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Packaging license text: It's the right thing to do
Packages are wonderful! They group together discrete bundles of function in “fun-sized” chunks that anyone can reuse. Unfortunately, many package ecosystems don’t do a great job of including the text of the package’s license in the package itself. By omitting this key piece of info, they make it extremely difficult for their community to comply with their license terms.
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Moving to GitHub
After almost eight years at Microsoft, in a variety of teams in the developer space, I’ve decided to move on.
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Open source license compliance distilled
Licenses are a fundamental part of open source but the challenge of finding and complying with the licenses can be daunting and mind-numbing. Here I summarize the practical license compliance landscape and set the scene for follow-up posts on how we can do better — to everyone’s benefit.
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Open source license compliance gone amok?
Open source is awesome! So many great projects out there. Individuals, teams, and companies pouring their passion into code that folks can use and evolve. Licenses are a fundamental part of open source but the reality of finding and complying with the licenses can be daunting and mind-numbing. As an industry we have not come to terms with this challenge and prefer either denial or throwing money at the problem. I think there is a better way.
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Open source engagement in organizations
Companies, governments, and other organizations big and small are working with open source to achieve their goals. Teams range from barely considering it to betting their whole business on open source. Putting some structure on this spectrum has helped me think about and evolve Microsoft’s open source program. I’d love to hear if you find it useful, how, or why not.
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Resuscitating the blog
I made a resolution — not really for the new year just all on its own — to start sharing more of what’s going on in the world around me. We’ll see if I keep it up. For now, I’ve updated the blog’s look a bit and have a few topics lined up in my head. In the event that someone else is trying similar GH Pages machinations, I’ve capture some useful info here. Bear with me (or do something else useful) if this is all old hat to you.
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Diving into GitHub Data
GitHub is a veritable treasure trove of information about all kinds of things related to open source, various technologies, software engineering practices, programming patterns, social interactions, and so much more. I’m really excited to be diving into this space. The first thing we are doing is sponsoring GHTorrent to run on Azure and integrate with Azure Data Lake
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mcaffer.com moved to Jekyll
Like so many others, I have moved my blog from WordPress on my hosting provider Dreamhost to be produced via Jekyll and hosted using GitHub Pages. I made the switch for simplicity and to mess around with current technologies. In this post I outline the steps I took and setup I use to create this blog itself. Over time I’ll likely update the blog to capture how each element of the blog works.