News

Back in 2009, our day-to-day life at Planio was writing software for clients. Client work is often fun, but there can also be a feeling that you're stuck on a hamster wheel of endlessly churning through projects, always looking for new customers. We used Redmine, an open source project management tool built using the Ruby on Rails framework, to manage these projects. And then something curious started happening. We'd wrap up a project and our client would come to us asking if we'd consider letting them keep the project management tool...

Dr. Kyla McMullen spoke at OSCON's morning keynote session today. She was the first African-American woman to graduate with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. And it says a lot about tech's lack of inclusiveness that this landmark achievement happened in 2012. These days she is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Florida. In her keynote, Dr. McMullen explained that as a child she was a tinkerer and reader—like most of us in the room...

One occasionally runs into a company trying to build an open source project out of an existing product. This is a nuanced problem. This is not a company that owns a project published under an open source license trying to also ship a product of the same name (e.g. Docker, MySQL), but the situation shares many of the same problems. Neither is this a company building products out of open source projects to which they contribute but don't control (e.g. Red Hat's RHEL). This is a company with an existing product revenue stream trying to create a project out of the product...