It is the advent of open source programming and the web that has opened up this idea of a visible portfolio for coders and engineers, whose work never used to see the light of day.

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There was an all day program on their plans to develop open source programming tools and general standards to make use of the high speed, low latency and other special characteristics of current and future generations of non-volatile solid state storage.

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Both Swartz and Anonymous have been stark proponents of open access to information and open-source programming.

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As an open-source programming language, Java can be used, free of charge, by companies wanting to build tools and applications.

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Open-source programming is more like academic work than business.

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But on February 1st, he started a new job as CEO of Revolution Analytics, the company supporting, spreading, and enhancing R, the open-source statistics and predictive analytics programming language.

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Some are now exploring ways to apply the open-source process outside the world of programming, Shirky said.

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The two founders of CoderDojo are just as inspirational, 20-year old James Wheltan and his business partner, Bill Liao created the open source coding movement out of nothing except a belief that learning, especially programming, should be free and open, oh and the world needs more programmers.

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Maritz, with no installed base, wants the Java-coding hoards from Spring, or the open source communities around the Web application framework Ruby on Rails or the scalable network programming framework Node.js.

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Open-source programs across the board - the Apache Web server, the Perl programming language and the GNU development tool set, to name a few - are gaining legitimacy as a business platform.

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Programming works this way, too, and this is why the open source community is so important.

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