Gadgetopia

No Respect for Windows Open Source: An interesting perspective about how much respect you can get making open source stuff for Windows. DotNetNuke is a portal/CMS system that runs on .Net. The guy who wrote it is apparently sick of sitting at the kids' table just because his app is ...

2007 Open Source CMS Award: Packt has started up their 2007 awards for open-source content management, and yours truly has been selected as a judge in the Best Social Networking CMS category. What s cool is that Bryan over at CMS Report got selected as a judge too, which means humble ...

CMS Toolbox: 80 Open Source Content Management Systems: Great list of open-source CMSs. There s something for everyone, these days.

reddit goes open source: Reddit has open-sourced their codebase. I think it s written in Lisp? Today we re excited to announce that we re open sourcing reddit. We ve always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step. When we say open-source we ...

OSFlash [Open Source Flash]: At first, I thought this was an open-source implementation of Flash. It's not, but still a cool thing. OSFlash is a community-run resource site for open source Flash projects and tools.

My business mail server got blacklisted the other day. We started getting consistent bounces from a couple of clients that referenced some odd site. A little poking around revealed that our mail server had been inexplicably identified as an open relay and was on a spam blacklist that the clients ...

Korea launches a switch to open source: They may seem like strange bedfellows, but two announcements this week strengthen open-source in government IT structures: "Thousands of computers in ministries, government-linked organizations and universities in South Korea will replace Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite with open-source alternatives under ...

The one piece of software I've found no open source equivalent for is Microsoft Streets & Trips. It's an invaluable tool for planning trips to places you've never been to. The main reason there's no open-source version (as far as I know) is that the mapping data itself is proprietary. ...

McNealy: Java won't be open source: Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

While software vulnerabilities do exist in software other than produced by Microsoft, it's rare that they make the news. Security experts find open-source flaws reports that researchers have found possible problems with two major open-source software products. "The latest flaws add to the debate over which is more secure ...

Open Source Takes on Hardware Biz: When you think "open source," you always think "software." Well, a group of developers is extending open source into hardware by developing a chip with freely-available blueprints. "Hardware has always been very proprietary even more so than software," said Lampret in an interview ...

iD Software uber-programmer John Carmack hinted on Slashdot that Quake 3 may soon go open source. By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon. That would be a tremendous boon to a lot of folks trying to write ...

Open Source Receives Royalties Boost: This is an awfully cool thing. Most of Packt's books are on open-source stuff, and a lot of them are on projects for which no other books have been written. Good to see them support the projects which provide them with subjects for their books. ...

A convoluted Mambo: Why open source software needs usability Nazis: A good rant over at TeleRead about the state of usability in open-source software -- Mambo, in this case. I also wonder if the Geek Snobbery Factor may have been at work. So often, leadership within open source efforts is ...

Donating $5,000 to .NET Open Source: Last year, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror promised to done some money from his advertising to open-source projects. He followed through on that today with a $5,000 check to the ScrewTurn Wiki project. This is like one of those giant promotional checks you see ...

CIO Magazine has published a suprisingly rosy article on the virtues of open source in IT shops. Interesting arguments for open source from a business perspective, along with a number of case studies. What Alberg finds fascinating about moving to open source is the performance improvement that resulted. The move ...

ONLamp.com: Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves [Dec. 11, 2003]: This is a painfully honest article. As wonderful as the open-source ideal is, it's tough to come by. Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors. Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people ...

Port25: This is interesting. I had heard that Microsoft had such a thing on the campus, but who would of thought they'd publish a bunch of stuff from it? Port 25 is open. The people, insights, and analysis from the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab.

The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source: Here's a great survey of all that is good in the open source world. Movable Type made the list for Perl (even though it's not technically open source), and I was surprised to see Ruby in there as a Perl alternative. ...

We seem to have avoided most of the Y2K election fiasco this year (depending on who you ask, of course), but most of the country still uses some sort of voting system with inherent flaws. Punch cards leave hanging chads, optical scanners have partially filled-in choices, and the current generation ...

Movable Type Open Source: I d never thought I d see this day in the five years I ve been using MT. As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

New York Times opens up code: This is kind of cool. It s good to see an organization like the New York Times contribute some stuff to open source. The New York Times likes open source so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, ...

Why Microsoft Should Open Source the Leaked Source: From the "never-gonna-happen" department, this guy says that Microsoft should just open-source the code that was leaked last week. He makes a good case, but there's no chance Bill would actually go for it. Why not make lemonade out of lemons by ...

