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The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

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Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

#4
I am curious about GPL compatibility in this situation. According to [1], software developed by US federal government cannot be licensed under the GPL since it is automatically in the public domain. However, the github repo readme makes the following claim:

"The project utilizes code licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and therefore is licensed under GPL v2 or later."

While I applaud this effort and wish to see more like it in the future, is there a possible issue with licensing here?

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GP...

Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

#7
post #5

Moving from MongoDB to MySQL. I never understood why people felt they need MongoDB/NoSQL for their projects. Does anyone have an example where it was really necessary/advantageous?

According to the README they say preformance improvements with Mongo. The downside was having to port all the new features over to it.

Personally I have used it to speed up development. It allows very fast iterations early on and integrates much more nicely with most languages then a SQL based solution. Also its a lot faster the MySQL.

Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

#8
post #5

Moving from MongoDB to MySQL. I never understood why people felt they need MongoDB/NoSQL for their projects. Does anyone have an example where it was really necessary/advantageous?

I'll give you an example for CouchDB that, for the first time in my life, I saw an advantage:

I created a webapp where a user can author a form (with several different kinds of fields), then it syncs with a mobile app that downloads the forms and allows for data collecting.CouchDB supports synchronizing with a server very easily and already has mobile support to. If/when the user changes the number of fields in the webapp, starting to collect that data makes it very trivial... no need to schema 'alter' statements in the server and synced back to the sqlite db in the phone. It all runs couch and it "just works".

Mind you, I am very skeptical about NoSQL in general, but for this particular example, for the first time in my life, I saw a clear advantage.

Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

#9
post #5

Moving from MongoDB to MySQL. I never understood why people felt they need MongoDB/NoSQL for their projects. Does anyone have an example where it was really necessary/advantageous?

I'd like a clear example too.

I can see the benefits of using something like NoSQL for temporary datastores (in memory only), but MySQL can function just fine as a key->value store as well to the best of my understanding.

Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

#10
It would be really cool if they let the devs use their public names and GitHub accounts to commit. As of right now it is WH-NewMedia, and there is no history. Makes me think this is a marketing excersize rather then a new leaf in federal software development.
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