ReadWriteWeb

In organizations of all types around the world, executive decisions are met with objections from subordinates. For open source software projects, those objections often take on the tone of philosophical treatises. Such has been the case the past two weeks with the Mozilla organization's decision (which had been in the works for several months) to reduce the amount of data that its Firefox browser presents the user about its version number to near-zero.

The decision had been made as part of the group's transition last year to an expedited release system, with the goal of finalizing new major or feature releases of Firefox every six weeks, following a staggered 24-week development cycle. At that rate, we could be at Firefox 10 by the beginning of the year. Does that fact really matter? Perhaps not, say Mozilla contributors such as community manager and Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler, who supports discontinuing the hype over version numbers as any big deal that real-world users care about.

Database scaling and performance consultant Markus Winand wrote a blog post criticizing NoSQL adoption for performance reasons. "Most SQL performance problems result out of improper indexing," he wrote. "But indexing is not only a SQL topic, it applies to NoSQL as well."

He goes on to say, however, that there are some cases in which you might want to use NoSQL; and he suggests that Git may actually be a NoSQL database.

Red Monk analyst Stephen O'Grady recently looked at projects hosted on Ohloh and found that only 13.8% of those projects are using distributed version control like Git and Mercurial. All other projects were using centralized systems like CVS and SVN. O'Grady goes on to cite many benefits in using distributed systems, and the reasons that most developers don't take take advantage of them.

I'm curious: do you use distributed version control for any of your projects? If not, why not?

Seeing a lack stories on the experience of small teams switching from SVN to GitHub, Brian Krausz decided to share the experience he had switching his startup GazeHawk to Git. The team was having some issues with SVN and decided to make the leap. He was able to get the whole thing transfered in one weekend.

Disclosure: I didn't get an early invitation, so this is not a first-hand review of Google Wave. But from what I know now, I don't want an invitation anymore. It looks like too much of a productivity suck. But I do use Google Spreadsheet all the time. It is the de facto real-time, online, distributed collaboration tool for serious GTD business. It is the best tool for an agile, networked business.

But it could be way, way better. Excel is still the best spreadsheet; it has just fallen behind on collaboration (and collaboration is a show-stopper). But Microsoft could catch up there, and a lot of really sharp startups are gunning for the same space.

Git is a decentralized version control system created by Linus Torvalds that is used by a number of open source projects, most notably perhaps the Linux kernel. GitHub is a new hosted Git repository service that's being called a "social network" for programmers and with good reason. It also already has some high profile projects of its own on board: Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Merb, Prototype and Scriptaculous, among others. "[GitHub is] the way SourceForge should have been," gushed one beta tester.