Simon Willison’s Weblog

/trunk/jl/scraper. journa-list.com is open source, and the screen scrapers are written in Python.

# 11th October 2007, 4:10 pm / journalist, open-source, python, scraping

Kosmos Distributed File System (via) New open source distributed filesystem similar to Google’s GFS.

# 28th September 2007, 9:12 am / gfs, goggle, kfs, open-source, rich-skrenta

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 / java, jython, open-source, python, rubinius, ruby, sourgrapes, sun, tim-bray

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 / java, john-resig, jvm, mono, mozilla, open-source, tamarin

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 / alex-russell, jobs, open-source, sitepen

Legal advice for businesses that are scared of open source (via) Useful for pointing people to.

# 31st July 2007, 9:59 pm / law, open-source

Django weekly roundup: July 30. Every active open source project needs something like this.

# 30th July 2007, 5:03 pm / clint-ecker, django, open-source

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 / grub, jimmywales, looksmart, open-source, oscon, oscon07, search, wikia

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 / 3d, europython, europython2007, gsculpt, modelling, open-source, python

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 / miguel-de-icaza, mono, moonlight, open-source, silverlight

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 / croquet, open-source, secondlife, smalltalk, squeak, virtualworld

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 / diff, google, java, javascript, neil-fraser, open-source, python

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 / google, masterslave, mysql, open-source, philippearson, replication

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 / openid, open-source, patents, simon-phipps, sun, tim-bray

Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think.

# 17th May 2007, 6:30 pm / arduino, hardware, hardware-hacking, open-source

VirtualBox. GPL licensed virtualization software; they recently released an OS X version.

# 8th May 2007, 9:35 pm / gpl, open-source, virtualbox, virtualization

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 / freebsd, hotmail, microsoft, open-source, windows, yahoo

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 / microsoft, open-source, yahoo

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 / adobe, flash, flex, open-source, ted-leung

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 / google, google-maps, open-source

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 / joost, mozilla, open-source

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 / ces, hardware, linux, mono, open-source

Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface.

# 12th January 2007, 11:36 am / camino, correo, macos, mail, mozilla, open-source, thunderbird

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 / open-source, secondlife

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 / google, gwt, javascript, open-source

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 / microsoft, open-source, sourcecontrol

I want my OpenID! Open ID code bounties worth $5,000. Could this kickstart adoption?

# 28th July 2006, 4:02 pm / bounty, openid, open-source