Thursday Threads: Kindle Ebook Lending, Google Ngram Viewer, Collaborative Open Source Development

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Peter Murray

This week brought news of the Kindle-based e-book lending program through Overdrive, and Peter Brantley has an opinion piece on what this means for Amazon, publishers, and even libraries. From the other e-book powerhouse — Google — is a TED talk presentation about the Google Books ngram Viewer. Finally, there is a view of one of the benefits of the open source software model with an announcement that six libraries are funding development to meet their needs.

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When Closed Source Companies Contribute to Open Source Communities

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Peter Murray

I was reading a story last week about the Linux Foundation‘s third annual report [PDF] of the Linux kernel, and in it was a section that talked about the affiliation of the programmers that contributed to the development of the kernel. This got me thinking about the affiliation of programmers in the library open source community. More on that after a brief detour to explain what the “kernel” is.

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