Medical companies feared an end to forum shopping and more examination of claims would burden both their efforts to patent inventions and gain redress when patents were violated. So they torpedoed this half-a-loaf solution for technology.

Earlier we challenged Moore's Law with OpenOffice.org. Today we have a three-way match. In the first corner, we have heavyweight Microsoft Office; in the second, undefeated champion Moore's Law; in... [[ Visit OOoNinja.com for the full article ]]

Sometimes I want to declare victory and go home. Of course, that's usually an admission of defeat, but I really think that with news like Verizon Embraces Linux, that the penetration of Open Source into every sector of computer-using society (which would be ... everything) is inevitable. We've started the snowball down the hill, and there's no stopping it. Not that we would want to! But neither can the foes of Open Source stop it either.

When Sun went open source, Sun had to change. We continue to watch this change with fascination, knowing that without dramatic changes in management attitudes, all the way down the line, Sun can't survive. The same lesson applies to content.

By Jason Robbins, Open Source TeamIt's an Internet world now, we're all just living in it. The cumulation of many software projects used to be RTM: the point at which the team could "release to manufacturing", meaning that someone burned a CD and put it in a box with shrink-wrap. Today, much of the most exciting software is on-line only, and that trend is only going to continue. So, doing a good job with the on-line release of software is more important than ever.In building Google Code's project hosting feature, we've occasionally needed to balance the needs of developers and the needs of end-users of the software being developed. We aim to make it as easy as possible for developers to participate in open source projects. But, we also keep in mind that developers develop software for users to use. Sometimes we've had to force developers to plan ahead a bit so that they do a better job for end-users. Specifically, when it comes to releasing open source software, we had a mini-bill-of-rights in mind for the benefit of end-users:

• If you download something, you can unambiguously tell someone else exactly what version you downloaded. For example, when filing an issue about it.
• If you downloaded a release, you can always download that exact same release again. For example, if you need to reinstall and you can't upgrade.
• You can tell someone to download a certain version that you downloaded, and they will be able to do it, even later. For example, in written installation instructions.
• You can refer to a release by URL in a build script or a web page client-side include, and the same version will still be at that URL later. For example, when offering a Java or Javascript library for other developers to reuse in their own applications, without forcing each of them to set up a new way to redistribute your library.

This all points to the need for archival downloads: downloads that, once released, stay released. We strongly discourage the projects that we host from deleting downloads, and the contents of a download cannot be swapped out for other contents. Instead, each download must have a unique name, usually including a release number. And, old versions can only be marked as "deprecated" to keep the list of current downloads clean and let end-users know that that download is no longer supported. We make exceptions for common errors, such as uploading the wrong file. When active open source projects release regularly, they naturally use up their download space quota, and we happily grant them larger quotas rather than ask them to delete any part of their project's history.

These alliance games are not Google's forte. With all the things it does so well, is the alliance game going to be its undoing?

Red Hat’s Fedora project yesterday quietly released version 9, an upgrade of its open source Linux operating system with support for live USB bootup, OpenJDK6 , KDE 4 and the ext4 file system. Fedora 9, code-named Sulphur, was developed by more than 2,000 volunteer developers, said Paul Frields, Fedora’s recently-appointed project leader. Version 9 offers a variety [...]

The bottom line is there are all sorts of things open source marketers can do with the permission users give them every day.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamLast weekend, the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) gathered developers, users and designers representing all of the major free graphics applications like Blender, the GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus and many more. The conference, now in its third year, was held at Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland, which you may remember as one of our top ten universities for Google Summer of Code™ 2008. Two former Summer of Code students, Michael Dominic Kostrzewa and Pawel Solyga, attended the meeting and were kind enough to send us their impressions of the conference.Pawel, Co-Founder of the Natural User Interface Group and one of their mentors for Summer of Code this year, gave us some general background on the meeting:The purpose of the LGM is to allow developers from diverse projects to collaborate, share ideas and code, co-operate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another. It isalso a great place to get feedback from live end users and artists, all of who are considered an integral part of the conference. We also had a chance to watch the pre-screening of the Peach open movie project's Big Buck Bunny on the local cinema big screen. As usual, LGM was free to attend, open to all and a useful three days for everyone involved.Michael adds:At LGM, key members of the community presented the current state of their projects and talked about future developments. Software packages ranging from font-design applications to digital publishing were demoed. The most interesting topics included vector-based sketching using tablets. Thanks to the latest code in the Inkscape project artists can create scalable, fully editable pen-alike renderings with same quality and feeling as traditional raster-based canvas. Another highlight was Krita - an application using advanced physical model to simulate the look & feeling of real-world brushes and paints.The Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 was a nice, successful event. It was exciting to see designers and coders talking to each other, sharing visions & ideas.Have you been working on a cool open graphics project or were you one of the attendees of LGM? As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the conference or the coolest new work you've produced using FOSS tools.

ReactOS, with sponsorship, might make it in some home offices and small businesses, but it will never get past that niche, and like Windows it will need support. It won't be free.

