… why can’t we?

It was announced yesterday that the White House IT folks have released some of their Drupal modules to the open source community. I am used to thinking of government as a dusty dinosaur whose bureaucracy keeps it behind the times. So this surprised me.

It seems we lack institutional support and direction on contributing to open source here at UNH. Is this true? We certainly use open source like gangbusters; we’ll take all the quality free software we can get. But do we contribute back? Are we feeding the virtuous circle, or simply leeching it?

In the midst of trying to better monetize our intellectual property, who amongst our best minds can articulate the corners where capital isn’t actually king?

And, why do I rant like this? Probably because I am more mad at myself than anything for not having made a meaningful contribution to computing in the public domain.

I just want to be like the White House staff, and do it on the clock. ;)

How have we survived til now without the yada yada operator?

And is this the first operator named after a TV catchphrase?

I had no idea there were so many version control systems available. But it does make sense that there are. A text editor is an important tool for programmers, so it is no surprise there are a zillion of them. So I guess it should follow that in the quest for the perfect version control system, programmers have been busy trying to create the optimal tool for this difficult problem.

The subject of this blog entry refers to this specific comparison table which is just one set of the possible combinations possible. See the Version Control Blog comparison page to build your own table from a selection of 29 different version control systems. Have fun comparing your current system to the latest fair haired boy getting all the buzz.