Despite our best efforts, the Daemonites still struggle at keeping documentation up to date. Documenting tags and functions is tortuous. Maintaining that documentation on an evolving code base is even worse. Might as well attempt to turn back the tide, or change global temperature by eating tofu.

The FarCry 5.0 release has been delayed. We're contemplating a significant licensing change and as a consequence we want to make the decision prior to making the release. Once we have resolved whether or not the license change is right for our community, we'll either release 5.0 under the current license, Common Public License 1.0 (CPL), or under the newly proposed dual-licensing scheme.

Infrastructure use to be a hurdle for many fledgeling communities but now you can have forums, version control, WIKI’s and issue trackers hosted for free in a multitude of places; Google Code, RIA Forge, Source Forge to name a few.

Embarked on finding the ultimate IRC client for my Mac and got a bit side-tracked getting that old stalwart XChat running under Leopard. Turns out this whole Unix on OSX caper is kind of fun -- got myself a copy of MacPorts and with some 4,500+ ports available, I'm installing Unix bits all over the place. Here's a quick run down of just how easy it all is.

Tragically the Gods were not kind. Google are very open about the whole process and gave us a few minutes of "face time" to discuss the application. I've included a summary of the transcript from the public #GSOC channel. It was a very amicable chat so don't read any specific negativity into it -- beyond my own disappointment.

New Atlanta have open sourced their BlueDragon ColdFusion engine under the GPL2.0 open source license. Why do this? Will it work? How open will it be? What should we do? And what should Adobe do?

Daemon is throwing it's hat in the ring for this years, "Google Summer of Code", in an attempt to get the FarCry code base onto the program. It would be a first for ColdFusion, and with any luck we might get some great projects off the ground. But we need help!

Once a community project gathers some momentum, you need a formal process for managing issues and feature requests. No development team can hope to capture ideas, and bugs through a miasma of emails, forum posts and instant messages. Enter the bug database.

Documentation is the Achilles heel of many open source communities. At least Achilles got to rage through history before his untimely death -- open source projects are less romantic. For most developers, once you’ve scratched that itch, the thought of spending time not coding but documenting gives you an all over, body rash.

The number of participants in a particular open source forum, is just a fraction of the total number of developers actively using that product. Think of how many open source projects you use yourself, and compare that to the number of forums you actively participate in. Helping to ignite an open source community may be as simple as asking a few questions.