I was recently listening to a FLOSS Weekly podcast (episode 100, congratulations!) interviewing Chris DiDona from Google. One of the items he spoke of that resonated with me was his/their practice of deciding who they wanted to reach and focusing on that audience even if it meant delaying or forgoing contact with others. DiBona explained that to him, it seemed Google was the place Computer Scientists go to practice Computer Science. Thus, though it would be nice to reach other people such as open source enthusiasts, their real desire was to reach computer scientist practitioners. The rate of innovative product development, focus on algorithms and performance, and more demonstrate that nurturing Computer Scientists is a key part of Google's success. Thus I found it very interesting to see the languages chosen by entrants in Google's AI challenge organized by the University of Waterloo. Read on the see the list.

About this time last year, I made time to sit down and blog about trends I was seeing in the job market pertaining to open source skills. This is an update after 1 year. What are the trends in the job industry pertaining to open source? Evidence indicates there are good jobs out there if you know where to look.

This is the third in our series on Asterisk. This article will cover enabling asterisk to record calls. You may want this to interview people over the phone, podcast, or some other purpose. Read on.

In the past, we've been given feedback that as an organization supporting open source and open standards we should not use certain technologies. Adobe flash, and Adobe Air have been two notable examples of this. For some, this issue is black or white... if you want to reach people on the web, flash is a big part of doing so. Conversely, those advocating open standards note the risks and damage caused by using technologies encumbered by patents and royalties and thus push strongly for free alternatives. It is thus interesting to see what Adobe has to say on the matter. Read on.