Apple's freebie tools -- Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, etc. -- are wonderful things. I really like Numbers. I'm tolerant of Pages. I've used Pages to write books and publish them to the Apple Bookstore. (Shameless Plug: Pivot to Python.)

These tools have a significant problem. Protobuf.

"... [I] am thinking of building an in house conda forge, or buying a solution, or paying someone to set something up."

The build v. Buy decision. This is always hard. Really hard.

We used to ask "What's your business? Is it building software or making widgets?"

And (for some) the …

Or "When is it time to move?"

I've got https://sourceforge.net/projects/stingrayreader/ which has been on SourceForge since forever.

Really since about 2014. Not that long. But. Maybe long enough?

The velocity of change is relatively slow.

However.

(And this is a big however.) SourceForge seems kind of …

This: https://opensource.com/business/16/9/alternatives-powerpoint Missing from the list? The S5-based slide-show tools that are part of docutils. The only issue with S5 is that you need to carefully review each and every page to be sure you material fits. There's no autosizing of the fonts, or …

Wound up here: "A Place to Hang Your Hat" and the #LABHR hash tag.

H/T to this post: "Building a Hat Rack."

This is a huge idea. I follow some folks from the Code For America group. The +Mark Headd Twitter feed (@mheadd) is particularly helpful for understanding this …

ComputerWorld, November 22, 2010, has this: "Open Source Grows Up". The news of the weird is "It's clear that open-source software has moved beyond the zealotry phase." I wasn't aware this phase existed. I hope to see the project plan with "zealotry" in it.

The real news is "More than …

Interesting item in the November 1 eWeek: "Open-Source Software in the Enterprise".

Here's the key quote: "rather than asking if or when, organizations are increasingly focusing on how".

Interestingly, the article then goes on to talk about licensing and intellectual property management. I suppose those count, but they're fringe issues …

Years ago (6? 7?) I did some data profiling in Python.

This required reading COBOL files with Python code.

Superficially, this is not really very hard.

1. Python slice syntax will pick fields on of the record. For example: data[12:14].

#. Python codecs will convert from EBCDIC to Unicode without …

About a decade ago, I discovered the concept of Literate Programming. It's seductive. The idea is to write elegant documentation that embeds the actual working code.

For tricky, complex, high-visibility components, a literate programming approach can give people confidence that the software actually works as advertised.

I actually wrote my …

Whitehouse.gov is publicly using open source tools.

See Boing Boing blog entry. Plus Huffington Post blog entry.

Most importantly, read this from O'Reilly.

Many places are using open source in stealth mode. Some even deny it. Ask your CIO what the policy on open source is, then check to …