eric raymond

The scientific method: it all starts with a simple, essential question. How can you "know" something?

How can we gather knowledge and have confidence in the correctness of such knowledge? The lucubration of many smart minds over the centuries came to refine the following: » Read more

"Release early, release often. And listen to your customers."

Eric S. Raymond (esr) wrote those words in his 1997 essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and, for a lot of people, they have become the mantra of the open source software movement. While this advice might seem obvious to many, that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, I’ve often benefited from esr’s maxim myself, and I’ve even come up with a shorthand for why it works. I call it the "practice effect." » Read more

The Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON), currently happening in Columbia, SC, has a large number of students and people new to open source attending. Leslie Hawthorn of the OSU Open Source Lab gave them an introduction yesterday afternoon for how students can get started in open source.

Why open source? » Read more