It should say: "You shouldn't have different pipelines depending on location." ... of course. Sorry for the typo.

From good, working FOSS projects you can learn just about anything. As for the distributed software development: One thing people can learn from FOSS is versioning. Seriously. Quite a few teams I've met in RL can't and don't/didn't version, with FOSS it's mandatory. A very important aspect is that FOSS teams version just about everything, including docs and assets. Very important.

Another thing distributed teams can learn from successful FOSS projects is not to drown in tooling-bloat. Most tools in FOSS are tried and true and have a track record of decades. IRC, simple IDE/compile setups, tried and true working environments (f.e. LAMP stack), a bug/issue tracker that does the job and maybe a web-forum. I like to use the Google suite for my projects, but that's mostly for FOSS stuff, so it doesn't matter to me that much what Google is reading along. YMMV.

One thing that I would recommend when doing distributed development is, that you should set up your entire environment and pipeline, so that it is ready for distributed devlopment. You should have different pipelines depending on location. The overall process of versioning, tracking, compiling and deployment should be the same for everyone. The difficult part isn't getting the externals to do their thing but to get the locals to switch to the new, optimsed processes.

Another thing good (FOSS) projects have in common is a clear vision and good gouvernance. The stakeholders and PMs of FOSS projects actually have their agency behind the thing. If they don't, they quickly drop out or the project simply never gets off the ground. ... That's a huge upside to FOSS btw. In paid development, you get idiots dragging along for years, simply because there's a paycheck involved. Very painful. I've seen that a lot of that.

TaskBoard
Taiga (leaning towards lightweight project management/"scrummish" stuff)
PinItToMe
TeamBins

Loomio (decision making tool)

There are a few more, but these are the ones that come to mind.

Just a few days ago I made the case why homeopathy or other "magical medicine" and the way it might be practiced today can offer at least one significant upside vis-a-vis regular medical treatment ... or should I say council?

That homeopathic substances probably offer no better remedy than placebos is not really news. However, they *do* offer cheap placebos, which also can be a good and useful thing. And placebos are effective, or at least have an effect, there are enough studies that prove that.

The last thing they should try is get into a fight on Apples on turf. I'd focus on what they're good at: Building traditional mechanical watches within the bizaro price-range.

Yeah, right, the Swatch guy (!!) doesn't have a clue about the watch market, or, in particular, the swiss watch market.

Dude, seriously.

Never had heard of the Linus Torwalds rant on C++, but reading it has me second-guessing my C++ ambitions. Linus has strong opinions, no doubt, and he doesn't tiptoe around the issue, but more than once have I found myself agreeing with him and also seeing why I would call other people names - because often quite widespread ideas and notions about programming are notably stupid, and Linus doesn't stop short of pointing those out.

What he has to say about C++ actually makes me weary about the PL. ... Gotta look into this.

Since Steve Jobs came back Apple has only introduced proprietary connectors when there was a really good reason for them to do so. Lightning was introduced because Micro USB was considered sub-par by Apple. And let's face it: There is some truth to that. Lightning is sturdier, easyer to handle, has more data throughput and IIRC more relyable electrical specs. Say about Apple what you want, but unlike quite a few other tech companies they actually know what they are doing and why and they don't short-change hardware design decisions. Their market evaluation seems to prove them right.

In a nutshell: If Apple decides that USB C is worthwhile and offers upsides vis-a-vis lightning, it could be that this actually is the case, and Lightning actually is on the way out.

As for Thunderbolt: Unlike what quite a few tech experts think, it is *not* an Apple specific spec, but a standardised port. It's only that Apple likes to use it more than any other vendor.

This. A hundred times this. Sometimes I'd just like to round up a few guys and beat the shit out of these people with baseball bats. Just for kicks and fun.

... they're all for PhD's in CompSci than solve any problem in the world in two days or less for a salary of 5$ an hour.
I'm deseprately looking for one of those myself. Let me know when you find one.

Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.

Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.

As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.

The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.

IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.

As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.

What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!

Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.

I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.

I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.

Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.

My 2 cents.

I missed applying for a German ID at the age of 16 which would've automatically made me a German citizen. I could've kept my amercian citizenship. I had to renunciate it when I wanted to become a German as a grown up. It's a bit of a shame I couldn't get my lazy teenage ass to go to the citizens bureau for 20 minutes to pick up my ID a few years earlyer. If I still were american, I'd have zero hassles entering the US whenever I want to.

I am glad to be German, Germany has quite a few upsides, especially these days. But it would be cooler to have both citizenships. No suprise here.

If you can get U.S. citizenship for your kids without needing to renunciate their other citizenship(s), by all means do it.

On the other hand, ditching a perfectly neat european citizenship for a U.S. citizenship is something I probalby wouldn't do.

Quite a few countries public don't allow for multiple citizenships, but in pratice they let them slip (who's going to find out anyway?). If you can sneak into a dual-citizenship for your children without to much of a legal risk, do it. Just tell them when they're grown up, and tell them not to advertise it at every occasion, especially not at US customs(!!!).

Ask other swedish/belian people in simular situations and try to find out how belgium/sweden handles dual citizenships and if there are any serious legal pitfalls.

Good luck.

Gitorious? ... Please keep the KDE team from writing a client for this service or something like that.

Compiz is the bug. The whole thing. Seriously.

Rendering the desktop / ui with OpenGL is a very neat idea, and as far as I can tell Blender and Enlightenment have both achieved this very gracefully a long time ago, as has OS X.

However, Compiz is an entirely different thing and in my book one of the most annoying bug-ridden additions to the FOSS desktop stack in the last 10 years. A buggy laggy piece of sh*t software, messing with my input, shoddy responsiveness with particularly annoying and not-very-useful animations (unlike OS X), freezing randomly after running to long, etc. And no, running a few days shouldn't be an issue for any piece of software.

I don't know the next thing about OpenGL GUI building and acceleration, but Compiz is in perpetual commercial-software-beta state. Why it's even included, let alone a default in some distros is beyond me.

Someone please kill this project off, replace it or replace the development lead. It's degraded the Linux experience considerably in my book.

Software Corp continues to use brain when licensing its software, remains perpetually popular. What a concept. These guys deserve our respect. I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, one of those rare games that acutally shipped with a Linux binary back in those days.

You guys are Epic! (pun intended)