Stuff I'm reading, end of June edition

Took a day off to enjoy the beautiful weather ... and tonight we're heading into the city for something we've never done before: opera!

Meanwhile:

• Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright case goes back to San Fran: Supreme Court denies Google petition

  Now that the Supreme Court has denied Google's petition and appellate attorney Joshua Rosenkranz (of Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe) has once again shown why he was dubbed the "Defibrillator" (for bringing cases back to life that appeared to have been lost), the sizable litigation caravan that had gone from California to Washington DC for the appellate proceedings--where an amazing reversal of fortunes occurred, with Oracle now having the upper hand--can finally head back all the way to the West.

• The Problem With Putting All the World's Code in GitHub

  But Github’s pending emergence as Silicon Valley’s latest unicorn holds a certain irony. The ideals of open source software center on freedom, sharing, and collective benefit—the polar opposite of venture capitalists seeking a multibillion-dollar exit. Whatever its stated principles, Github is under immense pressure to be more than just a sustainable business. When profit motives and community ideals clash, especially in the software world, the end result isn’t always pretty.

• The costs of forks

  A request from Emilien Macchi for more collaboration between Fuel and the Puppet OpenStack project kicked off the discussion. Puppet is a configuration management utility that is used by Fuel to assist in deploying OpenStack. But Fuel has forked some of the Puppet modules it uses from the Puppet OpenStack project—which creates Puppet modules for OpenStack components—into its Fuel Library repository. Macchi noted a number of problems with how that has been handled over the last two years.

• Killing yourself to survive is not the same as innovating

  To be sure, it is a maxim of economics that the returns to innovation are often higher for new entrants than incumbents precisely because new entrant’s don’t care about the sales of existing products. But it is equally important to note that that maxim only arises if the incumbent expects entrants not to win with those new products. As soon as they expect that, because the incumbent has other assets — namely its core brand — the incumbent has a more powerful incentive to develop those new products than entrants. This is one way of looking at Facebook’s acquisitions. They are not so much about becoming a family of brands but instead, after uncertainty is resolved, continuing to fund innovation on products where the incentives to fund entrant’s doing them has fallen, not risen.

• Collected Wisdom on Business and Life from the HBS Class of 1963

  The site, If I Knew Then, is actually also a book written by Artie Buerk, a member of the Harvard Business School (HBS) class of 1963 and contains collected wisdom — all in quotation form — from his classmates, gathered in preparation for their 50th reunion.

• Respect Your Salespeople: They Earn Your Salary

  A salesperson’s domain knowledge isn’t just a boon to sales, it’s an important component when sales brings back customer feedback. Engineers know when they’re dealing with a “coin-operated” salesperson, and they have no respect for the species. ‘Ah, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about!’. Actually, engineers don’t have much respect for sales, period, but they’ll listen to a technically competent salesperson, particularly if he or she is bringing back an esoteric bug report.

• Broadcasters, fighting, and data leakage

  The radio station builds an audience, and the third-party trackers leak it away.

• Google Summer of Code 2015 Frequently Asked Questions

  Timely evaluations of Google Summer of Code students are crucial to us.

• Expanding the Panama Canal

  Work began in 2007 to raise the capacity of Gatun Lake and build two new sets of locks, which would accommodate ships carrying up to 14,000 containers of freight, tripling the size limit. Sixteen massive steel gates, weighing an average of 3,100 tons each, were built in Italy and shipped to Panama to be installed in the new locks. Eight years and $5.2 billion later, the expansion project is nearing completion. The initial stages of flooding the canals have begun and the projected opening date has been set for April of 2016.