Open Source Web Design - Home /\^/\: Not a bad bunch of designs floating around here. They're all certainly very tweakable. Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a ...

Producing Open Source Software: A good-looking book on how to create the next killer app. Producing Open Source Software is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software. It's free ...

Open Command Window Here: This is so handy. Microsoft should build this into Windows. If you do much work from your command line, you know how annoying it can be to run the command window, then cd to the directory you're already working in. Open Command Window Here takes care ...

OpenUsability:Welcome: This is good to see, since usability has always been the big problem with open source stuff. Usability always plays second fiddle to writing code. OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together. The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who ...

Open Source a No-Brainer for Developing World: This is something I believe in quite strongly. Open source is a nice alternative (even a novelty) for us in the first world, but for countries like sub-Saharan Africa, open source is the only game in town. They can't afford to feed the ...

I was reading an article about vertical car doors over at the USA Today. They sell these doors as kits these days, so you can make your Civic very Lamborghini-esque. Mind you, these aren't gullwing doors that open to the side then up, these are jackknife-type doors, that open like ...

Open Web Design: Here's a good collection of open source designs that you can use. Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place! There's some really nice ...

Red Hat Signs Agreement to Acquire JBoss: This is interesting, but we all knew it was coming. Red Hat will acquire JBoss for approximately $350 million in initial consideration, plus approximately $70 million subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics. The transaction consideration is composed of approximately 40 ...

I'm reading Secure Coding: Principles and Practices from O'Reilly and I stumbled on something worth thinking about: should your software fail open or fail closed? Say you're building a corporate firewall. What happens when it encounters a fatal error and can't figure out what's a good packet and what's a ...

If you've read this blog, you may have picked up on the fact that I'm a bit of an open-source advocate. I far prefer to use open-source solutions wherever possible. By and large, open-source doesn't get enough credit. I've run Linux and KDE as my primary work environment on my ...

Here's a really handy thing: if you get an Excel attachment in Gmail now, you get the option to "Open in Google Spreadsheets," which means you don't have to download it. Very handy for a lot of reasons, and seems to work beautifully.

Open House: I want to go so bad it hurts. Joel, send me a ticket. Great pictures at that URL of their new office space. Someone in New York needs to go and take pictures. Here at Fog Creek Software we recently finished a big expansion of our office space. ...

Mambo Open Source: Mambo server is a PHP/MySQL-based content management system. The marketing material doesn't reveal much: "Mambo Open Source is the finest open source Web Content Management System available today. Mambo Open Source makes communicating via the Web easy. Have you always wanted to have your own site but ...

Disney Debuts New Safer, Quieter and More Environmentally Friendly Fireworks Technology: Disney has sort of open-sourced a new way to launch fireworks. The new method uses compressed air instead of black powder. (The quote below is from a press release, so it's a little self-serving.) As a recognized industry leader ...

Microsoft claims software like Linux violates its patents: I thought Microsoft was trying to bridge the gap to the open-source world lately? This is a really horrific idea. Did the SCO fiasco not warn them off a plan like this? [ ] there s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free ...

Homeland Security Survey Takes First Pass at LAMP: Some good news, though I think the bug density would skyrocket once they moved passed the top 1% of projects and into the second and third-tier of open source stuff. First results are in for the Department of Homeland Security's vulnerability survey ...

Open Source CMS Award: Packt is doing their awards again this year, and I ve been asked to judge in Best Open Source PHP CMS. Go nominate your favorite app. Nominations are open through August 25. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for ...

The 9th Webby Awards opens for entries from the best of web: The Webbies are open for entries. Hint, hint (oh, I'm kidding much like myself, Gadgetopia is too ugly to win anything...) Starting 24 September, web sites from around the world can get in the running for a ...

I read a great white paper on open-source content management last night called "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions." In it, the author examines several different scenarios and profiles over a dozen different open-source content management systems, explaining the key features of each and why it's right for the ...

IBM is planning to announce that they'll be donating the Java-based Cloudscape database to the Apache foundation, to be released as open source. Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is ...

A Radio Program Turns to a Blog to Cull Ideas: Blogging is coming to the airwaves. Here's the site. Listeners are invited to make suggestions on Open Source's blog, where they are openly posted along with ideas from the program's five producers. When the comment flow starts and suggestions are ...

