The Linux Foundation has published its third annual report about Linux kernel authorship.

"Why am I reinventing Disqus? That is the question I've been getting asked since I 'announced' on Identi.ca that I'd be replacing Disqus with a free (AGPL) comment system that I was to write." ... "Complete lack of Source Code: Currently, Disqus doesn't distribute their source code, and don't plan to do so in the future.

Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland's apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly "stealing" code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale "theft" of code from another website. Of course it's not "theft" it's copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with.

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software.

An interesting concept, that's been around for a while. Neat, but...

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product.

Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community.

Arguments rage over the importance of adding comments to your code versus the importance of writing clear code that speaks for itself, thereby potentially eliminating the need for comments.