OStatic blogs

4 Substantial Risks That Google Takes With Chrome OS

Sam Dean — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:04:41 -0500

Google is a company well-known for taking risks with various kinds of software projects, and the upcoming Chrome OS will be one of its most ambitious projects yet. The open source operating system, which Canonical and the Ubuntu team have contributed to, includes some bold gambles from Google. These include automatic wipes of the operating system with subsequent reinstallation whenever malware is detected, no hard disks on netbooks housing Chrome OS and more. GigaOm has the four big risks Google is taking with the new OS.

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Chrome (5 alternatives, 1 review)

Retrospectiva Keeps Software Development Teams on the Same Page

Lisa Hoover — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:26:07 -0500

If you're looking for an easy to use open source project management tool to manage the workflow of your software development team, then take a look at Retrospectiva. It's powerful software on its own that becomes better when you add on modules to make it even more functional and flexible.

Retrospectiva is designed with an eye toward engineering teams that need a tool to carry them through the entire development life cycle. It tracks issues and tickets, manages goals and milestones, and offers code review and revision management features as well. Retrospectiva also includes support for Subversion and Git.

Users can easily add additional modules to the Web-based project management tool, including a blog, wiki, or AgilePM. Retrospectiva has full RSS support and an XML-REST API.

The next time your development team tackles a big project, check out Retrospectiva to keep everyone on the same page.

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Over 50 Free, Must-Have Open Source Resources

Sam Dean — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:44:42 -0500

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

1. Digital Music, Video Graphics and Multimedia Resources

Sure the world of digital music is loaded with copyright sharks, DRM and other undesirables, but it's also increasingly teeming with cool, free open source tools and applications. Do you want to sync iPods and iPhones to any computer anywhere? How about playing Doom on your own customized OS for iPods or most other music players? Do you need customized music library management for multiple platforms, including Linux? Check this post for 8 free, open source tools for a better digital music experience. It can take you way beyond iTunes.

It used to be that open source video tools were scarce and often fraught with problems--but no more. In this post, we recommend eight top-notch tools for video playback and encoding, ranging from the very flexible SMPlayer, which lets you add subtitles to your videos, to the super-easy Simple Theora Encoder.

Are you under the impression that BitTorrent downloads are illegal or DRM infected? There are plenty of sites out there that offer free and legal torrent downloads to save bandwidth and make file sharers happy. Here, you'll find sites such as Legit Torrents, where you can get free video, games and Linux distros, plus nine other legal torrent sites worth checking into.

Songbird is one of the slickest open source music players available. It just arrived in a final new version. Here we took a look at the final beta version and summarized why you ought to consider this melody maker for your open source arsenal.

In our post 6 Ways to Get Much More Out of GIMP you'll find lots of good resources for leveraging the power of one of the most popular open source graphics programs. The post includes links to a free, full online book on beginning and advanced GIMP skills, and more.

Recently, we came across a great, free online book on the super powerful open source 3D graphics and animation application Blender. If you're unfamiliar with Blender, it's so flexible that impressive, full-length animated movies have been created with it. In this post, you'll find a review of the online book on beginning and advanced Blender skills. The book is called Blender Basics, Second Edition.

If you haven't tried out some of the many open source utilities and apps focused on video conveniences, take a gander at this post. It introduces XVid (a utility that can compress video files at a ratio of 100:1), and many more useful titles.

Open source media center applications have matured substantially, and can now bring tons of premium content to your TV. Here are four excellent, free applications that can quickly start entertaining you.

High-end graphics software is expensive when you shop on the proprietary aisle, but we've collected six cool, free tools here. Quite a few of these are easily as good, if not better, than proprietary alternatives. Make sure to check out IrfanView (which is freeware, not open source, but just had to be here). You'll find more on IrfanView, and other graphics tools, in this post.

2. All Things Firefox

The iMacros Firefox extension is incredibly powerful--an application unto itself, disguised as a Firefox extension. It lets you record macros that you can play back at any time, and the process is about as easy as using a VCR. In this post, you'll find a collection of screenshots that function as a guided tour to using iMacros, including how to use Super Bookmarks--macros that sit right on your Bookmarks menu in the browser, capable of executing task-based scripts of any complexity--or elegant simplicity--you choose. Several readers have gotten this running in minutes and written in with imaginative, time-saving applications for iMacros.