As good a time as any: Dave Winer announced today that the kernel of Manila and Radio the object database code will be open-sourced sometime in the next few months. To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure ...

Here's another little usability rant -- The image here shows the file operations buttons from Zend Studio -- a PHP IDE. The button on the left is a folder with a green plus sign, then a folder with an arrow up, and then a folder with an arrow down. These ...

Tossing this out for discussion and/or flaming In what order are the top open-source content management systems, from biggest to smallest? Yes, it s vague. By biggest, I mean a back-of-the-napkin estimation of factors like number of installs, number of developers, size of community, magnitude of momentum, strength of buzz, ...

Nutch: I'm not certain whether this is a service they plan to release, or if this is software you install yourself to roll your own search engine. "Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. ...

OSCMS Summit 2007: This is a very cool thing for Yahoo! to do. A gathering of Open Source content management systems and the geeks who love them: the conference open to all open source CMSes and will host several "sub-conferences" including Drupal's DrupalCon.

Spectrasource: Macromedia has put Spectra into open-source. What is Spectra? "Spectra is an application framework that helps organizations build and manage large-scale content management and e-commerce solutions that deliver rich, personalized customer and visitor experiences. It incorporates features such as content management, workflow and process automation, roles-based security, personalization, and ...

One of the reasons I enjoy open source is that a lot of the more mature packages start focusing on nice little touches that it would take a while for a big company to get their minds around. But since the source is out there, it just takes a little ...

Using MySQL 4.0 with .NET: An article you don't see much of these days: using MySQL in a .Net environment. Aside from Oracle, I've never heard of a non-Microsoft product being used with .Net, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.

OpenOffice995: It looks like the guys over at Software 995 (we've talked about them before) are re-packaging Open Office and selling support for it as "Open Office 995." For $19.95 you get email tech support with a 24-hour respond time. This, of course, being the only way you can make ...

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset: Apparently Microsoft posted this source over at SourceForge. The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to ...

Oracle snags open-source database company: Berkeley DB was the first data storage system behind Movable Type. Still gets used a lot for it. The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumored for weeks, gives Oracle another open-source product to accompany its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, ...

General Wesley Clark for President - Official Campaign Web Site: Here's another odd trend this campaign: candidates creating organizations of computer geeks to aid their campaigns. Howard Dean has Hack4Dean and DeanSpace, and Wesley Clark has countered with this. The Clark TechCorps provides a framework for involving open source software ...

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS: I was a judge on this panel. Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress ...

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution: So funny...can't breathe... Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. [...]

www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project: Did you know O'Rielly publishes some free books? Man, I love free books. Over the years, O'Reilly & Associates has published a number of "Open Books" books with various forms of "open" copyright. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific ...

Product News > Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant > November 6, 2003">Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant: I guess I dispute that PHP is "little-known," but this is still good news. "PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of ...

Daniel Robbins, the founder of my beloved Gentoo Linux, bowed out of the Gentoo community last year, setting up a non-profit organization to responsibly manage Gentoo and all of the intellectual property that surrounds it. He, along with others, created a very popular Linux distribution that provides unique benefits over ...

I was over at OpenSourceCMS.com today playing around with some content management systems: phpWebSite, Xoops, and PostNuke. They were all quite good, with phpWebSite being the one I enjoyed the most. But I want to articulate something I've had in the back of my mind for a while... "Content management ...

Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award: Drupal wins it all. After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, ...

Open Directory Search - Custom RSS Feed Generator: Someone has hooked up RSS to DMOZ search. This tool generates a custom RSS Feed of Open Directory search results for the search term entered...

Beast: An open source Rails forum in under 500 lines of code: The link text really says it all. Rick Olson and Josh Goebel have teamed up to produce Beast, a lightweight but well styled forum. Rails has sorely been lacking a good, well styled, open source forum, but Beast ...

I spent some time over the weeked with two major open source content management systems. I'm not going to mention names, since I don't want to start a flame war, but they're both very popular, have big communities behind them, and there's a good chance you've heard of them. They're ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

ZDNet states that the latest variants of the Bagle worm include the original assembler source code of the virus as an attachment to the emails it sends. Security experts worry that this will produce a lot more variants, and make it harder to prosecute the author. "On Friday, the perfect ...

Note: After you read this, make sure you read the first few comments for a considerable expansion of what I ve written here. GPL compliance issues are tearing Joomla! apart: There are some problems in the Joomla! camp. After they forked from Mambo, they decided to let companies develop and sell ...

