OStatic blogs

4 Resources For Keeping Open Source Efforts Legal

Sam Dean — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:47:41 -0500

You can never be too careful about the law if you're working in the open source world. As open source grows, so do the legal wrangles surrounding projects, licenses, and more. In the spirit of free, open source sotware, though, there are also many free resources for keeping open source projects legally protected, and under appropriate licenses. Here are four good, free resources and collections on this topic.

First, Know They Licenses

The Unlicense: A License For No License

FSFE and GPL-Violations.org on Reporting (and Avoiding) Licensing Issues

Thwarting Threats: Free OSS Legal Primer Boasts Big Authors

Image courtesy of Mr. Thomas on Flickr.

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Will Simon Phipps Energize OSI?

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:04:51 -0500

Former Sun chief open source officer Simon Phipps is joining the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board effective April 1st. Let's hope Phipps can shake the organization up a bit.

I'd hazard a guess that many newcomers to the open source community are partially or even wholly unaware of the OSI and what it's meant to do, because the OSI has not been a terribly dynamic organization over the past few years. The OSI is considered the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), and is the body that approves new open source licenses. But its influence has been considerably on the wane for some time now.

The last time OSI was called on to defend what open source means, some questioned whether the organization even had standing to weigh in. As Jon Corbet of LWN wrote in 2007:

OSI holds no trademarks which can be used to discourage unwanted uses of the "open source" term. In fact, the OSI has accomplished discouragingly little over the past several years. Nothing has been done to make the OSI a more community-oriented operation; the OSI board of directors elects itself and answers to nobody. About the only visible activities at the OSI are a multi-year process to try to reduce the number of approved licenses and the occasional approval of a new license. The OSI has not "gone wrong" - it has not started approving licenses that the community would disagree with. But it is widely seen as dormant and irrelevant to anything of interest that the community is doing.

OSI has been talking about being a more member-based organization for years upon years with little effect. This goes back at least as far as 2005, and the board has been making vague noises about becoming "member based," and struggling with definitions for membership, but failing to actually drive anything to completion. As OSI board member Ken Coar states on the OSI forums, the OSI has consisted "solely of its board of directors" which serve as a self-perpetuating body. The OSI Board chooses the members of the OSI Board, which even Coar admits is not "a terribly representative model."

But it seems Phipps, who is quick to defend OSI as "important and relevant", also sees that it's "time for change."

OSI needs to move from a "supreme court" model to a member-based model. I'd like to see activities promoting software freedom around the world both encouraged and represented by OSI — education, policy development and perhaps organisational support for open source projects. And if there was any way at all to be a more uniting force or have a scorecard — well, I can dream!

My goal as a Director will be to facilitate that change, a change that is already well under way following recent face-to-face discussions and the great work that Andrew Oliver and Danese Cooper have already put in. Expect to hear more on this subject as the year progresses.

It would be a wonderful thing indeed if OSI could move away from its "supreme court" model and become more active and more representative of the community it's supposed to represent.

The scorecard idea is one Phipps wrote about last year as a way to benchmark businesses as "open source." Instead of relying on a single item (using an open source license), companies would be scored on their governance practices, who controls copyright for projects, and so on. Then businesses would receive a rating rather than a binary declaration of being "open source" simply for using OSI-compliant licenses.

The scorecard might be a bit much to accomplish in the first year, but I sincerely hope that Phipps can do something to shake the OSI out of its somnambulance.

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Open Source Search Player Lucid Imagination Locks Up Another $10 Million In Funding

Sam Dean — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:43:03 -0500

Lucid Imagination, the Massachussetts-based startup focused on support and services for open source search technologies Apache Lucene and Solr, has announced that it has secured $10 million of Series B financing. After launching last year, the company was among a small handful of open source companies to obtain really significant venture capital funding. The company collected $6 million from a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by Granite Ventures and Walden International, and has also obtained funding from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA.

Lucid Imagination's most recent round of funding includes a new investment from Shasta Ventures, and extended participation from existing investors Granite Ventures and Walden International. Lucid will remain focused on both developers and organizations using Lucene and Solr.

"Apache Lucene/Solr open source search is quite promising," says Ravi Narayan, Director of Software Development at eBay, in a statement accompanying Lucid's announcement. "We are working with Lucid Imagination to use it for some of our search function needs." Officials at Lucid also made the point that the new $10 million in funding is more than twice the $4.7 million median deal size for 2009, reported by VentureSource.

