Open Source Software is more than just software that has an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. It’s a whole development style and culture. Karl Fogel is one of the developers of the Subversion project, and has been involved with a number of open source projects. He’s distilled the lessons he’s learned about the development style and culture in the book Producing Open Source Software. This is a really practical book, and deals with many of the day to day issues involved with working in open source projects. In particular, I found the section on Setting the Tone and the chapters on Communications and Managing Volunteers to be especially well done.

In true open source style, you can get the entire book online as well as in hard copy. I grabbed an online copy because I was in a hurry, and because I wanted to write all over it ( have this thing about writing in books). Karl has done a great job, and I’ll definitely be ordering a paper copy so that he’ll get some money for his work. And I’ll be recommending this book to every person who wants to know how to get involved in or run an open source project — it’ll let me save my voice and my fingers.

[I’ll put my usual book-review excepts on a post on my personal blog]

The slides for my OSCON talk: Building Your Own Chandler Parcel, are now available.

For more reports on OSCON, you can look at Philippe Bossut’s notes, or my personal blog. Reports from other OSAF OSCON attendees will follow in the days ahead.

OSCON 2005 is next week. This year there will be two OSAF related presentations:

Build Your Own Chandler Parcel This is tutorial presentation for people who want to get a head start on building extensions for Chandler.

Implementing CALDAV, a New Standard for Sharing Calendar Information over the Internet This is panel discussion on the CALDAV calendaring standard being developed at the IETF.

In addition we will be participating in a pair of BOF sessions:

Q&A on CalDAV calendar projects from Mozilla, OSAF, Novell (Hula), and RPI

Meet the OSAF Chandler & Cosmo developers

There will be a number of OSAF staff folks at the conference — please don’t be shy!

I’ve just published the latest revision of the Item Collection spec. This version fleshes out the notification story a bit more, and contains some sample code demonstrating tradeoffs between possible API designs.

Feedback is definitely welcome — just send it to the dev list.