HP under Hurd is becoming just as important to Microsoft as IBM is to open source. With EDS, a major user of Windows in its own service operations, this becomes clearer.

Kryder's Law, a variation of Moore's Law, describes the trend "magnetic disk areal storage density doubles annually" [1]. In other words, you don't want to know how much I paid for a 40MB Seagate... [[ Visit OOoNinja.com for the full article ]]

By Cat Allman, Open Source TeamThere is lots going on in May, starting this week with Connectathon in San Jose, California, USA from Thursday, May 8th through Thursday, May 15th. Samba guy Jeremy Allison will be taking part Monday - Thursday in this network proving ground which allows vendors to test their interoperability solutions, with special emphasis on NFS and Internet protocols.On Wednesday, May 14th BSDCan, an annual gathering of 4.4BSD based operating systems developers, kicks off in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada with two days of tutorials, followed by 2 days of talks, including one by our own Leslie Hawthorn on Google Summer of Code™, currently under way for it's fourth year.The Summer of Code goodness doesn't stop there: other past GSoCers also speaking include past mentors Poul-Henning Kamp speaking on "Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control", and Pawel Jakub Dawidek on the ZFS file system. Past student participant Constantine A. Murenin will be speaking on the past and present history of OpenBSD's hardware sensors framework, and Ivan Voras will be present on "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer he's began working on as a Summer of Code project in 2007.It shouldn't be too hard to find members of the Open Source Team if you're in San Jose or Ottawa over the next few days. Stop by, introduce yourself and let us know what's on your mind.Ed. note: updated post with corrected typo.

Instead of just honoring projects, why not organize and advocate for community managers, the profession Sourceforge has done so much to create.

At the heart of Vyatta is VC4, a Linux-based networking system the company claims offers better performance than Cisco gear at a fraction of the price.

As equipment maker PacketHop explains on their Web site, wireless mesh works by having WiFi radios self-connect, extending the range of the connection almost indefinitely.

Mozilla now expects Firefox 3 RC1 will be ready to go in late May. RC1 was originally planned to be released last month but several bugs have arisen during the final phase of development that needed to be addressed, including problems with the new Places bookmarking feature, themes UI and conflicts with Google’s Safebrowing add on. It looks like are systems are [...]

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamSometimes you have a good week, other times a great week. This week has definitely been one of the latter. We spent Monday morning with some incredibly bright youngsters from the Watershed School in Colorado, all of whom had spent the past three days exploring the joys of the Maker Faire. Our conversation bounced from how the students use Google Apps for their school projects to extending this non-profit school's computer budget by using Open Source software. The best part of the day, though, had to have been the campus tour; as we showed off the Growing Connection Garden on our HQ's main campus, we were greeted with many stories of how these students had recently begun exploring issues around food production in their course "From Farm to Table"; needless to say, a lively discussion ensued over lunch about sustainable agriculture and alternative educational strategies. Not long after returning to the usual swing of things Open Source, full of both organic produce and inspiration, Maital Ashkenazi, Google Summer of Code™ student in 2007 for the GenMAPP project, pinged. Maital, whom you may remember from her report on last year's Cytoscape Developer Retreat, let us know that the two plugins she produced for her project have been downloaded more than 800 times and will likely soon replace the current search functionality in Cytoscape. We were also proud to hear that an article on her work had recently been published in Oxford's Bioinformatics Journal. The best news of all, though, is that Maital has gone on to mentor for GenMAPP for this year's Summer of Code.In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that their student Filippo Bollini had crafted a particularly well written update; it's worth checking out for mentors wondering what sorts of information to collect from students or for students wondering what kind of details are most useful to their mentors.Getting back to great news from the younger crowd, Wilco Jansen, one of Joomla!'s mentors and organization administrators for both Summer of Code and the Google Highly Open Participation Contest™ (GHOP), wrote in to share some great news about their Grand Prize Winner, Tomasz Dobrzyński. Two of Tomasz's recently written plugins for Joomla! are community favorites, and Tomasz should soon be back to developing 'full-time' as his school holidays approach. Our Polish speaking readers may be interested in reading more about Tomasz and his two fellow Polish GHOP Grand Prize Winners, Jaroslaw Tworek and Wojtek Szkutnik. (Alternatively, now may be a great time to phone or make some friends in Poland.)With so many great things happening this week, we knew we wanted to share it with all of you. We hope you too find these notes inspirational, and that you're now fully primed to go scratch your own itch. If you have a story like these you'd like to share, we would love to hear from you.Happy Hacking this weekend!

The real OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is out and people are asking questions. Here are FAQ, a few other questions that should be FAQ, and errata. This is a beta. What's the worse than can... [[ Visit OOoNinja.com for the full article ]]

Just as Google's infrastructure allows it to act independently of the open source movement which it claims to champion, so Barack Obama's infrastructure enables the same with regards the progressive movement he claims to champion.