Slashdot Mirror

Another interesting option is Macadamian Technologies. They specialize in this sort of work. If you have ever worked on WINE, you will see they have done quite a bit of work on it. And there customer list is pretty impressive as well.

Seconded! That would give them real-world exposure to the development process, which would expose them to such things as:

diff/patch the sort of distributed development involved in open-source software does not lend itself to granting commit privileges to everybody and thus, until you earn them, you have to send patches out to a mailing list for review before being committed (meritocracy)
change logs you have to be able to describe the patch you sent out so that any other developer can understand them. It forces you to document your work before submitting it mailing lists/newsgroups whatever discussion forum the project uses, invaluable for coordination, code reviews of submitted patches and answering questions from fellow developers code reviews already briefly mentionned, but this is the best way to make sure the open-source concept works (i.e. make sure the code is seen by other eyes first) and helps improve future submissions benevolent dictators for life look that up on wikipedia for the "political organization" behind large projects use the source sometimes the best way to answer a question is to perform searches/readings of the source code and updating the documentation as necessary so the next person doesn't need to do the same work on a project you actually use it's most rewarding when you find a bug in software you use, and then fix it. You can then show your mother: "See? I made it possible to do that!" or "It no longer crashes when you do this". This is called "eating your own dogfood" use a bug tracking system fellow users of the open-source software will report bugs and it's a good opportunity to interact with your users to see if the software should (eventually) change at a lower level to accomodate them

In conclusion, it's not that you can't learn these things elsewhere, it's just that it's really easy for anybody to participate, learn and gather experience for the "real world" (tm).

Sources:
So you want to be a Windows Installer XML developer?
Single Committer Software Development
Part of Your Complete Breakfast

Seconded! That would give them real-world exposure to the development process, which would expose them to such things as:

diff/patch the sort of distributed development involved in open-source software does not lend itself to granting commit privileges to everybody and thus, until you earn them, you have to send patches out to a mailing list for review before being committed (meritocracy)
change logs you have to be able to describe the patch you sent out so that any other developer can understand them. It forces you to document your work before submitting it mailing lists/newsgroups whatever discussion forum the project uses, invaluable for coordination, code reviews of submitted patches and answering questions from fellow developers code reviews already briefly mentionned, but this is the best way to make sure the open-source concept works (i.e. make sure the code is seen by other eyes first) and helps improve future submissions benevolent dictators for life look that up on wikipedia for the "political organization" behind large projects use the source sometimes the best way to answer a question is to perform searches/readings of the source code and updating the documentation as necessary so the next person doesn't need to do the same work on a project you actually use it's most rewarding when you find a bug in software you use, and then fix it. You can then show your mother: "See? I made it possible to do that!" or "It no longer crashes when you do this". This is called "eating your own dogfood" use a bug tracking system fellow users of the open-source software will report bugs and it's a good opportunity to interact with your users to see if the software should (eventually) change at a lower level to accomodate them

In conclusion, it's not that you can't learn these things elsewhere, it's just that it's really easy for anybody to participate, learn and gather experience for the "real world" (tm).

Sources:
So you want to be a Windows Installer XML developer?
Single Committer Software Development
Part of Your Complete Breakfast

You missed one, Canada. Might I suggest one.

The previous company I worked for had a part in developing The Living Dictionary at least three years ago now. Sun's site has a short piece on it.

How about the fact that it includes Windows DRM? Or that it's just another arm of the Borg? That it's probibly just as insecure as Windows?

Do you know how goofy you sound, dismissing my practical reasons and then spitting out stereotypical Slashbot-isms? And you ignored my most important reason, the lock-in to an undocumented protocol.

By the way, Groove used to have a half-hearted Linux version. Wonder what happened to it...

Ther is nothing wrong with charging for software, and nothing wrong with building apps for Windows.

Ther is something wrong with charging a lot for software that does nothing I couldn't accomplish in an hour of python scripting around ssh. The needed functionality is so easy to achieve (since the tough part, the security, is handled by existing software) that chances are somebody else has already given away a free implementation. That's what I'm asking about.

If I were inclined to touch Windows programming, I might do it myself...

Take a look at SSCLI for Linux

Coding Conventions