OStatic's Firefox Superguide has been one of our most popular posts. It collects more than 100 ways to get more out of the Firefox browser, including screenshot driven tutorials, and a collection of the very best extensions for Firefox.

Here's a pictorial tour of one of the more useful Firefox extensions we've tried out in a while: VideoSurf. It provides chronological timelines for online videos at YouTube, Google Video and other sites. Jump straight to what you want.

In this post, you'll find two excellent tutorials singled out by Mozilla. The first is a step-by-step recipe for how to build Firefox extensions. The second is a guide to how to use Mozilla's useful Ubiquity command-line tool, and create commands for it.

Do you frequently share web-based content with others via social networks? If so, check out BlueOrganizer, a slick Firefox extension that we reviewed here. It's also very handy to have when you want to search the web for content related to what you're currently looking at. (Make sure and check out Glue, an update to this project.)

GPhotoSpace is a very interesting extension for Firefox that we wrote up here. It requires Firefox 3 and leverages the 7GB+ of storage space that you currently get with a Gmail account for an online photo storage repository. Uploads tend to be much faster than on sites such as Flickr, and there are other conveniences to having your photo management application in your e-mail engine.

3. In Our Linux Toolboxes

Keir Thomas, a noted Linux author, has made available a free book online: Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference. It's very good, and has already been downloaded over 150,000 times. You'll find information for beginners, and more advanced material.

Some people love Linux but just can't use it full time. In this post, you'll find a discussion of free virtualization options that can put Linux right on your Windows PC or Mac.

What if you want to put Linux and Linux applications on your USB thumb drive? Here, you'll find instructions and a huge collection of useful tools for making it work.

Are you upgrading a Linux box? Our own Reuven Lerner--a skilled and experienced developer--has a guide here to a large collection of resources for SELinux--which protects Linux systems from security threats.

Ramesh Natarajan is giving out free copies of his ebook, Linux 101 Hacks (the password "linuxrocks" starts the download). Though it targets a farily experienced audience, it looks like a handy reference for those common command line tasks that arise every so often -- but not often enough that you completely recall how to do them.

Do you have a need for warding off patent trolls who may threaten your idea or patents with dubious patents of their own? Linux Defenders is a brand new organization, with some heavy hitters backing it, working to ward off patent trolls. Check out our writeup here.

One of the chicken-and-egg problems that keeps some users from trying out and becoming skilled at good open source applications is lack of adequate documentation. How are you supposed to learn effectively without it? The good news is that for a whole lot of open source applications and operating systems, there are good, free books you can get online. You'll find tons of documentation for nearly every Linux distro at Linuxtopia. See this post for details.

4. For Developers

On the web development front, our post More Than Five Top, Free Tools for Web Developers has been very popular. It discusses Piwik (open source web analytics software with useful plug-ins from the community), Kompozer (a very popular web development environment, especially for CSS fans), and OpenX (a free, open source ad server for monetizing your site), plus several more.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but did you know that there are many open source infrastructure tools for cloud computing that can provide free flexibility, cost savings, and more?Especially if you're a developer, try these five examples.

Webinars have increased in popularity in recent years, and this post rounds up seven resources for finding free ones on open source topics. You can sit in on educational webinars on MySQL, Drupal and much more.

Want to view videos and presentations on Google's free offerings for the development community? We wrote up how you can find a slew of them here, on topics ranging from Google's AJAX APIs to using Google Gears.

5. Apps and Resources for Them

Along with free, open source software, there are many good, visual tutorials for top open source applications found free on the web. In this post, you'll find a whopping sixteen of them. You can brush up on web development skills such as CSS and AJAX, become a graphics wizard with GIMP, and learn how to install and master any Linux distro.

Drupal is one of the most powerful open source content management systems around, and many sites run on it, including Fast Company, The Onion, and OStatic. In this post, you'll find six great resources for learning more about Drupal, including an interview with Angela Byron, one of Drupal's top evangelists, and a free chapter of a book on Drupal development.

Want to put a bushel of free open source applications on your computer or even on a USB thumb drive in one, free download? You can find out how to do so here, and dive right into everything from the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, to Thunderbird e-mail, to open source calendar applications. Many of the applications are guaranteed to be ones you've never heard of, but they're all hand-picked by folks in the know. You get hundreds of applications--all free. For Macintosh users, you'll find an equally good one-download offering at MacLibre, as we discussed here.

