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Open source news for your reading pleasure.

January 13-17, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, you'll learn about some new partnerships that could lead to some new open source tech. Here's what we found:

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GitHub has become the de facto repository for open source projects. So, we were excited for the opportunity to sit down with GitHub's co-founder and CIO Scott Chacon during the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, NC.

In this interview, Opensource.com Community Manager Jason Hibbets asks Scott about how he got started at GitHub and what's important about the culture there. Scott also talks about how the staff at GitHub finds out about cool projects on the site and where he sees GitHub going beyond code in the future.

Here's the complete interview: » Read more

Image placeholder services are useful tools for web app developers. They serve the singular purpose of marking the location of a future image within a design or layout. Spaces that will eventually be filled with production images can be worked around while the artists or photographers prepare the images behind the scenes. From the perspective of rapid application development, an image placeholder service is a standard part of the developer’s toolkit.

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What if teachers could fork educational materials just like software developers fork code? Imagine if educators far and wide could collaborate on curriculums beyond their school, district, or university. Imagine a revolutionized education system by way of the open source model. Well, the future is now.

Eric Martindale, Cofounder and CTO of Coursefork, is replacing closed education systems with open ones with a new development tool for educators. It's not a MOOC, it's not Moodle, and it's not edX. It's a GitHub for course creation. It's about building a community. » Read more

Download the free All Things Open interview series eBook

I see SparkFun Electronics mentioned often in my social media stream, so I jumped at the chance to interview Chris Clark, the company's Director of Information Technology.

From their website: SparkFun is an online retail store that sells the bits and pieces to make your electronics projects possible. Our ever-growing product catalog boasts over 3,500 components and widgets designed to help you unleash your inner inventor... Through our Department of Education, SparkFun offers classes and online tutorials designed to help educate individuals in the wonderful world of embedded electronics... We believe an open market is a healthy market and we open source all of our product designs. SparkFun subscribes to the belief that open source tech encourages innovation and creativity, while helping empower individuals to build the projects they want.

In this interview with Chris » Read more

In a previous article, I discussed the complaints that have been leveled against GitHub during the past year and a half concerning the purported problem of public, seemingly-FLOSS code repositories with no explicit licensing. Here I will address the actions GitHub took in July, which were undoubtedly in response to this criticism.

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Few would deny that the rise of GitHub as a popular hosting service for software projects is one of the most significant developments to affect open source during the past five years. GitHub's extraordinary success is necessary context for understanding the criticism leveled at it during the past year from some within or close to the open source world. This criticism has focused on licensing, or rather the lack of it: it is claimed that GitHub hosts an enormous amount of code with no explicit software license. Some critics have suggested that this situation results from a combination of the ignorance of younger developers about legal matters and willful inaction by GitHub's management. In a followup article I will discuss the measures recently taken by GitHub to address these concerns; this article explores aspects of the complaint itself. » Read more

Frank Bergmann, founder of ]project-open[, talks with us about the integrated open source software stack. He says maintaining communication is essential, and it entails complete transparency.

The community will quickly punish you if you cheat. This is at the core of open source.

Frank also tells us who his open source hero is. Read on for more insight into how this open company operates.

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I’ve been thinking a bit too much lately about GitHub and Drupal.org. More broadly, I’ve had my mind on open source + community. Sometimes this is called social coding.

Social coding can take on a variety of shapes and sizes but is short-hand for what I can describe as loosely coupled, sometimes geographically distributed collaboration and coordination around open source projects. Civic coding is a form of social coding focused on municipal projects. Civic coding is a big part of what we do in the Brigade and why we’re running The Great American Civic Hack this summer.

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From James Bowes' article, A code hosting comparison for open source projects: » Read more