154 items tagged “opensource”
2008
Cappuccino Web Framework. Now open source (LGPL)—the Objective-C-in-JavaScript web application toolkit from 280 North, who are speaking at this year’s FOWA in October. Beautiful logo. # 5th September 2008, 3:27 pm
Announcing dmigrations
The team at Global Radio (formerly GCap Media) is the largest group of Django developers I’ve personally worked with, consisting of 14 developers split into two scrum teams, all contributing to the same overall codebase.
[... 625 words]Chromium. Google Chrome is out! Here’s the open source project, including the code for the new V8 JavaScript virtual machine. # 2nd September 2008, 9:06 pm
Free licenses upheld by US “IP” court. Free software and CC licenses which dictate conditions that, when violated, turn you in to a copyright infringer now have precedence in US law. # 14th August 2008, 9:33 am
The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles? Alex Russell calls for a constructive step towards better gender balance in open source: make it clear that misogynistic, offensive and lewd behaviour will not be tolerated by open source communities and bake that policy in to community codes of conduct. # 28th July 2008, 12:44 am
FLOSS Weekly 34: Django. Randal Schwartz interviewed Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON for the consistently excellent FLOSS Weekly podcast. # 27th July 2008, 9:47 am
What the Heck is the Open Web? Brad Neuberg is seeking a two sentence definition. Bonus points for answering the following: “If Adobe were to open source Flex/Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight, would that be the Open Web? If so, why? If not, why not?” # 22nd July 2008, 1:33 am
Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML. # 8th July 2008, 8:20 am
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
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. # 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