Do you use Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail application? If you do, or you're moving to it, check out our list of the best add-ons for Thunderbird.

Are you thinking of getting a netbook? They've become hugely popular and come with various flavors of Linux and lots of open source applications installed for very fair prices. Here are some good pieces of advice and links focused on ideal applications for netbooks if you're in the market for one.

Looking for a killer open source word processor? AbiWord is a top-notch one, and we took the brand new version for a spin, which you can read about here. Among other things, it now works much better with Microsoft Office files.

In addition to OStatic itself, where can you go to evaluate and kick the tires on open source applications? We found six sites looking into--many with user ratings for useful FOSS products--and you can check them out here.

Shred It! If you're deleting miscellaneous unimportant files on your computer, simply dropping them in the trash or deleting them ought to be sufficient. If you need to permanently and irrevocably erase files to keep them from ever being resurrected, however, then you need a reliable file shredder application. Here are four good open source choices.

Open sourcers often collaborate with each other, and if you work with others who are in remote locations, Dimdim is a very powerful open source web meeting application, recently out in a new version. Check out our impressions here. For an alternative from the world of freeware, including a Linux version, look into Yugma.

If the space shuttle missions have piqued or renewed your interest in space, you'll need some astronomy software to help you navigate the skies from your backyard. There are several terrific open source applications available for users of all levels of experience. In this post, Lisa discusses four good choices.

Are you interested in some of the best brand new open source projects? In this post, you'll find a collection of 10 of the "best rookies" selected by Black Duck Software, including note-taking applications, automated trading software, and much more.

OpenOffice.org is a terrific suite of office applications in its own right, but it's out of this world when paired with extensions that add extra functionality. You'll find ten of the best choices here.

Are you looking to do some interior design work? Sweet Home 3D is an open source, cross platform 3D interior design modeling application, that you should definitely look into. Take a peek at Kristin's tour of it here.

While ripping retail DVDs to share with friends is a no-no, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to copy them. Mac users have several open source tools at their disposal to help back up personally-owned DVDs with very little effort. In this post, Lisa covers several of the best choices.

6. In Need of Open Source Work?

Want to sell your open source skills to the highest bidder? Here we covered over 10 ways to get paid for your FOSS wizardry. Also check out this interview with oDesk's CEO (oDesk connects people with open source skills with employers, even guaranteeing work and payments).

Have you suffered a layoff recently? If so, we have scores of good ideas for finding work in the world of open source here. You can find good places to put up a profile of yourself, good sites to visit for advertised jobs in open source, and more.

Part of OStatic's mission is to deliver good educational resources on open source. We hope these free tools and tutorials help you.

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Four Open Source File Shredders That Delete Data Forever

Lisa Hoover — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:48:14 -0500

If you're deleting miscellaneous unimportant files on your computer, simply dropping them in the trash or deleting them ought to be sufficient. If you need to permanently and irrevocably erase files to keep them from ever being resurrected, however, then you need a reliable file shredder. Here are four of the best open source applications to try.

Eraser - This tool for Windows removes data from your hard drive by overwriting it with patterns that make files unreadable. It works with any hard drive that work with Windows and even erases files and folders that were previously deleted. Eraser also has a scheduler so you can automatically erase files on a regular basis.

File Shredder - This nifty tool has five different shredding options from Get Rid Of This all the way You'll Never Recover This File Again No Matter What. File Shredder even has a disk wiper that wipes unused disk space.

Autoclave - A common method of overwriting hard drives for privacy is zero filling. It's not a foolproof method, however, and easy to do incorrectly. Autoclave can zero out your hard drive in just a few clicks and make your data permanently disappear. The developer is sure the tool will erase everything forever and not even the National Security Agency and it's million-dollar technology could access it. "But," he says, "if that's who you're worried about reading your data, it's probably best if you pound the drive into dust using a sledge hammer, and then fuse the pieces together with a blowtorch."

Darik's Boot and Nuke - Here's a self-contained boot disk that automatically completely delete the contents of any hard drive it detects. Once you use this app, your data is forever cooked, so be careful with it. DBAN is a great tool for wiping the contents of a computer you're selling or as a way to ensure you've eradicated all viruses and spyware before doing a clean OS install.

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OStatic Buffer Overflow...

Sam Dean — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:45:41 -0500

Theory of competition fails in open source, elshewhere. Markets tend to crystallize around a few dominant players.

Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision. Florian Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, says the delay is good.

Droid could bring Motorola back from dead. The Android-based smartphone could revive the company.

Nokia N900: First look. What the Maemo-based phone/tablet is like from the perspective of a Linux geek.

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Crazy Google Kids at it Again with Chrome OS

John Mark Walker — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:36:52 -0500

Google kicked off the launch of its Chromium OS project today with a presentation on Chrome OS. The first thing you'll notice is that the name of Google's consumer product will be Chrome OS, while the open source project is named Chromium OS. My guess: Google will bless the usage of the Chrome OS name by granting trademark rights to those who comply with Google's standards. Google didn't say that, but that's what I would do.

The next thing I noticed is that Chrome OS will be completely "cloud-based". As in, no local data. As in, all web apps all the time. As in, it's only useful to the extent that there's an internet connection. This will likely prove to be a Google Rohrschach test. Those already predisposed to disliking anything Google does will find this horrifying. Those who think Google is the bee's knees will conclude that it's not completely evil and, indeed, is the next logical evolution of desktops-in-the-cloud technology.

This is at first glance a radical change from what we've previously called an operating system. At second glance, it really does make a lot of sense. I and several others have been trying to advocate the usage of open source software as a platform and delivery system for automated services over a network. Most companies in the commercial open source space have been, for reasons beyond my comprehension, slow to completely embrace this strategy. Now Google is taking this concept to the extreme. The question is, is it too extreme?

The benefits are enormous - without all the overhead that most operating systems have to deal with, Chromium engineers are free to optimize to their heart's desire without breaking existing code. Users can tap into a wide array of web-based applications, whether on the internet or an intranet. Google claims that they will store all of your user data (cue rioting by privacy and standards advocates). This wasn't mentioned in the video, but Chris DiBona pointed out that this is why Google sponsors the Data Liberation Front, to assure users that their data is always accessible and can be moved out of (and into) Google products. Chrome OS also features some additional security measures that make it more difficult for someone to pwn a machine and then use it to access the data stored on Google's servers. There's a very clever trust mechanism that I'll link to if I can find a good description.

Of course, that doesn't - and shouldn't - mollify those of us worried about data privacy. Then again, most of us already entrust Google with much of our data. You can either not use Google products, or you can "trust but verify." Either way, the concern is understandable, and Google faces increasing opposition to data mongering with every data scraping product they make.

The downsides to Chromium OS are both obvious and non-obvious. The above concerns of privacy and lock-in are obvious and are not new to followers of Google. Another obvious downside is that any Chrome OS machine is pretty much DOA when it comes to enterprise computing. The inability to run any legacy application is a non-starter for most organizations. Then again, Google isn't targeting that market, so perhaps it's not an issue - yet. And let's not forget that if you travel somewhere without a net connection, you're out of luck, unless you've set of Google Gears to create local copies. There was no word on whether the plan is to make that the default approach.

Some perhaps less obvious downsides involve its certification policy. At one point in the presentation, there was some mention of Chrome OS only running on machines with solid state drives, which led me to wonder whether this was going to be a self-contained box, a la Apple. Soon afterwards, however, there was some discussion about working with hardware partners and certifying machines to run Chrome OS. Not mentioned was how tightly they would police the Chrome OS trademark. Yes, Chromium OS is an open source project, but we've seen in the past that enforcing trademarks too strictly can incite community rebellions. See, eg. Red Hat, Mozilla, Java, Twiki, et al. Personally, I can see the case for using a certification process and enforcing it with trademarks. Assuming this is the direction they go, one hopes they're smart about it. Communicated very clearly, however, was that Chrome OS will not run on most netbooks sold today, thus the need for a rigorous certification process.

There are also open questions as to how well Chrome OS will work with devices and peripherals. It remains to be seen how enthusiastic device manufacturers will be about supporting yet another platform. Based on today's presentation, it looks like Google will go with the approach of working with a select few hardware vendors. Given that these netbooks will be targeted at consumers, it remains to be seen how well they will be able to dictate the distribution channels for both the base netbooks as well as peripherals. One can easily envision someone buying a cheap consumer device and being disappointed that it won't work with their shiny new Chrome OS-based netbook.

For more on Chromium OS, see Chromium.org as well as today's blog announcement.

