OpenID54 items tagged “opensource”
Ruby’s Vulnerability Handling Debacle. The critical Ruby vulnerabilities are over a week old now but there’s still no good official patch (the security patches cause segfaults in Rails, leaving the community reliant on unofficial patches from third parties). Max Caceres has three takeaway lessons, the most important of which is to always keep a “last-known-good” branch to apply critical patches to. 
2nd July 2008, 10:39 am
Reddit release their codebase. Under the same Common Public Attribution License used by Facebook for their recent source release. 
18th June 2008, 2:32 pm
Facebook Open Platform. Facebook have open-sourced (under a modified MPL, does it still fit the OSI definition?) the code for the Facebook Platform, including their implementations of FBML, FQL and FBJS. This is no small release; the tarball weighs in at 40MB and includes libfbml, which depends on Firefox 2.0.0.4 for its HTML parser! 3rd June 2008, 12:21 am
The Carbon Account. The carbon calculator project I contributed to at Torchbox last year has launched, and they’ve made the code available as open source. 30th March 2008, 7:04 pm
Standing in Line. Simon Wistow coins “CLAMP” for LAMP + Cache, and expresses the need for a dirt-simple, high performance open source queue system. 19th March 2008, 9:41 am
Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner. Quietly released a few months ago; it’s really nice. 13th February 2008, 11:30 pm
Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project. 23rd January 2008, 10:42 am
The thing that disrupts you is always uglier and worse in some way. Less features, less developed. But if there’s a 10X price win in there somewhere, the cheap rickety thing wins in the end.
— Rich Skrenta 18th January 2008, 10:59 pm
Sun To Acquire MySQL. Sun also employ Josh Berkus, one of the lead developers of PostgreSQL. 
16th January 2008, 1:55 pm
Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.
— Becta 12th January 2008, 10:35 am
Good architectural layering, and Bzr 1.1. Mark Shuttleworth on the growing importance of plug-in architectures as an open source project evolves, as they allow new developers to release their own components without needing commit access to the project. Django is pretty good for this, but more hooks (and a faster event dispatch system) would be useful. 9th January 2008, 2:06 pm
From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.
— Miguel de Icaza 4th January 2008, 12:42 pm
The Dark Side Of The Moon (via) Robert O’Callahan believes that Moonlight is a strategic mistake, because it gives credibility to Microsoft’s entry to a new market which they will use to “keep the competition on a treadmill”; Moonlight can also never be entirely free due to the need for a proprietary codec (VC-1) available only as a binary blob. 4th January 2008, 12:41 pm
The future of web standards. Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG. 17th December 2007, 1:16 pm
Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.
— Linus Torvalds 16th December 2007, 9:53 pm
The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
— Ian Hickson 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm
Simply put, free and open-source software is just the scientific model applied to programming: free sharing of work open collaboration; open publication; peer review; recognition of the best work, with priority given to the first to do a meaningful new piece of work; and so forth. As a programmer, it is the best arena in which to work. There are no secrets; the work must stand on its own.
— Dave Shields 30th November 2007, 11:47 pm
A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. I hadn’t realised how much competition OLPC faced from Microsoft and Intel’s Classmate. It would be amazing to see a generation grow up understanding that computers are open tools that they can control themselves rather than closed black boxes. 24th November 2007, 10:47 pm
Proprietary Software Does Not Scale. I’ve been thinking this for a while: if you’re using software with a per-CPU license you can’t just roll it out as an image across a bunch of virtual machines when you need to. 18th November 2007, 12:30 am
Yet when you look at the projects in the UK, these projects are failing. The more they fail, the more it drives [the UK government] down this weird behaviour of only selecting the biggest people—even though they’ve failed two or three times before.
— John Powell 16th October 2007, 5:33 pm
/trunk/jl/scraper. journa-list.com is open source, and the screen scrapers are written in Python. 11th October 2007, 4:10 pm
Kosmos Distributed File System (via) New open source distributed filesystem similar to Google’s GFS. 28th September 2007, 9:12 am
The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago... 21st September 2007, 11:32 pm
Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.
