At LMAX, we’ve been using Vue.js for all our new JavaScript work very successfully for a while now. Our existing products used Vue.js for the logic but continued to use bootstrap as the component library to ensure the UI remained consistent.  For anything new though, we started using Vuetify to give us better UIs much more easily.

Vuetify is close to reaching it’s 1.0 release now and we’ve been using it for a while so when we first started with it, the vast majority of development and support was being done by the project founder, John Leider in his spare time. Migrating UI libraries is painful so having an early stage project without a lot of community (at the time) was a pretty big risk for us, but the code was excellent and John was obviously very committed to the project, being very responsive to bug reports and questions.  So LMAX jumped on board as a platinum supporter of Vuetify, making regular monthly payments to support Vuetify development.

There has been a trend over the past few years for open source projects to routinely ask for “donations” through a donate button on the site and increasingly in the software itself. I put “donations” in quotes because in the vast majority of cases these aren’t payments to a charitable organisation — they go straight into the pocket of the one and only developer.

Now it’s important to be clear, there are quite a number of open source organisations that are set up as actual charities or at least are independent organisations where the money donated actually goes towards the open source projects supported by that organisation. For example, when you donate to the Apache Software Foundation they use that money to pay for servers, bandwidth, legal advice the projects need, subsidising conferences around the projects and so on1{#footlink1:1294312313194.footnote}. These are great places to donate your money or time to — they handle donations very professionally as the funds directly benefit the projects and ecosystem around the projects.

Back when git and GitHub were relatively new to the mainstream, there was a big discussion about how it promoted forking and was potentially bad for community building. Since then GitHub has well and truly proven that it can successfully support significant community and very successful projects. Looking around GitHub though, it’s clear that not every project successfully builds community there and the tendency to fork can still become a problem.

It would be hard to have not noticed the on-going debate around “open core”. From what I can tell, it largely, but not completely, boils down to concerns about a product being called “open source” if the core that’s open source is generally unusable without the commercial-only additions. Mostly, people are ok with there being separate commercial-only plugins or tools provided so long as the open source product can stand alone and be useful and effective. Dave Neary hits on what I think is a key warning sign that a product is using a damaging open-core model:

The new Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE site has now gone live, a result of our new partnership with Moxiecode, the company behind everyone’s favorite open source editor TinyMCE. I’m really excited about the potential of this partnership and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with the Moxiecode team so far.

What We’re Adding…

We think we can bring a lot to the TinyMCE community, the things below are just where we’re starting.

From the job description:

We are seeking a Software Developer who is experienced in creating sophisticated, highly interactive, JavaScript applications. Ideally we desire someone that has experience in TinyMCE or has experience working as part of an open source project. The right person will have the ability to work remotely in a highly collaborative manner with virtual teams. I’m pretty excited about this new opening within Ephox. Lots of great stuff to come out of it hopefully, but in particular helping Ephox to start working better with Open Source communities and developing some awesome stuff with JavaScript. While TinyMCE experience is something we’re particularly keen to have “ready to go” if possible, whoever fills this role is going to become a web content editor expert in general from Tiny to CK, Dojo and of course our personal favourite EditLive!

I keep seeing otherwise intelligent people1{#footlink1:1251967506123.footnote} encounter problems with software but never actually report them to anyone who could fix them. For commercial software opening a support ticket takes just a few minutes and usually gets the issue resolved pretty quickly so you can stop wasting time suffering through it or complaining about it. For open source software it’s often a bit more difficult – you need to join the users mailing list and ask questions there, follow up if you don’t get a response and maybe even put together a solid bug report. Still nothing ominous.

The conversation that has sprung up around how the use of distributed version control, Github in particular, affects community is a refreshing change in the blogosphere1. It’s people collectively thinking things through rather than just reacting in uproar or following the latest meme.

The latest installment is from Ben Hyde, git: Balene for Knowledge2. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but let me pull out a couple of key points: