The open source model assumes that the value of code is not necessarily monetary. Is this a precursor to the new economy, or will the capitalist world succeed in establishing money as the ultimate measure of all worth?

The week before JavaOne I quietly unleashed a new feature on Artima.com called Artima Developer Buzz. People with tech-oriented weblogs can register their RSS feeds in any of 16 communities (Java, Python, Open Source, etc.). Readers can quickly scan through Google-like summaries of posts to find what interests them.

In which I say a little bit about myself and why I'm doing this

One of the best ways to learn how a system works is by breaking it.

Read most any software engineering text book and you'll be told that requirements gathering is key to successful projects. Yet, many projects in start-up companies never develop such a document or, perhaps worse, have useless, sketchy documents that serve only political needs. What's going on here?

Despite the Java noisy noise about attracting Visual Basic-type developers, I retain the impression that many of us Java folks don’t get it. Either we can’t define this audience or we secretly don’t believe in its value. But there is value here, value loftier than merely growing product revenue and stealing corporate developers away from .NET.

We were in the pub when Charles posed an NP-hard problem: "How do you teach programmers style and elegance in code? I would like five points or properties that I can teach to my programmers." Trusty pints of Guinness in hand, Charles, Frank and I set about trying to find some kind of answer.

George Santayana, a notable philosopher, coined the phrase, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." A study of the history of the CORBA standard reveals that for WebService standards, history is again repeating itself.

I've spent most of my career in small companies, usually start-ups, doing software development under less than optimal conditions. I've got 15 or 20 years worth of (hopefully instructive) horror stories aching for an outlet. This is my first installment.

Java is in need of a sort of "Grand Unified Theory" for distributed applications. EJB, Jini, JXTA, and JMS have more in common than just the letter J, though you wouldn't know it from reading the specs.

The process we use to develop software also helps us develop ourselves.

Static Reasoning favors perfect planning over runtime adaptability. This is a favored approach in the software community. However, there are limits to static reasoning, grasping this fact helps achieve better manageability of complexity.

The open-source movement and agile programming may be converging. While reading Martin Fowler's excellent book "Refactoring", I realized development by refactoring is a sharp description of the normal style of open-source hackers. In this essay (which Martin Fowler and Kent Beck and I discussed in draft) I explore the connection further.

Java IDEs are very powerful but.....

The Hive Mind is asynchronous.  You don't have to be in the same place or even in the same time to be able to converse.