— Microsoft FAQ 13th August 2007, 1:54 pm
Why Tamarin instead of... Justification for Tamarin in Mozilla over Mono and the JVM. It mainly comes down to license compatibility and overall size. 9th August 2007, 12:43 pm
Sweet Gig. SitePen seek “R&D Associate” to have fun hacking on Open Source software and researching whatever they think is important. 7th August 2007, 2:47 pm
Legal advice for businesses that are scared of open source (via) Useful for pointing people to. 31st July 2007, 9:59 pm
Django weekly roundup: July 30. Every active open source project needs something like this. 30th July 2007, 5:03 pm
Grub. Jimmy Wales just announced at OSCON that Wikia have acquired Grub from LookSmart, and will be releasing it as open source. 27th July 2007, 5:24 pm
gSculpt. Powerful open source modelling software, written in Python and demonstrated (to much applause) as the last lightning talk of EuroPython 2007. 11th July 2007, 11:48 pm
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days. Absolutely incredible feat of software engineering by Miguel de Icaza and the Moonlight team. 21st June 2007, 11:10 am
Croquet. Open-source collaborative virtual world environment built on top of Squeak, a bit like a decentralised version of Second Life. 10th June 2007, 10:50 am
google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python. 9th June 2007, 6:15 pm
Semi-synchronous replication for MySQL (via) Google’s patch for MySQL which enables more reliable master-slave replication (a transaction isn’t committed until at least one slave has replicated the data). 5th June 2007, 10:07 pm
Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants (via) Sun just made their OpenID patent covenant official. Simon Phipps explains why these are a Good Idea. 22nd May 2007, 5:09 pm
Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think. 17th May 2007, 6:30 pm
VirtualBox. GPL licensed virtualization software; they recently released an OS X version. 8th May 2007, 9:35 pm
Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties. 4th May 2007, 5:54 pm
MSFT and Yahoo: two icebergs, roped together. Yahoo!’s engineering platform and culture is Open Source pretty much all the way down. Microsoft’s isn’t. I wonder how that would pan out. 4th May 2007, 5:50 pm
Adobe open sources Flex. Ted Leung says that this might indicate the possibility of Adobe open sourcing Flash itself in the future. 26th April 2007, 11:24 am
New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API (via) Google are taking a hybrid approach to development on their Maps API—an open source utility library layered on top of their closed source, obfuscated core code. 23rd March 2007, 9:09 pm
opensource @ Joost. Joost is built on top of Mozilla, Redland, SQLite and a bunch of other bits and pieces of Open Source infrastructure. 12th March 2007, 1:29 pm
Mono-based device wins Best-of-Show at CES. “The Sansa Connect is running Linux as its operating system, and the whole application stack is built on Mono, running on an ARM processor.” 17th January 2007, 11:21 pm
Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface. 12th January 2007, 11:36 am
Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
— Mark Pilgrim 12th January 2007, 9:51 am
The Second Life Viewer is now open-source (via) I’d heard that the biggest barrier to this was the need to protect the SL economy from malicious disruption. The FAQ is fascinating, and a real tribute to open-source principles. 8th January 2007, 6:47 pm
GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source. At least you can see how the code generator works now. 12th December 2006, 5:50 pm
Microsoft versus FOSS Configuration Management. Why the Free Software world’s source control works and Vista’s apparently doesn’t. 7th December 2006, 9:28 am
I want my OpenID! Open ID code bounties worth $5,000. Could this kickstart adoption? 28th July 2006, 4:02 pm
Yahoo! UI Library. Open Source JavaScript widgets and libraries. 14th February 2006, 1:12 am
DHS Funding Open Source Security. Paying for “source code analysis technology” coverage of Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and more. 17th January 2006, 10:18 pm
Taking charge of your own destiny
Scoble has posted 12 reasons that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are steering clear of the Microsoft platform. It’s an interesting list (the comments are full of treats too) but for me it misses the key reason that open source development tools are so compelling: they put you in charge of your own destiny. [... 367 words]
Enter the hedgehog
The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. Unlike most Linux distros, Ubuntu comes with just one desktop manager (Gnome) and one obvious default application for each of the essentials: Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for office work, Evolution for mail. [... 209 words]
Clearout
- Tristan Louis’ RSS to Necho convertor puts paid to the idea that the success of one format will be detrimental to the usefulness of the other.
- O’Reilly’s RegExp Power series (part one and part two) demonstrate some powerful tricks for use with Perl compatible regular expressions.
- Norman Walsh explains Content Negotiation and some of the pitfalls with modern browser implementations.
- So that’s what happened to Digitiser. See also a Digitiser Tribute and a Mr Biffo interview from 2001 for background information. I cuss you bad.
- George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
- Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. The title is misguiding; this is an essay about how online groups behave and how to look after them.
- A Java HttpClient Class.
- Some good stuff on Boxes and Arrows: Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers and Views and Forms: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications (Part 1).
- Inside our notions of “document” and Inside our documents II—the Runoff model.
- 5 days worth of XSLT observations from Simon St. Laurent: One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
- Windows programming with open source tools: Minimalist GNU For Windows and Win32 Programming with GNU C and C++.
/ clayshirky, digitiser, georgeorwell, httpclient, java, opensource, perl, regexp, rss, simonstlaurent, tristanlouis, windows, xslt