"Companies want to find data as easily as consumers find stuff on the internet every day," says Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, in a statement. "Technology-savvy executives recognize they need enterprise-ready technology that can deliver search power that is tailored to fit their business needs and their marketplace. With this investment, Lucid Imagination can continue to satisfy the appetite for reliable, cost-effective differentiated search that quickly finds the right information wherever it is and delivers it to users."

The Lucene search library ranks amongst the top 5 Apache projects, installed at over 4,000 global companies. Although OStatic is primarily Drupal-based, our site's search is based on Lucene. According to Lucid Imagination officials, the Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project.

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A Good Company Looks Like A Good Open Source Project

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:15:33 -0500

Business Insider is running a slideshow feature on "How to run a company that engineers actually want to work for." It should come as little surprise that the engineer-friendly company looks a lot like successful open source projects, except with a paycheck and benefits. Maybe companies of every stripe should be spending more time looking at FLOSS projects to see what motivates people to contribute.

Some of the tips that BI suggests include making employees comfortable, giving employees a mix of projects, letting workers do useful things, and focusing on short-term planning and reasonable deadlines, etc. Sound familiar? This looks like any number of successful and thriving open source projects. While Business Insider focuses on engineers, the lessons apply to any skilled and creative discipline. It's as true for marketeers, Web designers, and journalists as it is for software engineers.

If you'd like to look at the longer-form version of what companies should be doing to better engage their employees, take a gander at the forming Open Source Way online book that's being put together by some of the folks at Red Hat. The abstract reads:

This guide is for helping people to understand how to and how not to engage with community over projects such as software, content, marketing, art, infrastructure, standards, and so forth. It contains knowledge distilled from years of Red Hat experience.

While written with open source communities in mind, most of the suggestions can be abstracted to apply to other disciplines and organizations. My particular favorite is "embrace failure," something that many organizations have yet to learn. Encouraging failure (while taking note) helps ensure that employees will take risks and extend themselves further than employees working in a risk-adverse culture. (This is also a major theme in Seth Godin's Linchpin.)

This isn't to suggest that open source projects, even the good ones, have all the answers -- or that the FLOSS model should be taken to the extreme or too literally. But when you see a FLOSS project with enthusistic participation from individuals and other organizations (like Drizzle), you could find plenty of inspiration for improving any organization's effectiveness.

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OStatic Buffer Overflow...

Sam Dean — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:32:05 -0500

Meet Ubuntu Linux's New CEO. Jane Silber took over from Mark Shuttleworth and is making changes at Canonical.

Hands On with Opera Mini for Android. A test drive of the browser, which has been a long time coming to Android. Who should get it?

Kindle for Android Finally Coming Soon? After arriving on other mobile platforms, it's overdue on Android.

The 10 Most Downloaded Open Source Apps Of All Time. eMule tops the list?

Microsoft Offers a Sophie's Choice. How much application freedom does the company really encourage?

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Evan Prodromou Speaks on the Future of StatusNet

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:03:15 -0500

There's no moss growing on StatusNet these days. The company has been busy announcing cloud service plans, an enterprise network service, and the 0.9 release of the open source StatusNet microblogging platform.

To get a sense where all this is going, I took the chance to ask a few questions of StatusNet's CEO, Evan Prodromou. He gives the scoop on the new stuff coming to StatusNet and provides a few thoughtful answers on where he thinks social media is heading.

OStatic: What inspired StatusNet? Why do we need an open source microblogging platform?

Social networking software is hugely popular. But most social networking software is provided as a consumer-oriented service in the cloud. Open source microblogging software puts this functionality in the control of the users; they can use it for public networks or private ones. We think microblogging is too big for any one site or company.

OStatic: StatusNet is now offering everything from Identi.ca to private plans, single-user plans, community plans, and offerings for the enterprise. How do these fit together? What's the use case for individual plans vs. enterprise plans?

There's really two sides: the public and the private. On the public side, we see people using community sites to bring together public organizations. Single-user sites are great as broadcast platforms for a company or person. We see community and single-users sites working together in a network-of-networks using simple federation protocols.

On the private side, there's a great symbiosis between the cloud plan and enterprise installations. You might think that small and medium-sized businesses will be attracted to the cloud, while larger organizations would want the internal deployment, but I think it's more complex than that. The cloud makes sense for some large organizations. What really makes a difference is how integrated the organization wants the software to be in their network, and how much they want to customize the server for their own needs. We've had some very, very big organizations who want to use the cloud.

Identi.ca is our flagship site, and it's the way that most people up until now have tested out the software. Over the 18 months of its existence developed into the main social network on the Web for people involved with open source software and open Web standards.

