Should Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage that flaws in its software have caused around the world? It might have to, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law. Although that sounds an appealing prospect, one knock-on consequence could be that open source coders would also be liable for any damage that errors in their software caused. Here's what the European Commission is proposing:

Perhaps my greatest shock came when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it. No test. *None*. Common sense said it had to be a closed loop, where the program would circle, forever, endlessly. Program control passed right through it, however, and safely out the other side. It took me two weeks to figure it out.

This paper examines this most frequently deployed of software architectures: the BIG BALL OF MUD. A BIG BALL OF MUD is a casually, even haphazardly, structured system. Its organization, if one can call it that, is dictated more by expediency than design. Yet, its enduring popularity cannot merely be indicative of a general disregard for architecture.

Degrafa is

* a declarative graphics framework

* open source

* licensed under MIT.

This file documents the GNU make utility, which determines automatically which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues the commands to recompile them.

Mascara is a tool that extends JavaScript with powerful ECMAScript 4 features like classes, namespaces and type-checking - and translates it to "lowest common denominator" object code, which will run in any browser.

These experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.

Despite the common belief it is actually possible to access private fields and methods of other classes via Java Reflection. It is not even that difficult. This can be very handy during unit testing. This text will show you how.

Aptana Studio is the premier IDE for Today's Web offering integrated language support for HTML, DOM, JavaScript and CSS, embedded development platforms and databases for PHP, Jaxer, Ruby on Rails, and Python. Plus support for emerging platforms that use Ajax like Adobe AIR and Apple iPhone. Aptana Studio is free, open source software based on the Eclipse tools platform.