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Competing with Web Services: Can Open Source Survive?

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:43:12 +0000

In 2006 at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Tim O’Reilly caused a stir by saying that open source licenses would be made obsolete by Web 2.0 and Software as a Service. At the time, O’Reilly’s prediction seemed far-fetched, and few in the industry agreed. But today, there appears to be a legitimate question over open source’s future in a world where software is not distributed to the user at all — but run over the Internet through a browser. Is open source going the way of the Dodo?

At OSCON 2010, a group of industry experts attempted to answer that question during a series of lightning talks titled “Web Services: How Can Open Source Software Compete?” Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk, Even Prodromou of StatusNet, Aaron Williamson of the Software Freedom Law Center, Mark Hinkle of Zenoss, and several others weighed in on the health of open source.?

Read the rest on IT Expert Voice »

WebM Poised to Bring Open Video to the Masses

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:25:22 +0000

Google I/O brought a lot of interesting developments, but one of the most interesting for Linux users might be the announcement of WebM. Finally, Linux will be a first-class platform for media.

WebM isn’t the first effort to bring open video to the Web, but it has a number of things going for it that other solutions do not. Namely, it has the weight and backing of one of the largest companies on the Web (that’d be Google), and buy-in from most of the major browser projects and vendors.

Read the full story on Linux Magazine’s site… »

“Microsoft’s irrelevance is taken for granted”

Joe Brockmeier — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:57:40 +0000

Interesting post over on Daring Fireball about the current state of mobile OSes, Apple vs. Google, and Microsoft’s continued slide into irrelevance… go read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

OpenOffice.org vs. Google Docs

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 12 May 2010 20:27:30 +0000

Microsoft is getting ready to ship Office 2010, but a lot of small businesses realize they don’t need all the features (or licensing costs) that come with Microsoft Office. The front-runners for Office replacements are OpenOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?

First, why do we narrow down the options to only OpenOffice.org or Google Docs? They’re not the only competing solutions to MS Office. For online office suites you’ll find more full-featured competitors like Zoho, and desktop users can choose Apple’s iWork suite or many others. However, Google Docs and OpenOffice.org (OO.org) are the entrenched players here.

Read the rest on Small Business Computing… »

Is Google Appifying Email a Good Thing?

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:04:25 +0000

Google recently announced that it’s beefed up Gmail with OAuth for SMTP and IMAP, and providing adding “contextual gadgets” to Gmail to integrate with Google Apps. Sounds good for Gmail and Google Apps users, but what about everybody else?

It’s Google’s Internet, we just use it. At least that’s how it feels some days the the predominance of Google. Google’s been trying to integrate itself into almost every area of technology lately, from providing DNS service and suggesting new protocols to replace HTTP, to its front-line user applications. Oh, and I hear they’re dabbling with this search thing as well, and something about advertising.

Read the rest on Linux Magazine’s site… »

Where’s the Summer of Documentation?

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:00:12 +0000

If you ask what’s missing from open source software, one of the top responses is often “documentation.” While there’s piles and piles of great code stuffed up on Google Code, SourceForge.net, and others, the actual documentation to accompany it is often lacking. This is why it’s doubly sad to keep seeing bounty programs aimed at generating more and more code, and more and more coders, but very little being done to address documentation.

Google has been running its Summer of Code program since 2005. It has reached out to hundreds of open source programs and distributed millions of dollars to try to encourage more people to get involved with open source. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the pressing need that many projects have to develop more docs to go with the software they already have. Now Fedora is ramping up a “Summer of Coding for 2010, and yet again — it’s all about code doesn’t address any other forms of contribution.

Read the rest on OStatic »

Making Thunderbird Financially Sustainable: How it Could Work

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:15:14 +0000

Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.

No doubt the next release of Thunderbird, currently code-named Lanikai, will do a lot to win users. Lanikai will focus on making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 more gradual, and improving on the Thunderbird 3 platform. This means fixes for IMAP, stability and memory improvements, interface enhancements, and improvements to message filters and Smart Folders. The 3.1 release is avoiding disruptive changes and the team is shooting for a May release. The bigger challenge ahead for Moz Messaging is how to pay for itself.

Read the rest on OStatic…

Google Buzz: Much Ado about Something

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:13:27 +0000

If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Google is having a yet another go at a social media platform, this time with Google Buzz. Buzz meshes input from third party social media sites like Flickr and Twitter, and pulls in Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Reader, and a number of other features in a way that makes for a compelling platform. Has Google finally gotten it right? Buzz has a few glitches, but the final product is worth a look.

Last year, Google generated a ton of hype around Wave and plenty of people were convinced that Wave was going to be a fantastic collaboration tool that would mesh real-time and asynchronous communication and provide the next big collaboration and communication platform. Far from being the social media and collaboration tool of dreams, when Wave finally hit the beach it was with all the grace of a dead whale. In addition to the platform’s obvious technical flaws, the roll-out was too slow, giving only a small sub-section of users access — leaving many users with no one to collaborate with on a collaboration platform.

Read the rest on Linux Magazine

Facebook Friends PHP: Introducing HipHop

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:07:57 +0000

Are you a fan of PHP? Facebook is. The company has been working behind the scenes to create HipHop, a runtime compiler for PHP to improve the language’s performance on Facebook’s servers. The company is also friending the rest of the PHP community with its work by releasing its project as open source.

Rumors have been flying for a while, and the news was confirmed on Monday by ReadWriteWeb. Facebook gave a talk on Tuesday night about HipHop to introduce the technology at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

Read the rest on OStatic

Google’s Chinese Diplomacy: Can Google Make a Difference?

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:47:28 +0000

The company that promised not to be evil took a serious drubbing in 2006 when it decided to censor search results in order to comply with local laws in China. Four years later, Google is having to rethink its decision. Google has made a splash with its new approach to China, but is it enough and the right approach to make a difference?

Google attracted international attention and criticism for going against its own corporate ethics to do business in China. At the time, the company said it hoped that it could “make a meaningful – though imperfect – contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.” Google may have made some impact, but it doesn’t appear that its presence has had any deep impact on access to information in China.

Read the rest on OStatic…