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Chrome OS Unveiled, Source Code Now Available

Sam Dean — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:25:21 -0500

As GigaOm reports, Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus today. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications,” they added. It also features a lock-down security model, where it will download a new image of the operating system and install it if malware is detected. Cached data will subsequently be retrievable in the cloud. Source code for the OS is avaialable now. For more details, see the GigaOm story.

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What Does a User Cost?

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:49:54 -0500

Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the "lifetime value" of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

Godin writes "Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer."

That's equally true of users of open source projects. Contributors to projects are valued and recognized. But all too often, users are ignored and seen as a sort of side-effect of producing software. Yes, they can have it too, but really, it's a contributors-only (and often developers-only) club. Many projects are starting to recognize the problem and are seeing that at least some of the users now are the next round of contributors.

That's a good reason to start. Every happy user is a walking, talking promotion for your project. Maybe they'll never become a committer or ambassador for your project, but they may tell a friend or two about it and those users may eventually become contributors. I know a few powerhouse advocates who do no more than spread the word about their favorite projects at every opportunity who have ultimately brought in several contributors.

But even the most passive users contribute value to the open source projects that they use. Mozilla Firefox is a "supported browser" for many sites today not because of the strength of its contributor community, but because of the sheer mass of its user community. The fact that Firefox has a healthy contributor community in the thousands doesn't mean diddly to large businesses. But the fact that it has millions of otherwise passive users means quite a bit -- because those businesses understand the principle that Godin is espousing: Think about the lifetime value of a customer (user) and what it means to lose one.

Open source projects like openSUSE, Fedora, GNOME, KDE, and the thousands of others, don't get any real revenue (discounting the occasional fan store sales) from users, of course, but the value of a user is inestimable.

Godin says that it shows a business embraces this concept when they see a customer walking out of the door as the potential lifetime spend of that customer being lost. I suggest open source projects embrace the idea, and see every user lost as a potential Linus Torvalds walking out of the project. Embrace that thought, and we should have very happy users indeed. The rest will follow.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.

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MindTouch Launches Cloud-Based Collaboration Platform

Lisa Hoover — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:05:39 -0500

Open source collaboration software vendor MindTouch announced today that its widely-used enterprise collaboration platform is now available in the cloud. This is great news for businesses who want a service comparable to Microsoft SharePoint, but don't want the headaches of proprietary software or the hassles of a lengthy installation process.

If you're a regular reader of OStatic, then you know this move is one of series of releases MindTouch has launched to drive the future of collaborative networks. Following the creation of the MindTouch Creative Knowledge Base and the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, a move to the cloud was the next logical step.

MindTouch Cloud has all the features and functionality of MindTouch Standard, including desktop productivity tools, full featured LDAP and Active Directory module, database adapters, and more. What sets it apart from other collaboration systems is the ability to use other popular enterprise systems atop this platform. Customers don't have to give up the workflows and Web apps they're already used to because MindTouch Cloud interfaces easily with support ticketing, ERP, accounts payable, Salesforce.com and other systems a company may already be using.

"This solves the business problem of accessing critical line of business information. Previously, business users would have to wait weeks or even months to get to the information they need to make intelligent decisions. And the end result was static, difficult to share and challenging to collaborate on. Anyone who has to track and collaborate across the silos of a supply chain, cull data from multiple data sources monthly or report across CRM, support, financial, etc knows the tremendous value of automation with MindTouch," said Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch Founder and CEO, in a prepared statement.

You can give MindTouch Cloud a try free for 30 days, or jump right in and sign up today. Pricing plans start at $7 per user.

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10 Years of SourceForge.net

John Mark Walker — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:52:53 -0500

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. Some fine people in San Francisco went about their unremarkable lives in 1967, only to discover years later that they were at ground zero of the "Summer of Love." In the summer and fall of 1999, I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would become known as the world's largest open source development site.

I refer, of course, to SourceForge.net, which launched on November 17, 1999. Most people think of SourceForge.net these days as another huge web site with lots of ads, but very few understand its humble beginnings or how challenging it was to even launch the darn thing without the powers-that-be at VA killing it off in a fit of well-intentioned hari kiri. The history and beginnings of SourceForge.net can teach executives and managers today the value of trying crazy things that might (and probably will) fail; of letting your young guns run wild with imagination; and not squashing innovation within your company. Unfortunately, there are also quite a few lessons on how to squandor success, but that's for another day. Today is about SourceForge.net, the site that was before its time and how it came to be.

