This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the first OpenCamp in Dallas, TX. While I've been to a few of the CMS-focused events - WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp NYC, and DrupalConDC - this was my first time at one of the crossover events. In one event, we had some of the best and brightest from each of the communities in one place presenting, talking, drinking, and generally arguing over the intracies of each of their systems and why the other guy was completely wrong.

Alright, I'm kidding.. most people thought everyone else was just mostly wrong.

First, some high points:

This coming year will be my third at SXSW so this time I partnered with Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) to submit a Core Conversation proposal called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media". Here it is:

What are they building? Did he quit or get fired? Who is she dating now?

As helpful as Facebook can be in knowing who is dating who.. does that really help anyone? Is that even interesting? Wouldn't you like to know about the things that *aren't* being talked about? Professionally, how can you look at a "stealth startup" and figure out what they're doing and how they're doing it? How can you learn about their investors, products, and even potential customers? How can you scare the hell out of them for fun and profit? Who are the Connectors? Where are the Mavens flocking? How can the CIA put two and two together to equal terrorist?

Last week at the GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC), a GNOME Foundation member by the name of Dave Neary presented the results of the GNOME Census. While the data and conclusions are interesting and inflamatory to some*, the motivations of the GNOME Census were quite simple:

What is the GNOME Census?

We’re aiming to answer three questions as completely as we can:

When we spec'd out the Web2project Desktop Client, the Vision was to build a simple client that would retrieve a user's list of tasks, allow them to log time against any or all of them, and update the server with the time and comments. While the vast majority of the time the user would be online, there are times - either by choice or necessity - when the user may not be able to connect to their server. Therefore, we needed a simple local datastore.

While I could attempt to have mysql installed locally, that's a huge dependency that will scare away non-developers. Alternatively, some file-based XML monstrousity might work but then I'd have the fun of dealing with XML. Without a doubt, SQLite was the only logical choice, especially once I found out Flex has support built in.

If you've only worked with a "normal" database engine like MySQL or SQL Server, then you'll quickly realize that SQLite is whole other beast..

For those of you just tuning into the WordPress/Thesis battle, here is the current - as of 19 July 2010 - state of things:

Update: To be fair, a great deal of inspiration for this post came from Ed "Funkatron" Finkler and his session at phpWorks 2008 Picachu pitch-at-ya peek-at-you lightning talk called "Users are Assholes" and later by Matthew Weier O'Phinney's lightning talk called "How to get kicked off my Project." Thanks for the fodder guys!

On all sides of software development, there are annoyances. Some of them go beyond annoyances and into pet peeves. Some of them go beyond pet peeves and incite open war within projects and communities. After witnessing a number of these rants - from developers and non-developers - and even sharing a few myself, I thought maybe I could make the situation better.

Therefore, I present here for comment:

The Ten Commandments of Open Source Software.