Various interesting links related to the class.

Project Overview

• What will people pay for? Dan Bricklin. [www.bricklin.com/peoplepay.htm]

Project Lifecycles

• Anchoring the Software Process, Barry Boehm, USC, 1995. [citeseer.nj.nec.com/boehm95anchoring.html]
• The Graphing Calculator Story. A really interesting story about hard core geekdom and what it takes to get a project built and shipped by a large company. By Ron Avitzur, the author and guiding spirit behind Graphing Calculator from Pacific Tech.
• Fog Creek Software home page. [www.fogcreek.com] Fog Creek is the creator of the bug/feature tracking software product FogBUGZ. A principal in the company is Joel Spolsky, author of Joel on Software, "tips, opinions, and highly questionable rants on the software development process" that I think are great reading (archive). Some relevant rants are:
  • Painless Functional Specifications
  • The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
  • Daily Builds Are Your Friend
  • Painless Bug Tracking
  • Painless Software Schedules
• VisiCalc history. Two first-person accounts of the beginnings of a killer app.
  • Software Arts and VisiCalc, by Dan Bricklin
  • Implementing VisiCalc, by Bob Frankston
• The official history of Google, another killer app. Unofficially, the web remembers everything, at least for a while.
• There is no official history of the Cuecat that I can find. (surprise!) But here's an interesting review of how it happened from the Dallas Observer (competitor to the company that spent $40M on the Cuecat).
• Inattentional blindness. We see what we're looking for.
• "Here's what's really sad -- the overwhelming majority of so-called successful development projects produce mediocre software." -- Victoria Livschitz, senior IT architect, Sun Microsystems
• And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done. Linus Torvalds

Some interesting data sources

• Marine Data Buoys [map] [Tatoosh Island] [Cape Elizabeth- 45NM West of Aberdeen, WA]
• River flow and level [Washington Kayaking] [Real-Time Data for Washington: Streamflow]
• Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) [home] [backbone architecture]
• Real Time Transit Info (SmartTrek) [SmartTrek home] [Whidbey Ferries]
• Travel times (DOT) [traveltext.html]

Design

• Perfection and Simplicity and Designing Distributed Systems from A Conversation with Ken Arnold by Bill Venners, artima.com.
• Are Programmers People? And If So, What to Do About It?, Ken Arnold.

Deployment

• FreeBSD Release Engineering, Upcoming Release Schedule.
• Balancing Discipline and Flexibility with the Spiral Model and MBASE (Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering), Boehm and Port
• Unified Process for EDUcation, Rational Software Corporation and École Polytechnique de Montréal

The SCO Soap Opera

• Groklaw site dedicated to following the continuing story of SCO vs. the world.
• 23-Jan-03. SCO has created a new division entrusted with managing its intellectual property assets.
• 7-Mar. SCO Files Lawsuit Against IBM. "The SCO ® Group (SCO), the owner of the UNIX operating system, announced today that it has filed legal action against IBM in the State Court of Utah, ..."
• 14-May. SCO warns commercial Linux users of potential 'legal liability'
• 26-May. SCO announces a Unix technology licensing deal with Microsoft Corp.
• 30-May. Analysts to SCO: No thanks to code review offer Linus Torvalds likened the fight to a Jerry Springer episode.
• 13-Mar-04. SCO cuts to the chase... "The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws, and IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are barred."
• 29-Apr. ... then backs off.
• 21-May. Now what? IBM slams 'grandiose' SCO, asks for whole farce to be called off.
• 10-Feb-2005. Judge Kimball: "... it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities."

Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law

• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• Business Week: A Big Fly in the Open-Source Soup (13-August-2004). Or, as Groklaw titles it: Businessweek to Linux: Dump the GPL So Business Can Embrace and Extend It
• Intellectual Property, Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding, The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation.
• The Free Software Definition, The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation.
• The Open Source Definition, The Open Source Initiative (OSI).
• Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative "is a source licensing framework that makes source code broadly available while preserving the intellectual property rights that sustain a strong software business."
• SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers.
• Microsoft (and other large companies) are writing and receiving patents for many, many "innovations" and various novel ideas. Is the intent is to prevent competition from small and medium sized developers?
• More innovative software patents for Microsoft.
• Employee Non-disclosure agreements.

More Intellectual Activity

Taking responsibility for your knowledge portfolio

• Boeing
• IBM
• Sun
• How To Keep Your Job, a talk from the Pragmatic Programmers.

International Education

• Global E³ is an international exchange program for engineering students at member institutions. The program offers the opportunity for American students to study in one of 17 countries overseas.