and "FOSS" to "community software" in order to give solution providers an alternative way to talk free and open source software that felt more safe and familiar. They brough their discussion to Opensource.com, publishing an article about why we need a new term (by Robert Lindh) and another on how and why the discussion got started (by Sal ). In a move to begin taking feedback from the community at large, a poll was added to Opensource.com asking: "Which term best describes the kind of software you work on?" It currently has 271 votes, most saying that "open source software" is the term that best describes their work, with a close second to "community software." The discussion is open, so if you'd like to cast your vote and have a say, check out the article and poll on the site.

3. 8 new tips for getting things done with OpenStack

Jason Baker's monthly guide to all things OpenStack hit big with readers this week. Did it have something to do with OpenStack Summit in Paris last week? Baker attended the conference and reported back to us that it felt like everyone working on OpenStack was at the conference. Keynotes covered real, user experiences—like Tim Bell of CERN on the use of OpenStack for scientific research. Find out what's going each month with Baker's OpenStack roundup.

2. Open source accelerating the pace of software

Gordon Haff is Red Hat’s cloud evangelist and regularly speaks at industry events. His article on Opensource.com this week spoke about the way many different open source cloud communities and projects are making a difference—like Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, Ceph, and Open Daylight—to name a few. What's noteable is they are working together, collaborating, to build upon and amplify the work each other is doing to propel software forward. Haff says, "OpenStack is a great example of how different, perhaps only somewhat-related open source communities can integrate and combine in powerful ways. It's a dynamic that just isn't possible with proprietary software."

1. You don't know Javascript, but you should

This article is a partial transcript of a talk that took place at Rochester Institute for Technology in New York on Javascript. It may sound run-of-the-mill, but open source and Javscript guru Kyle Simpson, or getify online, gave the talk. If you don't know his name, you might know his books. He's written a lot about Javascript over the years; most recently, he's been writing a book series called You Don't Know JS. In this talk, Kyle addresses what he's seen over and over in his years teaching Javascript to developers: they've learned it incompletely and improperly the first time and are having a hard time re-learning it. So, his book series is meant to teach JS, or Javascript, the right way the first time to developers, and it's meant for re-teaching it to those who struggle with it day to day. You can see Kyle's answers to a Q&A session with the class, as well as, more on his new book series, in the article.

P.S. It's being written on GitHub. Free reading!

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Jen leads a team of community managers for the Digital Communities team at Red Hat. She lives in Raleigh with her husband and daughters, June and Jewel.

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