But the social Web needs to be a network-of-networks — not just one big site. We hope that people will use personal StatusNet Cloud accounts, or public community sites, to connect to the networks that matter to them. So, if Identi.ca's community resonates for you, I highly recommend that people have an account there. But if not, there are a lot of other options available.

OStatic: On the surface, this seems ripe for fragmentation -- whereas Twitter is one site everybody flocks to, there seem to be almost too many options with all the offerings from StatusNet. Is that a concern, or how is this solved?

It's solved with interoperability. We've developed a great protocol called OStatus that's based on some incredible emerging technologies: PubSubHubbub, Salmon, ActivityStreams, and Webfinger. We think it's a great way to keep these diverse networks interconnected.

There are a number of services -- Google Buzz, WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr -- that already implement OStatus partially. We're looking forward to making them all work together well.

OStatic: Some folks have criticized "social media" as being a flash in the pan. Any concerns that microblogging is a fad that might give way to next year's hot new technology or trend?

I think that that's already happening. We've seen a transition from plain-jane microblogging in 2007-2008 to much more sophisticated and rich status updates in 2010 and beyond. The rapid growth of location-based services like FourSquare and Gowalla is also part of this evolution.

But "microcasting" model -- broadcasting updates to a circle of friends and fans -- seems to be growing, not shrinking. Social news like digg.com, social music like last.fm or blip.fm, and photo sharing like Flickr are incredibly popular.

Technology is always changing. That's one of the great strengths of open source software -- it can rapidly adapt to new and future needs.

OStatic: Old Unix hands might remember "finger," but it's probably not a common term. Can you talk a bit about WebFinger and what it's used for?

WebFinger is an addressing system. Blaine Cook (former technology lead at Twitter!) had the key insight that we don't associate URLs with people -- we associate them with "pages". We associate email addresses with people -- or, things that look like email addresses.

WebFinger gives users an email-like address that they can share with friends. So if you want to subscribe to Dewitt Clinton of the Google Buzz team, you can just use his WebFinger account, dclinton@gmail.com, rather than trying to find an URL for his notice feed.

My WebFinger account is evan@status.net. We have an update@status.net for updates about the software, and cloud@status.net gives info about the StatusNet Cloud Service. It's a really convenient system!

OStatic: Any privacy concerns or problems that people should be aware of with WebFinger?

Well, clearly, if your Webfinger and your email address are the same, you're not going to be able to give out one without giving out the other. But there are some obvious workarounds for that.

OStatic: StatusNet has been growing quite a bit lately. What's the vision for the next year or two — and what will it take for you to consider StatusNet successful?

We have a lot on our plate for the next couple of years. In the near term, we're going to concentrate on providing enterprise status updates for our business customers. But we also want to make sure that an open and distributed social Web continues to grow and thrive.

Probably our biggest challenge is going to be reaching out to developers and designers to get them used to our software. We want Web marketing agencies and enterprise software developers to have StatusNet as a tool in their toolbelt -- their go-to software for setting up system updates.

My personal goal is to see a StatusNet site for president@whitehouse.gov. I believe that open source software is the best tool for open government, and I hope we can see more of its use by the Obama administration.

Evan Prodromou picture courtesy of Wiktravel under the CC by-sa license.

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Guest Post: Financing, By and For Developers

Guest Editor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:58:14 -0500

On March 19th, in conjunction with PayPalX, Sun Microsystems, Embarkons.com and session sponsor Cooley Godward Kronish, developers, lawyers and financers will be gathering at the Peer Financing for Developers conference in Menlo Park, California. The goal of the conference is to examine new and innovative approaches to peer financing of projects.

The half day conference will take place at Sun Microsystems' campus,and interested attendees can get tickets at peerfinancing.eventbrite.com. OStatic readers can also get $20 off the cost of a $95 general admission ticket by using the code "OS20." We asked Trevor Cornwell, founder of Embarkons.com, which focuses on peer financing for developers, to write a guest column on the topic. Here it is:

Financing, By and For Developers

By Trevor Cornwell, founder of Embarkons.com, peer financing for developers

Developers are revolutionizing manufacturing. New ideas are conceived of, coded and brought to market in days, when they used to take much longer. But financing for porojects is still time-consuming to put together because it is based on trust networks to which most people, especially people new to the territory, don’t have access. The good news is that there are simple solutions arising in the area of peer financing, which can be best understood by first understanding existing problems.

