Bomoko and other nonsense words

  A few years ago, a friend of mine decided to challenge himself to do 12 patches to Drupal in 12 months . Since I work on an open source product, I make contributions to OSS practically daily, but this year I'd like to give back a little more - so I'm going to attempt to do 12 contributions outside of the things I work on daily . But why? It's worth spending some time thinking and writing about the current problems with open source software. We have, by and large, a demographics problem , a problem with large corporations hoovering up the unpaid labour of contributors and profiting off it, there are various cultural issues within the free and open source communities we're still trying to address. And yet, I still think of Open Source software as being something of a triumph in a world where we seem to value profit over everything else. Where we seem to, almost reflexively, seek to reduce any occurring phenomenon to its dollar value. From the first time I heard of Free ...

Back in South Africa, in the early 90s, I was invited to take part in programmes offered at the Johannesburg College of Education's "Gifted and Talented Center". I can barely remember much about it. I recall that I did courses in electronics, drama, programming, and study techniques. Further, I remember the buildings and the general feeling of the place (massive buildings, alcoves with chairs and windows in the long passages between primary blocks, etc.). However, I couldn't remember very much around the nature of the programme (if, indeed, I ever knew anything about it) - who funded it, how were pupils identified, etc. I tried searching online but to no avail, there was one hit on someone's personal blog, but that was it. I did, however, manage to find the director of the JCE Gifted Child Enrichment Center from the time I attended and took a chance, asking him if he'd be willing to provide me with some information. He response was both generous and massively...