Alex Salkever of Business Week has written an open letter to Apple's Steve Jobs in a recent column that provides some interesting perspectives on where Apple should go next in terms of its computer business. Most of his points are awfully hard to argue with. You've been to Target, right? ...

Open Source Invades the Enterprise: Here's an interesting tidbit in a very good article about the invasion of open-source. This is a snippet about Medsphere, a company that makes hospital management software. (Or, rather, a company that released hospital management software.) Scott Shreeve, the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, says ...

Open Source: Open Source Scripting Made Easy: This is an article about PHP scripting tools that makes an important point: Commercial scripting languages have drawn success from powerful and widely used development tools: ASP has Visual Studio, ColdFusion has Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and JSP has a variety of tools from commercial ...

I suppose that FCC blogging regulations require us to muse on Google Talk for a bit. For folks that have been using IM since ICQ was king (like me, and I'm betting most of you), the Google Talk client itself looks pretty poor. It's missing features that AIM and ICQ ...

From Christian Science Monitor: Deciding what kind of software Massachusetts wants to load on some 50,000 state computers may sound like something of interest only to uber-geeks. But that decision could spark a revolution in how software is developed and sold. The Commonwealth wants to adopt an "open document" standard ...

Unintended Consequences of Using GPL Fonts: Slashdot is reporting today on the apparent belief that using a GPL-ed font in your document makes the content of the document GPL-ed by extension. [...] it appears that using GPL-licensed fonts in a document makes your document subject to the GPL. There are ...

I have the need for a new office router. We only have a couple of people, so a normal home router would be fine, except that we're geeks, so we need more than one external IP. Most home routers don't handle that. You can snag yourself a fancy Cisco PIX, ...

GPLFlash - Flash decoder, player and plugin: Someone pointed this out in a comment to my previous post from today. This is the homepage of the redesigned GPLFlash. GPLFlash is based on Olivier Debon's original work, which hasn't had a release since June 2000. This project is an endeavour to ...

InfoCentral: A log time ago (like, four years), I wrote a piece of software called InfoCentral. It's a PHP/MySQL app to manage church congregations. "InfoCentral is a church management database written in PHP, using MySQL as its database backend. It is currently the only viable Open Source package for this ...

Open Source Applications Foundation - Our Product "Chandler" - Description: Chandler is the Big Thing that Mitch Kapor (the guy who brought us Lotus 1-2-3) has been working on for a year now. Version 0.1 is out. Here's his vision: "Recent open-source groupware products and projects (Evolution, Kroupware) use Outlook ...

GWT is Open-Sourced: This is cool, but I had no idea the GWT was that complicated. The Google Web Toolkit has been open-sourced. The toolkit was developed internally and can be used to create products like GMail and Google Maps. It allows you to program in Java and let the ...

Boston s $14.8B Big Dig finally complete: I can t believe it s finally coming to an end. All that s left now are the lawsuits. Officially, Dec. 31 marks the end of the joint venture that teamed megaproject contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build the dizzying array of underground ...

Cool Notepad Trick: Just when you thought Notepad was useless. I never knew this existed. Open a blank Notepad file [...] Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first line of the file, followed by Enter. Save the file and close it. [...] Double-click the file to open it and notice ...

Novell has announced in a press release that they will release the Exchange Connector for Ximian Evolution, previously a $75/seat plugin, as open source. Novell today announced its Connector for Microsoft* Exchange Server will be integrated into EvolutionTM 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning today with the current ...

Red Hat Decides To Do Its Own Press: Red Hat goes into the magazine business with "Wide Open." The magazine, available for $35 for a charter subscription, will be focused on professionals and non-professionals interested in open source and how to use it, Red Hat said. Each magazine will include ...

Linus Torvalds leaves Transmeta: He's leaving to go to work full-time on the Linux kernel. (Because he really needs to re-write about 80 lines of code.) This came in later from eWeek: Linux founder and lead developer Linus Torvalds will join the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) as its first ...

DeanSpace: Howard Dean's presidential campaign has resulted in an open-source app to organize "grassroots" movements. "DeanSpace is based on Drupal, an open source project that makes content management and community building on the web easy. The DeanSpace team has customized Drupal to make it work even better for building online ...

It's a long weekend coming up for us U.S. folks, so we'll need some extra diversion this week. I was thinking of keeping this one in my back pocket to slowly mete out future Friday Diversions, but this way you can divert yourselves if I miss a Friday or two ...

Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents: Nielsen dictates an exception to his "open no new browser windows" rule. Seems like a good point to me. When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are ...

Open-source PHP applications that changed the world: A nice roll-up of the most influential PHP apps of the last 10 years, from phpMyAdmin in 1998 to Magneto last year. From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ...

Sixth Annual Weblog Awards: Bloggie nominations are open. Just thought I'd mention it. No reason. Totally innocent. A "weblog" is defined as a page with dated entries....The contest is open to any weblogs that existed for a period of time during the year 2005, so weblogs that were discontinued during ...

Song swappers flock to invitation-only Internet: "Just as Prohibition drove drinkers underground in the roaring '20s, the music industry's crackdown is pushing many song swappers away from the open Internet and into what amount to cyberspace speakeasies. These high-tech Cotton Clubs usually require users to be trusted or at least ...

Random Hacks: The Missing Future: Here s a thought-provoking essay on the future of the small software developers. The author says there are two options for the future: Microsoft or open-source. Both have problems A 30-person company can t compete with Microsoft. And a 30-person company will have a hard time competing ...

I downloaded the evaluation version of WinZip so I could untar an archive. Everytime I open it, I get the Buy Now splash screen, but I swear, the Buy Now and Use Evaluation Version buttons keep switching places. Or maybe their placement is random. At any rate, each time I ...

How to set up multiple homepages in Firefox: Great Firefox tip from Lifehacker. Is this documented? If there's more than one site you always visit after starting up Firefox, you can set your homepage to open several tabs of different web sites at once automatically. From Firefox's Tools menu, Options, ...

opensourceCMS: This site has several dozen installed CMSs for you to play with: "This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be ...

The ReactOS project released the first screenshot today of its Windows NT-compatible GUI that runs off of entirely open-source code. ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. If this project ever creates a system that's even ...

This is impressive; a rack filled with 22 Mac minis, driving 22 NEC 40-inch screens that make up the Threshold system, an interactive art display at a museum in Perth, Scotland. The mini's drive the monitors, with their display coordinated by Open Threshold, an open source app, which is the ...

Mac OS Forge: According to this article, this site is endorsed by Apple itself. Mac OS X includes a wide variety of open source software from FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the GNU Project, and many more projects each its own vibrant developer community. Mac OS Forge is dedicated to supporting the ...

MySQL reserves features for paying customers; open-source community up in arms: This is interesting, and perhaps not surprising given the acquisition. Open-source darling MySQL is facing a new uprising within its customer base over plans disclosed this week to reserve some key upcoming features, and their source code, for paying ...

Convea - Open Source Business Application Platform: This is a pretty stunning piece of work. It's super-Outlook in a browser. IE 5.5+ only. Try the demo. If you're ever used Oddpost, you'll be just as impressed with Convea. Using astounding client-side programming, they have utterly and completely replictaed a client-side ...

Oracle tried to buy open-source MySQL: I guess if you can't buy them, screw them instead. MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money ...

Reticulum Rex: Here's a great little Flash movie from the folks at Creative Commons that gives you an update of where they're at after a few years of work. It's exciting to see what they're accomplished. It also led me to Common Content: An Open Catalog of Creative Commons licensed ...

Linux, Open Source Remain Thorns in Microsoft's Side: Microsoft says Linux and open-source are its second-biggest concern. Microsoft's chief financial officer John Connors outlined the five largest risks and drivers to Microsoft's business going forward. ... 'The general economic environment is risk and driver number one, Linux and non-commercial software ...

Armed and Dangerous: Open souce champion Eric Raymond goes ballistic on SCO in an open letter. "I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic — that the CEO of SCO is lying through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that you genuinely aren't capable of recognizing honest outrage when you ...

I started working with Swish-E again recently. This is an open source search engine that, for my money, is one of the best deals in the open source world. A few years ago, I spent some time working with Inktomi Enterprise Search (now Verity Ultraseek) , but after a few ...

Microsoft in hot water over Wikipedia edits: Microsoft was sick of having their Wikipedia edits to the ODF and OOXML articles reverted, so they tried to pay an "independent" party to change them. Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would ...

Perens Launches 'OpenSourceParking': This is just kind of silly, really. It's just people playing with statistics for no relevant reason except that companies use useless statistics like these to "prove" their products are more popular. Windows' share [of the hosting market jumped] 5 percent as domain registrar Go Daddy moved ...