SourceForge.net began as a project called "Cold Storage" and was headed by Tony "fusion94" Guntharp. His team included Uriah "precision" Welcome, Drew "dtype" Streib, and Tim "bigdisk" Perdue. The first thing that might surprise you is that Cold Storage was never intended to be a developer collaboration site at all. In fact, Tony's team was trying to solve a vastly different problem - finding and locating different versions of open source software. At the time, there were a smattering of sites called SUNSites, with the most popular housed at UNC, before it mutated into ibiblio.org. But each SunSITE repository was at the time FTP-only, and there was no canonical index: each SunSITE would have different projects and of the projects that were shared, some were not synced. It was possible to download different versions depending on what SunSITE you used. There were security ramifications to this, as one could never be sure which version included a bug fix or patched a security hole. The grand plan of Cold Storage was that all open source software in the world would be indexed and mirrored and made available in an expansive archive. This way, developers and users alike could always be sure they were getting the latest patched releases, or in some cases, that they could downgrade to a version they knew was reliable. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a site called Freshmeat.net. Freshmeat kept an index of the latest versions of all open source software, and linked to the latest downloads. In this case, there was a master index, but users were at the mercy of the latest and greatest, and there was no interface for finding a specific older version.

While they were busily creating Cold Storage, a happy accident occurred. VA housed a number of open source projects at openprojects.net as a sort of open source community service for goodwill purposes - until the day that a massive hardware failure prevented angry sysadmins and developers from accessing their projects. Tony and team were tasked with fixing those issues. While they were working on that, they realized that they could combine the project hosting services of openprojects.net with their Cold Storage plans, and voila! Cold Storage quickly morphed into SourceForge. 67 days of hard PHP/MySQL coding later, SourceForge.net was launched.

Actually, it should have been that easy, but it wasn't. This is the part of the story where what had been an interesting engineering project morphed into a major political undertaking. Enter the bean counters: those who didn't want to launch the service because they couldn't see the business reasons behind it. There were numerous incidents where the project was on the chopping block, only to be saved by a friendly executive or two, including then-CEO Larry Augustin. The typical, cookie cutter MBA-bred CFO takes a look at the P&L sheet, says "WTF?", and quickly reaches for the "Funding Denied" stamp. Lost in that strict P&L approach is the vision behind a project like SourceForge.net, and the idea that building the center of gravity for open source development and attracting a critical mass of developers is actually valuable.

After finally gaining the blessing of the company, the SourceForge guys went on to build out the site, before launching it officially on November 17. By that time, it was recognized as a valid company project. I'll never forget when, a few weeks before launch, a marketing person at VA issued an all-hands-on-deck call to action for employees to help add projects to the site. I'll also never forget working next door to those four crazy guys who spent long hours locked in that room banging out SourceForge code. I often wonder how many companies in the world had the kind of chutzpah, grand vision, capacity for innovation and near-insanity to bring about something like SourceForge.net. Not
very many.

These days, *forges come a dime a dozen, and finding a place to host a project is not nearly as daunting as it was in 1999. At that time, offering shell accounts, version control, bug trackers, mailing lists, a unified web front end, and web subdomains *for free* was unheard of. SourceForge.net was truly before its time.

Hats off to Tony, Uriah, Tim and Drew. You really changed the world.

(Many thanks to Tony who helped me recall much of the chronology)

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Zenoss Enterprise 2.5 Released, Now Features Amazon EC2 Monitoring

Lisa Hoover — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:56:38 -0500

Open source network monitoring software vendor Zenoss announced the release of Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, the company's commercial version of its flagship product. It sports several new features, most notably Amazon EC2 monitoring that provide users with dynamic snapshots of performance and the ability to drill down on performance issues with "inside the instance" monitoring.

Zenoss Enterprise 2.5's focus is on scalability and security with an eye toward future datacenter platforms and technologies. Additional new features include:

* Support for distributed collector non-root installs that make it easy to install Zenoss Enterprise while still being in compliance with corporate security policies.

* Enhanced security features including encrypted passwords used for monitoring devices as well as preventing security vulnerabilities related to SQL injection and cross-site scripting.

* VMware Ready support that offers customers the ability to manage both physical and virtual infrastructure through a single pane of glass by delivering certified integration and interoperability with VMware vSphere.

