Open Source Archive

Eric S. Raymond is one of the three big figures in open source, together with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. During a talk for the Long Island Linux User Group, he made some interesting statements about the GPL, namely that the GPL is no longer needed due to the way the open source movement works.

Richard Stallman, frontman of the Free Software Foundation, has shifted his attention towards web applications. "In the free software community, the idea that non-free programs mistreat their users is familiar. Some of us refuse entirely to install proprietary software, and many others consider non-freedom a strike against the program. Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or non-free. But browsers run other non-free programs which they don't ask you about or even tell you about—programs that web pages contain or link to. These programs are most often written in Javascript, though other languages are also used."

Even though some believe that Microsoft's recent patent lawsuit against TomTom is a prelude to an all-out legal assault on Linux, that doesn't stop Bob Muglia, the company's president of Server and Tools Business, to look into the future and state that Microsoft's products will look more and more to open source software. In fact, he predicts most Microsoft products will have open source in them at some point.

Fosdem 2009 takes place in Brussels on the 7th and 8th of february. Just like in previous editions we have collected a list of interesting interviews with our main track speakers: Rob Savoye (Gnash), Martin Odersky (Scala), Pieter Hintjens (OpenAMQ), Victor Stinner (Fusil), Simo Sorce (FreeIPA v2), and Max Spevack (Fedora).

It seems that Haiku hacker Francois Revol (mmu_man) posted a few messages to a thread in MSI's forums asking to provide hardware with open specifications and/or (non-GPL) FOSS drivers such that alternative operating systems like Haiku and others could benefit and be supported as well. His messages were seemingly squelched by a forum moderator as "rubbish" while other, pro-Linux, postings seem to have remain untouched. Francois decided to respond with a public blog rant of his own opinions regarding the state of open source driver support and vendors' responsibility to their customers.

Theora is a video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. While the Theora bitstream format was standardized in 2004 and our beta releases have been used by millions, this 1.0 release is an important milestone reflecting the maturity and stability of the Theora codebase. A number of leading multimedia web groups already support Theora. Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox, the world's most popular open source browser, will support Theora natively, as will releases of the multi-platform Opera browser. Top-10 website Wikipedia uses Theora for all of its video.

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that "Microsoft's sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft 'gets it' regarding the ASF" I had a fit of the giggles and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant. Gary Richmond explores Microsoft's motives. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

Terry Hancock offers a detailed dissection of the critical difference between power and freedom when it comes to understanding why Microsoft and GNU/Linux respectively are playing different games - and freedom is the only game in town for the free software. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

The open source world is currently debating the merits - if any - of synchronising the release schedules of several of the bigger, key projects that make up a Linux distribution. The discussion was started by Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and continued as a back and forth between the Ubuntu leader and KDE's Aaron Seigo, but of course other members of the community discussed right along on blogs and other venues. Sander, developer of Coccinella (an open-source Jabber client) provides some insights into the whole discussion.

BetaNews reports that popular news aggregator Reddit has gone open source. The Reddit source code is available now and is written largely in Python.

More often than not, the question arises on OSNews why certain projects or pieces of abandonware aren't released as open source software. Supposedly, this would speed up development, facilitate the growth of a community, all that jazz associated with open source development. Here are four projects I'd like to see released under a MIT license.

Coverity has published the 2008 edition of its Open Source Report. The report uses static code analysis on C, C++, and Java source code to determine the quality of the code. These reports are funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and supported by Stanford University, and are part of the US government's Open Source Hardening Project. The report is based on over two years' worth of data from Coverity Scan.

Ars reports: "The Standish group recently completed an extensive study that examines factors influencing open-source adoption. Based on five years of research and analysis, the report provides intriguing insights into open-source adoption levels and the way that open source is reshaping the software industry. Individuals who participated in the Standish survey identified several key drivers for open source adoption, including lower costs, better security and reliability, and faster development speed." Sadly, the report itself is not available to the public (you can purchase it for USD 1000), so I can't give you a more detailed analysis than whatever Ars has to say. Which is too bad, since I love diving into the statistical side of such a study.

"One of the most significant moments in the history of the modern software industry took place in 1998 when Netscape announced plans to release the source code of its browser under a license that would freely permit modification and redistribution. That pivotal event represents the point at which software freedom extended its reach beyond the enthusiast community and began its ascent into the mainstream. To celebrate the success of the past ten years and reflect on some of the challenges that the open-source software community will face in the future, we spoke to some of the pioneers who were there on day zero when revolution started. We want to share their perspectives on a wide range of issues, including software patents, the emerging challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open-source software on the desktop, the importance of interoperability, and the ongoing fight to bring software freedom to the masses."