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Confluence

Extend Firefox, for a prize: The joy of the bounty

Mozilla has launched its Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some cool prizes in the offing, including a MacBook Air.

The purpose? To encourage additional and improved add-ons for Firefox, of course.

It's similar in many ways to Atlassian's bounty program, which is giving away six $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.

Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.… Read more

The riddle that is Atlassian

If you work for an open-source company, no doubt you use some of Atlassian's software (Jira, Confluence, FishEye, etc.). If you're like me, you've always assumed that this was because Jira/etc. is open source. In this, I'm sorry to tell you, you would be as mistaken as I've been.

Atlassian is one of the most fascinating companies with which I'm familiar. Oddly enough, the company succeeds because it makes great software. It does, even more oddly, what most open-source companies aim to do. And yet it is not an open-source vendor.

There's a lesson in this for me...and maybe for you. I talked with Mike Cannon-Brookes today, Atlassian's co-founder and CEO, and learned the following:… Read more