Products, ideas, books, and stories get better as more people hear them, add to them, shape them and make them their own. But when it comes to financing, the focus has traditionally been on finding that one person who will write the check that will make The Next Big Thing possible

In short, democratization makes things better--and the concept hasn't spread sufficiently widely in the field of financing. Developers are going to need to lead that revolution—and they can.

It is said that if you can get the elevator pitch right, you will get funded. Truth and practice are not that simple. It can take months to get an introduction to the right person. Then the funder has to be in a position to invest. He or she has to possess both the means and the will to write a check. VCs comment that they see hundreds and maybe thousands of deals before they choose to finance one. Is it the best idea? It is usually the best one for them, based on a variety of factors.

But what about you? What if your idea or app or book doesn't get funded? Should you heed the wisdom of those you have seen, or move on to something else? Should you go into debt? Tap a rich uncle?

Peer financing is about offering funding alternatives because people who know your business, who live your life, and live in your markets are participating as funders. Also, sometimes dividing the amount of funding that is needed by a project among several participants opens up new possibilities.

For many, what immediately comes to mind when peer financing is mentioned is peer-to-peer lending. Prosper.com is a leader in the field, but what Prosper does is but one approach. Crowd funding, contests, group financing, direct offerings, incubators and a host of new models are part of a trend to transcend the one-to-a-few approach.

PayPal has recently released a new set of APIs which have the power to open a host of new models because they allow funds to be distributed to multiple parties seamlessly. Imagine being able to make one payment that distributes to multiple parties at once or multiple parties working together to fund one entity. Creating a threshold for funding can be done easily and efficiently with these new APIs. Simple payment tools are going to drive innovation in financing, which will force us past some of the ruts we are in today.

Markets demand change. On Wall Street, everything is made into a financial product. In Silicon Valley, almost everything conforms to one existing model. Innovation in Silicon Valley is moving away from the venture and shifting to the determined developer who codes all night and gets his idea out there. If the idea works, it may get traction fast. If not, it is on to the next idea. One thing is for certain: These new ventures need some financing, and they need it quickly.

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Former Sun CEO Takes Tech Titans to Task Over Patent Trolling

Sam Dean — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:10:19 -0500

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz only recently announced his departure from Oracle, following its acquisition of Sun, via a quirky haiku posted on Twitter, and now he is providing juicy details of his historical run-ins with technology heavyweights. Schwartz was always well-known as a blogger during his tenure at Sun, and he now writes on a blog titled "What I Couldn't Say..." Among other things, he details crossing paths with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates regarding patents and royalties.

In a blog post called "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal," Schwartz makes reference to the Apple/HTC lawsuit and notes that Steve Jobs threatened to sue Sun at one point. He writes:

"In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were 'stepping all over Apple’s IP.' (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, [Jobs said] 'I’ll just sue you.'

My response was simple. 'Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?' Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996."

According to Schwartz, Steve "was silent" after that rebuttal. Schwartz goes on to detail a meeting he was in with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer from Microsoft, in which Gates "skipped the small talk" and said:

“Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.”

OpenOffice, of course, is a free open source office productivity suite found on millions of desktops, and Gates and Ballmer were apparently seeking a licensing deal with Sun, which would effectively result in a payment to Microsoft for every download of OpenOffice. Schwartz writes:

"Royalty bearing free software? Jumbo shrimp. (Oxymoron.)"

Schwartz's post contains much wisdom about patents and going on the offensive with them. Good reading.

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A Bright Future for Drizzle

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:47:36 -0500

It seems like there's been little but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle.

Turns out, there's plenty of interest in the fledgling database project. Specifically Rackspace is investing heavily in Drizzle for its Rackspace Cloud. Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor, Eric Day, Lee Bieber, and Stewart Smith have all landed over at the hosting company to work on Drizzle. According to Pipes, Rackspace sees Drizzle as the answer to problems that MySQL can't solve:

Rackspace recognizes that the pain points they feel with traditional MySQL cannot be solved with simple hacks and workarounds, and that to service the needs of so many customers, they will need a database server that thinks of itself as a friendly piece of their infrastructure and not the driver of its applications. Drizzle's core principles of flexibility and focus on scalability align with the goals Rackspace Cloud has for its platform's future.

Rackspace is also heavily invested in Cassandra, and sees integration of Drizzle and Cassandra as being a key way to add value to its platforms and therefore for its customers.

It's really good to see the Drizzle team landing somewhere that they can continue to drive the project and with a company that has a strong incentive in working well with the community. The Drizzle Project is a shining example of a project being set up right. Brian Aker asked the right questions and made smart design decisions when starting the project. It seems likely that Drizzle will continue to build momentum, and I doubt Rackspace will be the only company scrambling to hire core Drizzle developers.

