236 items tagged “open-source”
2008
Reddit release their codebase. Under the same Common Public Attribution License used by Facebook for their recent source release.
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!
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.
Standing in Line. Simon Wistow coins “CLAMP” for LAMP + Cache, and expresses the need for a dirt-simple, high performance open source queue system.
Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner. Quietly released a few months ago; it’s really nice.
Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project.
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.
Sun To Acquire MySQL. Sun also employ Josh Berkus, one of the lead developers of PostgreSQL.
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
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.
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.
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.
2007
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.
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.
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.
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.