Discursive

The ASF is having one of those fun, endless arguments: "what constitutes a software release?" The central problem is that the C people only think is appropriate to vote on a source distribution where the Java people tend to vote on a tag in source control. Should be a pretty simple difference to bridge, no? Think again, here's a picture of the discussion thread...

I can't tell you what prompted this email because it is secret, but I will tell you that there is an interesting discussion happening in the Foundation about something that people might have an opinion on. Tantalizing isn't it? Makes you wonder what people are talking about, huh? Well, trust me, it is interesting, it illustrates thinking behind a topic that many developers are discussing, but the conversation I'm talking about is secret, by the very act of participating in the discussion I've agreed to conceal it. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to tell you where it took place.

I've been getting a lot of spam FriendFeed follows lately, that's usually the first sign that a social networking site has started to turn irrelevant. Anyone else notice an influx of high following to follower ratio FriendFeed users of late? This picture below illustrates everything that is wrong about tying to use sites like FriendFeed for marketing. The "expert" is trying to bump up her followers by mass following 12,000 people. She has also just tweeted about some tool that can automate FriendFeed subscriptions. FriendFeed... creeping toward irrelevance?

I was only gone for a few minutes, but when I returned I found that my "Open Source Infrastructure" diagram had turned into something much more interesting. Clearly, a project's Open Source infrastructure is only complete with a big pink Josie and some snazzy stars.

First, I wrote a quick piece pointing people to the Personal Genome Project. Church's experiment is expanding beyond the initial group of 10 luminaries and is starting to invite more participants. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, from some discussions at last year's Scifoo, I'm convinced that aggregating everyone's Genetic sequence into a massive data set would yield a series of benefits that could potentially transform our understanding of disease.