221 items tagged “open-source”
2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
/trunk/jl/scraper. journa-list.com is open source, and the screen scrapers are written in Python.
Kosmos Distributed File System (via) New open source distributed filesystem similar to Google’s GFS.
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...
Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.
Why Tamarin instead of... Justification for Tamarin in Mozilla over Mono and the JVM. It mainly comes down to license compatibility and overall size.
Sweet Gig. SitePen seek “R&D Associate” to have fun hacking on Open Source software and researching whatever they think is important.
Legal advice for businesses that are scared of open source (via) Useful for pointing people to.
Django weekly roundup: July 30. Every active open source project needs something like this.
Grub. Jimmy Wales just announced at OSCON that Wikia have acquired Grub from LookSmart, and will be releasing it as open source.
gSculpt. Powerful open source modelling software, written in Python and demonstrated (to much applause) as the last lightning talk of EuroPython 2007.
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days. Absolutely incredible feat of software engineering by Miguel de Icaza and the Moonlight team.
Croquet. Open-source collaborative virtual world environment built on top of Squeak, a bit like a decentralised version of Second Life.
google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and 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).
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.
Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think.
VirtualBox. GPL licensed virtualization software; they recently released an OS X version.
Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties.
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.
Adobe open sources Flex. Ted Leung says that this might indicate the possibility of Adobe open sourcing Flash itself in the future.
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.
opensource @ Joost. Joost is built on top of Mozilla, Redland, SQLite and a bunch of other bits and pieces of Open Source infrastructure.
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.”
Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface.
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.
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.