Top stories: July 18-22, 2011

Google+ is a social backbone, how to fix the patent mess, and programming well with others.

Here’s a look at the top stories published across O’Reilly sites this week.


Google+ is the social backbone
Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph.
Intellectual property gone mad
Patent trolling could undermine app ecosystems, but who can mount a legitimate challenge? Here’s four potential solutions.
Software engineering is a team sport: How programmers can deal with colleagues and non-programmers
Ben Collins-Sussman, tech lead and manager at Google, and Brian Fitzpatrick, engineering manager at Google, explain the “art of mass organizational manipulation.”
FOSS isn’t always the answer
James Turner says the notion that proprietary software is somehow dirty or a corruption of principles ignores the realities of competition, economics, and context.