OpenGroupware.org Complements OpenOffice: A group of open-source folks are looking to torpedo Exchange: "'Just to be perfectly clear, this is an MS Exchange take-out,' said Gary Frederick, leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project, in a statement. 'OGo is important because it's the missing link in the open source software stack. ...

'Most important ever' MySQL reaches beta: I found this stat in this article about MySQL 5.0, and I'm amazed by it: [MySQL] accounted for 40 percent of open source database deployments, while Firebird and PostgreSQL accounted for 39 percent and 11 percent of deployments respectively. Firebird has a 39% share ...

MovableType Madness: Dean over at blogs4God presents a really good wrap-up of the furor over the new Movable Type release. Unbeknowst to me, Six Apart made a change over the weekend to say that mutiple Weblogs in MT used to create one site (for instance, if you have another blog ...

Windows XP: The featured article over at Wikipedia today was on Windows XP, and it included this bit explaining what limitations are contained in Windows XP Starter Edition the Windows version for developing countries (launched in India two days ago). [...] display resolution can only be up to 800 ...

trimMail set up a machine with an open Squid proxy, and didn't tell anyone about it, just to see what would happen. It only took 18 hours before someone found it and tried to use it, likely for nefarious purposes. Is this a clutch of phishers looking for open proxies ...

Blend Interactive is a certified partner of the eZ publish content management system. eZ Systems, the company behind eZ publish, sells commercial support for the system. However, this is sometimes (often, actually) hard to explain to potential customers. It s commercial but it s open-source huh? To try and solve this, we wrote a ...

How do you or your company release code you re compelled to release under the GPL? One of the core tenets of open source is that you release your changes to the community. Everyone pays lip service to this idea, but how do people and companies actually do it? Does your ...

To show how the Mono project is building steam in the open source community, the O'Reilly folks have hightlighted seven cool apps written for Mono that show what .Net is capable of in the world of free software. Because of this ease of development, there are many cool open source ...

Microsoft Reader - Welcome, Readers!: New free books from Microsoft: I Am Madame X, Open Innovation, and The Joy Luck Club.

I N K S C A P E . Draw Freely: This has been a hole in the open-source landscape for a while now. Good to see it filled. Inkscape is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, ...

Home / Mono: Joe pointed this out in a comment to an earlier entry, but just in case you don't monitor comments, I wanted to make sure everyone sees this. It's .Net for Linux. The Mono project is an open source effort sponsored by Novell to create a free implementation ...

Google Gears API Developer s Guide: Gears is interesting. Here s what it does, on the surface. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. But I think for some applications, this is going to be like a DVR. With a DVR, ...

Elias Fotinis TaskArrange :: Arrange the Windows taskbar buttons: Okay, this sounds stupid, but I'm wicked guilty of it. From left to right, it has to be Outlook, Thunderbird, Firefox. If it's not, I get a little...anxious. Sometimes we open our programs in a specific sequence, to keep their taskbar ...

Mozilla FireFox has been awarded "Best In Show" at the LinuxWorld conference, which is taking place this week at the Moscone Center in 'Frisco. "The winners of the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards represent the best that open source has to offer," said Warwick Davies, group vice president, IDG World Expo. ...

I just opened the box on a new LaCie CD writer, and they were kind enough to include a blank CD with it. Not a huge deal, but that CD-R was in a TriggerPack case, which is so cool I hardly noticed the Porsche-designed housing on the drive. One end ...

Wells Fargo Warns Of Email Hoax: I got this yesterday, but Outlook blocked the attachment. "The email, which is titled 'Wells Fargo New Business Account Application' states that the user's 'application' has been rejected. If a user opens the attachment, however, a Trojan is placed onto the user's system that ...

InfoCentral was a piece of software I wrote for my church about two years ago. They had been tracking congregational information (people, families, group attendance, etc.) using multiple AppleWorks databases (which are really just flat spreadsheets anyway), and it was getting out of hand. InfoCentral was meant to get everything ...

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare: Business 2.0 has a good article on the new front in the browser wars: rich client apps. Firefox has XUL, which is a language to create applications within the Firefox browser. This article explains why Microsoft should be worried about it. [...] Firefox's open platform gives it ...

Could Google kill the cell phone industry?: This is a very interesting picture of why one guy thinks Google wants to lease the 700Mhz spectrum from the U.S. government. He makes a good case and an exciting one. With full leasing ownership of the 700MHz spectrum, Google will try to effectively ...

