Blimey. The rumours were true then.
I’ve just noticed that the Learn3k website has sort of stuttered into life!
There’s a tiny bit more information on there now anyway :)
Michael McCracken mentions a nice idea for a foundation dedicated to soliciting and publicising open source bounties, originally proposed here by Nat Friedman.
The idea is to connect up people who are offering money for enhancements to open source software with programmers who have the time and the skills to do the work.
Nice idea - I’m quite tempted to try to set a rough version of the site using a wiki or cms and see how it evolves. The big problem that I can see is how to handle disputes. I can imagine at least 3:
- someone claims a bounty but there is a dispute about whether it is completed
- someone pledges, concedes that the task has been completed, but then fails to pay
- two or more people claim the bounty for different solutions
Here are the rules that Nat used for the bounty scheme that he organised.
Apparently the new Office file format will be an open XML standard.
Sounds good, but I’m not quite sure where it leaves the Open Document standard, which as I understand it is the same, only different.
Take two open, universal document standards into the shower?
I’m not sure how extensible either of these formats is, but if we can standardise on one of them, and if it allows some way to embed new content types into the document, then we might end up getting back to something like OpenDoc by the back door. Obviously OpenDoc was a lot more than a document format, but having a standard for that is certainly a good start…