‘Triage‘ is a medical term for the process which happens in an emergency of sorting out who will die no matter what, who will need help so they don’t die, and who will be fine whether you help them or not. ‘Bug Triage‘ is a process in software engineering to sort out which bugs will be fixed now, which wil be fixed later, and which won’t be fixed. In addition to this each bug must be assigned a severity (a technical metric), and a priority (a business metric).
This is of course a rather general description. A good clear description can be found here: Bug Triage Meeting - Severity & Priority. Erik Sink has posted on his bug triage process here: My life as a Code Economist.
Yesterday announcements were made that Java has been released under the GPL2 Open Source licence. Here’s some of the relevant links:
Apparently it’s an early version of Java 7 that is immediately available under the new licence, this includes the Hotspot VM and the ‘javac’ compiler. However, the Java API class libraries and certain 3rd party components are still not yet open.
Personally I think this is great news. Adoption of Java has clearly been hampered on open source operating systems because it remained under a closed source licence for so long. It has allowed technologies such as Mono/.Net and Python to get ahead for development of cross platform desktop apps where Java may have a been a viable choice if only it’s licence had allowed it to be shipped along with standard packages.
The new release of Ubuntu is out. Seems it happened about a week ago so I’m behind the times already.
My dad met Jon Maddog Hall (from Linux International) in London this weekend at Kew Bridge Steam Museum. Nothing to do with Linux at all, he was visiting the museum where my dad is a volunteer. Jon was involved early on with Linux, he helped source DEC Alpha hardware for Linus to develop on. Here’s the photo he mailed on to us.