CinePaint: Here's another example of a software domain in which Linux holds an edge. This app was an fork of The Gimp. It certainly has some decent credentials. CinePaint is a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to work best with 35mm film and other high resolution ...

O'Reilly CodeZoo: When O'Reilly takes the time to build a directory of open-source components, I'm willing to bet it's pretty good.

Love all...for instant replay at U.S. Open: The animated instant replay system has been a hit at the U.S. Open so far. If the player chooses to consult the replay (each player is allowed two challenges per set), an animated image of the ball hitting the court zooms into focus ...

I was browsing a Linux site when I saw an ad for this event: What is Penguicon? To those of you familiar with the Linux and Open Source community, think of a weekend long Linux Users Group meeting with hundreds of other geeks which also just happens to have nationally ...

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen: This is a great article -- a rant, really -- about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There ...

Dilbert Comic Strip Archive - Dilbert.com: Today's Dilbert is a cute reference to freeware/shareware/open source software and how too many companies have issues with it.

I've always wondered, with the porting of open-source apps to Windows, is it possible to build an XP system that's functional for day to day use, but uses entirely free software? Well, I wonder about a lot of things like that, but I'm pretty lazy, so that's where it ends. ...

A Whole Lotta Features: This is a good tutorial on how to run an entire site from MT, but it runs into a problem that I've written about before. "...and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a ...

Spin and Vibe both large, established magazines have released new Web sites, both running on PostNuke. Good examples of what can be done with open source content management.

Ray Ozzie's Weblog: Ray Ozzie gets medieval on the future of email here. "Anyone who is doing a critical business process online that involves substantial dialog between individuals should NOT be using email at this point in history, and many no longer are." That Ray feels this way shouldn't be ...

Web Developer Extension: I don't remember where I heard about this one, but it's a peach of an extension. We've talked about the Web Developer extension for Mozilla and FireFox before, but the latest version comes with the sweetest sidebar you could ever imagine... You can open the stylesheet for ...

A Windows user spends a week with a Mac: This is from last year, but it's a good essay about transitioning from Windows to Mac. It seems balanced, and it reinforces my overall feeling: six of one, half dozen of the other. I think Macs are pretty, but I doubt ...

Open current Windows Explorer folder as Command Window: Here's an extremely handy registry hack. It lets you right-click on a Windows folder and get a command prompt at that folder.

Open Directory - Computers: Internet: Searching: Search Engines: Google: News and Media: Weblogs: Behold a DMOZ category specifically for Weblogs about Google. Slicing that taxonomy a little thin, aren't we? Via ResourceBuzz.

Open Source Content Management System List: I found this in while looking for cofax.org. Not a complete list (will there ever be one?), but it looks better than most I've seen.

I'm writing this entry from my new Red Hat Fedora Core 1 machine. It's very nice. Install was as simple as Windows (simpler, probably), and it's very functional right out of the box. It had network connectivity right away, and I can browse all my Windows shares without a problem. ...

What is AdSense for feeds?: Google has released this for open beta. We're currently beta testing AdSense for feeds, a program that allows you to monetize your feeds through contextually targeted advertising. I have applied.

TinyMCE Javascript Content Editor by Moxiecode Systems AB: This is a really nice, open source WYSIWYG editor. The plugins and demo look great (note that the demo has every single feature enabled, so it's awfully cluttered).

FeedDemon: You want to know something sad? This is what I was trying to download when I got TopStyle. I was pre-occupied with something else, I clicked the first download link I found, then installed the file and ran it before I realized it wasn't a news aggregator... But, anyway, ...

Yesterday on Kim Komando's radio show, they had some adverts about BigString.com, an e-mail service that makes some pretty astounding claims about messages sent using a BigString account: Recallable Email, which can be erased, edited, recalled or even have attachments and images "swapped out." Self-Destructing Email. Don't let your email ...

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

I've discovered yet another use for the Web Developer Toolbar; I can perform The Site Design Litmus Test, heretofore known as "Joe's Razor" (named for no one in particular): Open up a site you've done in Firefox, and take a look at it. Now, open up the 'Edit CSS' sidebar ...

File this one under "One More Reason To Like OS X". Although Quicksilver has been around for a while (Rob made brief mention of it last year) I just discovered it after following a short rabbit trail that started with a Lifehhacker interview with 43Folders' Merlin Mann. I can already ...