Rackspace seems like an ideal spot for the Drizzle team (or a large chunk of it, anyway) to land. As Eric Day writes, "what better place to develop a database designed for the cloud than on one of the fastest growing cloud platforms. We'll get a detailed look at the demands, get feedback from cloud customers, and have the perfect test bed for offering new services. We'll also be able to work closely with a top-notch group of DBAs, developers, and sysadmins in one of the most demanding service architectures out there."

It also makes me wonder whether all of the fuss over MySQL was worth it. MySQL has played an important role for more than a decade, and will continue to be an important part of the FLOSS ecosystem for the foreseeable future: But it's not the be-all, end-all of database technology for FLOSS. When the 451 Group surveyed its users the response was indicative of a decline in MySQL usage in the next four years. MySQL isn't going anywhere, but it also doesn't look like it's going to continue growing or remain as crucial to the community as it has been.

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Wear Your Linux Pride on Your Sleeve, Linux.com Launches New Store

Lisa Hoover — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:51:15 -0500

If you've been longing to wrap your baby, significant other, or even your coffee in Linux-y goodness, now you can -- while supporting a valuable FOSS community resource at the same time. Linux.com launched a new store filled with all kinds of geeky t-shirts, baby onesies, mugs, and other fun paraphernalia.

The Linux.com Store carries goodies bearing clever phrases only a geek would understand, ("Fresh Kernels," anyone?), cool Tux logos, and sticker sets to adorn your laptop. All profits go to furthering Linux Foundation activities, strategies and goals.

The Linux Foundation also announced a new t-shirt design contest. Submissions are due by April 11, 2010, and the top five will be available for community vote at Linux.com through June 6, 2010. The winning designer will have his or her shirt featured in the Linux.com store, and receive travel and admission to LinuxCon this summer.

Go forth and shop.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Examines, Stomps On iPhone Developer Agreement

Lisa Hoover — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:08:21 -0500

More than 100,000 app developers have reportedly signed the iPhone Development Program License Agreement allowing them write software for the iPhone, however few people outside the inner circle of developers have ever seen the documents thanks to a non-disclosure clause included in the agreement.When NASA released the NASA App for iPhone, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seized the opportunity to get a copy from the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act.

The EFF scoured the pages and released a fascinating look at the agreement, teasing out some of its finer points for closer inspection.

Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would "enable others" to reverse engineer, the SDK or iPhone OS.

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can "revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time." Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That's pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer's reputational and commercial value in its hands—it's not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

You'll want to check out the EFF's post for the full scoop on what they found. For instance, there's a clause that forbids developers from publicly distributing apps that Apple has formally rejected. It essentially turns iPhone app development into a crap shoot: If your app is turned down, you have no chance to recoup your losses via unauthorized app venues like Cydia.

The agreement no doubt raises the hackles of most developers in the open source community, however, it's important to consider that Apple's Developer Agreement is opt-in. Most likely, the attitude out of Cupertino is, "If you don't like it, don't sign it."

In the end, Apple shoots itself in the foot by shutting out developers who would bring a great deal of talent to the Apple development community, if the agreement weren't so off-putting. On the other hand, seasoned and novice developers alike will always have a home in mobile app FOSS communities like Moblin and Android.

What's your take on Apple's Developer Agreement? Is it about what you expected, or are you surprised by its constraints? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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5 Open Source Resources For Boosting Your Productivity

Sam Dean — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:18:12 -0500

No matter how smart a worker you are, there are plenty of open source tools that can make you more productive. They range from hugely useful Firefox extensions such as iMacros (which lets you record repetitive, multi-step tasks and then execute them with one click) to collaboration applications for efficient co-working. Here, you'll find five of our best posts and collections on productivity enhancement tools. Everything found here is free.

Using iMacros for Firefox: A Visual, Step-By-Step Tour. This visual tutorial on how to use the iMacros Firefox extension has been one of our most popular posts on OStatic. If you don't use iMacros to automate repetitive tasks, you should. Also check out these online demos of iMacros for getting a sense of how powerful it is.

Collanos Workspace for Team Collaboration. If you collaborate with teams of people, you may know of enterprise collaboration tools like MindTouch Deki and Kablink. These are great solutions, but for a consumer-oriented option, Collanos Workplace is a great choice. Check out Lisa's review here.

