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From the website:
Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.
This could be a helpful org for penntags
tagged accessibility foss open_source_software penntags sakai_fall_2007 user_interface
by winkler4
...on 04-DEC-07
Eric Raymond's white paper on the lessons learned from open source software production. I capture these to assist in my thinking as we go forward with PennTags development. The Cathedral model represents a closed, commercial approach to software development while the Bazaar represents the OSS model of development.
- Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
- Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
- "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Chapter 11)
Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once. - If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
- When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
- Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
- Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
- Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law". - Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
- If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.