* A redesigned agent-less distributed collector architecture that provides all of the fault-tolerant benefits of an agent-based architecture without the penalties of having to deploy an agent.

* An updated Event Console with a new look and feel that will make it even easier for IT operators to complete their most common tasks. The primary design features were based on a set of usability interviews and include streamlined navigation, inline event filtering and a preview pane.

Get full details of Zenoss Enterprise 2.5 on the company's Web site, or take it out for a test drive.

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OStatic Buffer Overflow...

Sam Dean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:38:14 -0500

The Google phone is coming soon. There are rumors that Google is getting into the phone-building business.

Netherlands' open source policy goes double Dutch. A report from an open source conference in Amsterdam.

Has Windows Mobile lost 28 percent market share in a year? That's what Gartner researchers report.

KDE 4.4 due out in February of 2010. Here is what to expect.

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Doing "Notmuch" to fix Email

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:02:31 -0500

When two of the X.org folks get involved in writing an email system out of frustration, it's safe to say that email clients need a kick in the pants. Carl Worth, with some help from Keith Packard, have announced Notmuch, a search-based "email system" for handling large volumes of mail.

Packard says "it’s a sad commentary on the Linux desktop that the most important feature for many people using Linux has no credible GUI application." One might quibble with Packard for singling out Linux. GUI mail clients across all platforms have really failed to evolve as well as, say, the Web browser. While the current crop of GUI clients work fine for processing smaller amounts of email, people who process hundreds of messages daily start seeing pain points in the GUI clients pretty quickly.

The answer? According to Worth and Packard, it's "Notmuch:"

Notmuch really isn’t much of an email program; it doesn’t talk to mail servers to receive or send mail, it doesn’t even really know what Maildir should look like. All it does is construct a database for all of your mail messages and allow you to search and show email messages.

The Notmuch interface is implemented within Emacs. It doesn't send or receive email, and the search "heavy lifting" is done by Xapian. There's not much to Notmuch, except a library interface for searching through a bucket load of email.

The developers don't claim that Notmuch is ready for prime-time just yet. Packard says that it's pretty rough today but "it's plenty fast," and that the things to fix are "pretty simple at this point." If you'd like to play with it today, you can find the code in a Git repository. The Notmuch site doesn't provide any packaged downloads at this point, so it may be a while before most users get their hands on Notmuch.

Whether notmuch itself really catches on or not may not be the point. One hopes that the projects producing GUI email clients will take note of the general level of frustration with email. While I don't see Packard's rather hefty volumes of email on a daily basis, I get enough to see the inadaquacy of the various clients that are available. The Mozilla Messaging folks are doing great work with Thunderbird, but even that client leaves a fair amount to be desired.

What the Notmuch developers have done, in addition to creating at least one library inteface that might be useful, is to highlight just how weak our email solutions are right now. Often in the FOSS community, that's all it takes to spur other projects into working on a reasonable fix. Let's hope "Notmuch" is all it takes.

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Chrome OS Will Be Shown This Week

Sam Dean — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:45:39 -0500

Rumors have been swirling for days now about possible delivery of Google's much discussed Chrome OS this week. GigaOm pinged a few people at Google to get confirmation on the rumor, and while they didn't get back a specific answer on whether the download will arrive this week, there was an invitation to a press event at Google's Mountain View campus on Thursday morning, billed by the company as "an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS." It sounds like everyone will get to try it very soon. Check out GigaOm for more details.

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Amarok Refreshed: Better, Stronger, Faster!

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:55:29 -0500

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed "Weightless," the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.

If you use some of the "first party" scripts in Amarok, there's an important new feature in the Weightless release. If the scripts are updated between releases, Amarok can check and update those scripts on its own.

For Podcast fans, Amarok 2.2.1 brings the ability for podcasts to update themselves when you're connected to the network. This release also allows you to mark podcasts as new (or old) manually, so you can override playback information.

It's the simple features that really make a media player pleasant to use, though. For instance, this release adds the ability to just middle-click on a song, album, podcast or whatever and add it to the playlist. You can build up a playlist in no time by just breezing through your collection and middle-clicking on items rather than right-clicking and then selecting the "add to playlist" item.

Overall, Amarok 2.2.1 is a fairly substantial update for a point release and definitely worth checking out. The download page links to distros that ship Amarok and also to the sources.

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