ReadWriteHack

When Linus Torvalds used to talk about world domination, I thought it was relating to Linux. Apparently, it applies to his side-project Git, too. Developer demand has nudged Microsoft's CodePlex into supporting Git.

Most of the major open source code hosting services had already added support for Git. SourceForge, Google Code, GNU Savannah, and (obviously) GitHub have all offered support for Git repos. Yesterday, CodePlex's Mark Groves announced that CodePlex was bowing to developer demand and followed suit.

Gravity, a company that provides "interest graphs" based on content visited by users has announced Gravity Labs.

Gravity Labs is, as CTO Jim Benedetto puts it, "an initial peek into our underlying interest graph infrastructure as well as a showcase of some of our Open Source projects."

It takes a lot of confidence to label a project "awesome," but after looking over the Font Awesome collection, I'm inclined to agree.

Font Awesome is a set of glyph icons meant to work with Bootstrap, the Web App toolkit released by Twitter last year. The project is courtesy of Dave Gandy, co-founder of Lemonwise.

Yahoo is getting serious about turning YSlow into a real community driven project. The company put up YSlow on YDN in 2007, but now they've gone all-in with a BSD-licensed release on GitHub.

On the off chance you're not already familiar with YSlow, it is used to analyze Web pages against a set of best practices. YSlow crawls the DOM of a page, gets information about all of the page's components and then generates a grade for each of the 23 performance rules. YSlow has extensions for Firefox and Chrome, and has bookmarklets for Opera, Safari and mobile devices.

If you have kids (or you are one) and you're in or near the San Francisco area, you might want to sign up for the GitHub-sponsored CoderDojo coming on February 25th. CoderDojo is a free, not-for-profit movement with a strong open source emphasis on open source that seeks to teach young people how to code and make learning "a fun, sociable, kick ass experience."

The organization was founded by James Whelton and Bill Liao, and has focused mostly on Ireland until now. (There's also a CoderDojo in London.) The program is for kids between seven and 18, and according to GitHub's Cameron McEfee has been teaching "HTML, CSS, Javascript, iOS app development, and pretty much anything else they think sounds awesome." Kids also get guest lectures from tech mentors and tours of tech companies, in addition to instruction on development.

With little fanfare, GitHub has released Janky under the MIT license. Janky is a continuous integration (CI) server that runs on top of Jenkins and Hubot, designed to work with projects hosted on GitHub.

Today, CollabNet announced Connect, its new integration framework to provide app dev orchestration and management. The big news here is its integration with Atlassian's bug tracker tool JIRA. It also brings the Git source code repository into an enterprise setting that can be used more adroitly by larger project teams. The goal is that your data stays in one place while you move through the development and test lifecycle.

You can download a free trial of Connect here.

One year after acquiring Bitbucket, Atlassian is taking aim at GitHub. The company announced Git support with free, unlimited private Git repositories today. Git support is new to the Bitbucket service, which started around Mercurial repositories.

In addition to Git support, the company also announced a new importer for GitHub as well as importers for other hosted code collaboration services like Google Code, CodePlex and SourceForge.

You know there's a slight problem somewhere when a developer uses words like "hell fire" to refer to a project. When it comes to Etherpad, the popular collaborative editor, it's not the concept that's problematic, it's the delivery.

Thankfully, the Etherpad Foundation has put two years into delivering a kinder and gentler version. Called Etherpad Lite, it streamlines the original into something more manageable to install and run."

Companies and projects focusing on large-scale collaboration might want to start thinking about collaboration in a new way. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody closed out the second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 with a contrarian look at collaboration. While many treat collaboration as a "love fest" or harmonious interaction, Shirky put forward the idea that productive methods of fighting are the most successful, particularly in open source.

Shirky, who also teaches at New York University, started talking about his "favorite bug report ever." The bug report, for Firefox (#330884), was a corner case where Firefox would show any user what sites that should never save passwords even if selected by another user.