[ad_1] In the colophon to his book, Just a Geek, actor and writer Wil Wheaton wrote that he wanted to use Emacs to write the book but “couldn’t find the text editor.” Wheaton was joking, of course, but he highlighted an important point about Emacs: it’s gone way beyond its roots as a tool for…

[ad_1] Open source is a developer-centric solutions model, which, in a nutshell, could be described as building communities of developers to solve problems. In its most simplistic form, the model has two stages. First, a developer has a problem, which they can fix with some new code, and they make a start on it. Second,…

[ad_1] Failure. Now that’s a word with a negative vibe. Among engineering and construction projects, it conjures up the Titanic sinking, the Tacoma Narrows bridge twisting in the wind, or the space shuttle Challenger exploding. These were all failures of engineering design or management. Most failures in the pure software realm don’t lead to the…