Category: Open Source

This is a test of writely, a web document editor. I edited this documetn on Firefox on Linux. A WYSIWIG Blogging Front End It supports publishing to most types of blog, including Movable Type, which is why you are reading this on my blog. I published it there. Open Document Format It also supports saving… Continue reading Writely – A Web Document Editor that supports ODF

OSCON 2005 kicks off tomorrow 1 August 2005. I am here all week and am planning to update this blog entry with news and other tidbits. Wednesday – Keynotes and Sessions Tim O’Reilly Tim has some interesting visualisation tools for book sales. Of interest to me personally was that C# declined last year and Java… Continue reading O’Reilly Open Source Conference Coverage

In the past, open source Java projects were largely independently distributed, often with nothing more than a sourceforge site. In the past few years branded collections of projects have emerged. The best known is the Jakarta collection at Apache. Some others are http://opensymphony.com, http://codehaus.org, and http://opensource.thoughtworks.com . The new thing emerging is commercial support and… Continue reading The changing face of open source distribution

For the past 5 months I have been talking to SourceLabs about open source. They are a promising startup offering support for commonly used open source. The research I have read consistently shows lack of support as the largest inhibitor of open source adoption. To make themselves known to the open source community, SourceLabs decided… Continue reading Have you swikked yet?

Update:On 7 July Google announced the Google Toolbar for the Firefox browser on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This move should be applauded. Now for Google video. For some time I have been watching Google with growing concern. When they came on the scene, I was a very early user. I thought it was… Continue reading Google is hostile to open source, open standards and no longer cool

I greatly enjoyed reading Thomas L Friedman’s “The World is flat”. In the context of international trade and also competition, the term “level playing field” is often bandied around. A “level playing field” is one where each combatant has the same rules and no specific discrimination against them. What happens if a lot of countries… Continue reading The World is Flat: A Book Review

Know the Signs of Insect Infestation Insects likely to infest archives and libraries are numerous. Their patterns of infestation and resultant damage vary not only from species to species but within species, depending on life-cycle stage: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. The following list records some signs of infestation. Without exception, whenever any of these… Continue reading Subversive thoughts on Subversion

On Security Brian Behlendorf thinks that computer systems are going to be understood in far more biological terms in the future. We talk about viruses and anti-viruses. How about vaccines? He points out that many viruses and worms are not harmful but they could be. In this way they are like vaccines, where an infectious… Continue reading OSDL Conference Key Thoughts: Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, Mitch Kapor, Brian Behlendorf

The first question on my mind about MSN’s new search engine is whether it provides an unbiased view of the Internet. Judge for yourself “java sucks” Google: 410,000 MSN: 846,373 “.net sucks” Google: 3,000,000 MSN: 245,041

I am attending the OSDL Linux Enterprise Summit in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco. Interestingly a good proportion of the attendees are corporte lawyers. The focus right now is on getting the law right to avoid future difficulties. Following are some highlights from day one. Open Source Licensing, Larry Rosen Used to be mainly… Continue reading Report from Day One of the OSDL Linux Enterprise Summit