OpenGoo: An Open Source Answer To Google Apps. Among productivity applications, you may already use Google Apps, but for an open source equivalent that lets you completely control your data and customize your apps, try OpenGoo. Lisa reviewed it here.

5 Useful Guides to More Free Tools Than You Can Shake A Stick At. On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our best collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. In this post you can find lots of productivity enhancement applications, as well as free books and tutorials on open source tools.

Four Open Source Mind Mapping Apps to Keep You Focused. Mind mapping tools are among the closest allies of skilled project managemers. Some people believe the learning curve is too steep for these applications, but they are in fact easy to get going with. Lisa covers four of the best mind mapping tools here.

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Filling the Gap: Open Clip Art Library Provides More than 26,000 Images

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:16:02 -0500

Would you like some Libre content to go with those free and open source applications? One of the initial challenges that the open source community has had in supplanting proprietary solutions is not just the software itself, but the entire ecosystem that has built up around proprietary software. Case in point: While you can find top-notch free and open source tools to create artful documents, finding clip art and templates that are free is a much bigger challenge.

Luckily for FLOSS enthusiasts everywhere, projects like the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) are stepping up to fill the gap. A little bit of history. The project started in 2004 to hold freely available clip art. What started out as a modest site with a small collection of clip art has blossomed into a monster-sized collection of goodies.

How much has it blossomed? The OCAL folks recently announced the 2.0 release of the library. Weighing in at more than 26,000 pieces of scalable vector clip art, more than 1,200 artists have dedicated time to help fill a gap in the FLOSS ecosystem. More than 14,000 of those pieces have rolled in over the past year, which is impressive by any metric.

What does a 2.0 release mean, in the context of a clip art library? In this case, it's a couple of things. First it's a recognition of the library's improvements to its hosting framework. The site uses the Aiki Framework, and now sports a new theme and the ability to browse through PNG thumbnail previews. Need to work with the graphics from the site and make changes? Grab the SVG. Need to slap in a bitmap image? Grab the PNG.

Even though the site holds an impressive amount of clip art, there's always more to do. The team has set a goal of 50,000 pieces of clip art by the end of 2010, and are calling for help to support the 2010 Libre Graphics Meeting that will take place from May 27 to May 30 in Brussels. There's also a roadmap for the 2.1 release targeted for April, and geared at finding more ways for people to help with the project.

Though the site's current state is impressive, it'd be great if they succeed in bringing in more contributors. There are a quite a few talented folks in the FLOSS community contributing to various projects, and if the OCAL could tap more of that talent it would do a lot to fill out the library and improve the quality of the offerings. While there's a lot of really good stuff on OCAL, it's not uniformly great. Some of the clip art is not so good, and having better resources and a larger community to work with developing artists might go a long way.

Want a little clip art to spice up your project? Browse the site or just download the entire stash in one go. The full release comes as a compressed package (take your pick of zip file, tarball, or compressed tarball) with all the PNG thumbnails and vector art. If you want to see the latest additions to the library, check out the recent uploads page, which lists all the most recent uploads.

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Tinymail 1.0 Released

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:10:57 -0500

At the core of the Nokia 900's Modest email client is Tinymail, a library for developing mobile apps with email features. Three years in the making, Tinymail 1.0 has made it out the door. In addition to making it past the 1.0 barrier, this release brings a bunch of improvements and new features for the project.

Tinymail is aimed at Linux-based mobile devices like the Nokia 900, and started life as a replacement for Evolution for resource-constrained systems. The first pre-release went out in September of 2007, and it's come a long way since then. The 1.0 release brings improvements in IMAP and POP3 support, better reliability on 64-bit systems, and new widgets to display mail and folders.

Even though Tinymail is aimed at Mobile devices, you can find packages for some distros (like Ubuntu) along with the Modest UI. The Modest site has links to the Modest PPA (package repository), though the packages are probably of greater interest to developers than most desktop users.

Even though the project has hit the 1.0 milestone, there's plenty of work to be done. Upcoming releases should have support for downloading message parts separately to avoid downloading attachments over slow connections. As Linux continues to make progress on mobile devices, this is a project to keep an eye on.

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reMail E-mail Search Tool Is Going Open Source

Sam Dean — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:24:06 -0500

Popular iPhone email search app reMail was recently purchased by Google. As a result of the purchase, reMail has no longer been available in the App Store. Now, reMail founder Gabor Cselle has made a second announcement with good news for fans: reMail’s code is going open source. It’s being distributed under an Apache 2.0 license via Google Code. Find out more at WebWorkerDaily.

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