Or so claims SD Times...

http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33430

The decision process includes: "find a low-cost solution". More importantly, it includes "justify the fees to purchase and for support."

This drives down the cost of software and support for commercial products. It also rationalizes what your buy when …

See the 10 Open Source Opportunities entry in CIO Minute.

The OS and Virtualization territory is already staked out. Not sure this will be a real opportunity space.

Enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, BI) are scary. Scary because these are purchased by CIO's. CIO's are herd animals and -- of course -- an …

Check out Binstock's January 15th column in Software Development Times, Integration Watch: The End of PERL?

Very compelling case, generally free of the kind of subjective rants that often characterize analysis of PERL's viability. I tell people to drop PERL all the time, but I don't often have as clear …

For years, I've written documentation using ReStructured Text (RST). It's just one of several "lightweight markup languages ". For others, look at Markdown , StructuredText , Setext , among many others.

I generally use the rst2html utility that comes with Docutils . It works fine for small things.

I just read about the Sphinx documentation …

The Open Source Enterprise article in the November 15th InformationWeek is quite cool. Here's the "wow" quote for me.

Another way that open source code meets current needs is through lighter-weight integration than commercial vendors typically offer. By definition, open source code adheres to publicly approved standards. That means open …

See Martin Fowler's essay on Technical Debt . Also see Steve McConnell's thoughts <http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx.

We can use Agile techniques to get things done ASAP and ACAP (As Soon As Possible and As Cheap As Possible). However, we still need to …

Someone sent this question to their manager and included me on the CC: list.

"Would you consider tools like Django to quickly build web apps ?"

My suggestion is that a bald query like this can only get on of two possible answers: "No" (and a large number of unsubtle variations …

Why Python, indeed?

"It's clear that you find it easier and quicker to use Python, and that's fine. It's often quickest for people to use the tools that they know best."

As they say on Fark.com, "This".

However, the Python advantage doesn't stem from knowing Python better than Java …

Recently , I found out that my HTML parser was only a mere shadow Beautiful Soup . I invented what is -- essentially -- a similar core structure. I didn't carry it to the same level of completion. From what little research I've done, my invention predates Beautiful Soup.

It's one of those "collective …

The problem with Python is the vastness of the Open Source community. You may think you have something cool for HTML parsing , but then someone tells you about Beautiful Soup which already does it.

In my defense, I actually did a version of this HTML parsing back in '02. Indeed …