It's been more than a year since the inception of the Mambo Foundation and the melodrama it sought to end. Now in its sixth year as a free software project, Mambo's momentum continues with the recent release of version 4.6.2. With that in mind, Ric Shreves, the president of the Mambo Foundation and member of the Mambo Steering Committee, took some time to answer a few questions about Mambo and the Mambo Foundation.

Few software technologies are more difficult to learn to implement than the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Most commonly you'll know LDAP as Active Directory on Windows or OpenLDAP on just about every other operating system. It was designed to make system administration easier, but unless you know how to install, configure, and successfully implement it, OpenLDAP can't do a thing for you. Fortunately for those of us who weren't born omniscient, O'Reilly has a great book on the subject: LDAP System Administration.

This editorial is an experiment. It was originally written by Radu-Cristian Fotescu for his blog, but he offered us the chance to publish it here on The Jem Report as well. It is extremely long, and divided up into separate pages, which is something I don't usually do with articles. So the format in which this is published is the first experiment. The second experiment is a matter of this article's content. I don't agree with everything Radu-Cristian says in his article, but I very much agree with what he is doing, which is to take a brutally honest look at the failures of the open source community and demand that we begin to recognize them instead of continuing to ignore the parts that aren't working correctly. This is the first step in fixing some of the problems that frustrate us all as GNU/Linux and *BSD users. Maybe it's time for a great re-examination of our processes and attitudes, and think about what needs to be done to create great software instead of continuing to perpetuate old mistakes on the basis that tradition, politics, rhetoric, and dogma are more important than critical thinking.

The phrase "I am not a lawyer" (IANAL for short) is used with alarming frequency when publicly discussing the increasing number of legal issues surrounding patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets (what is commonly referred to generally as intellectual property, or IP for short) in the technology industry. Seldom do we hear directly from the IP trenches; most of the public commentary on IP issues seems to come from bloggers, so-called "luminaries" or "thought leaders," news editors, and press-hungry CEOs, few or none of whom are qualified to offer informed opinions on these subjects. In this interview, Jack Haken, the vice president of the Philips Intellectual Property and Standards and 2006-2007 visiting professor at Fudan University Law School in Shanghai, China describes some of the work he does as an IP attorney for a technology company that has had a significant impact on the computer, audio, and video technology industries, explains some of the issues facing technology companies today, and offers some advice to open source software developers.

The majority of computer science education focuses on software functionality. You're taught the process of building a program, usually from small, hypothetical programming problems and case studies. Once the program is working as expected, the project is over forever and you move on to the next one. While this approach may be effective for teaching future programmers how to use a specific language and implement certain functions, processes, and theories, it is terrible at preparing them for what the author of Code Craft calls "the software factory" -- the actual software development industry. It is only too late that so many programmers learn how to write secure, maintainable, readable code; some never do. Code Craft is the perfect segue from a computer science degree to the "real world" of software development.

I've been a fan of the Head First series from O'Reilly since the original Head First Java, and though I still think it could do with some improvements, it's among the best and most innovative ways to learn a new programming technology or technique. Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design follows perfectly in Head First Java's footsteps not only in its style and methodology, but also in its subject matter. This book is the natural next step to Head First Java -- it might be what you read after you've written several meaningful Java applications and are ready to go pro.

During the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCALE) 5x's mini-conference on women in open source software, BSD Certification Group member Dru Lavigne put forth the idea that free/open source software provided an excellent opportunity to inexpensively change one's career path. Since this is an idea that has not been widely explored, Dru took some time to talk to me about it, as well as provide an update on the BSD system administrator certification program that is currently in development.