246 posts tagged “open-source”
2009
Introducing Cloudera Desktop. It’s a GUI for Hadoop, and under the hood is a whole stack of open source software, including Python, Django, MooTools, Twisted, lxml, CherryPy, Mako, Java and AspectJ.
You count the "value" that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can't now because they can't compete with free. But you don't count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It's the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of "dumping" and ruining the market for competing software. That's true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.
There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It's just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn't help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development.
Kung Fu People (via) The first site to launch based on the open source Django code from djangopeople.net!
Scriptlets—Quick web scripts (via) From the prolific Jeff Lindsay, a pastebin-style tool for short server-side scripts written in Python, JavaScript or PHP that executes them within a Google App Engine powered sandbox. The Java code that implements the service is available on GitHub.
Django 1.1 release notes (via) Django 1.1 is out! Congratulations everyone who worked on this, it’s a fantastic release. New features include aggregate support in the ORM, proxy models, deferred fields and some really nice admin improvements. Oh, and the testing framework is now up to 10 times thanks to smart use of transactions.
NASA NEBULA Services (via) NASA’s new NEBULA cloud computing platform appears to be built entirely on open source infrastructure, including Python, Django, Fabric, Eucalyptus, RabbitMQ, Trac and Solr.
Popfly Shutting Down. Yet another reminder that building stuff on a closed-source platform (especially a hosted service) is risky business, even from a vendor as large as Microsoft. This certainly won’t help them make the case for Azure.
Twenty questions about the GPL. Jacob kicks off a fascinating discussion about GPLv3.
BBC: Glow (via) The BBC have released Glow, their jQuery-like JavaScript library developed in house over the past few years. It’s open source under the Apache license.
Yahoo! proposal to open source “Traffic Server” via the ASF. Traffic Server is a “fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server” (presumably equivalent to things like Squid and Varnish) originally acquired from Inktomi and developed internally at Yahoo! for the past three years, which has been benchmarked handling 35,000 req/s on a single box. No source code yet but it looks like the release will arrive pretty soon.
From Microsoft: C# and CLI under the Community Promise. Microsoft’s assurance that it won’t “assert its Necessary Claims” against alternative (including open source) implementations of the ECMA C# and CLR specifications. The promise doesn’t cover implementations of .NET, WinForms etc- so the Mono team have announced they will be splitting their project in to two packages—a safe, ECMA based package and a package containing everything else.
Stellarium. Really lovely open source planetarium application, for Linux, OS X and Windows.
EveryBlock source code released. EveryBlock’s Knight Foundation grant required them to release the source code after two years, under the GPL. Lots of neat Django / PostgreSQL / GIS tricks to be found within.
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
PostgreSQL Development Priorities. The top two for 8.4 are “Simple built-in replication” and “Upgrade-in-place”, Josh Berkus is seeking feedback on priorities for future work on 8.5.
djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in.
Reducing XSS by way of Automatic Context-Aware Escaping in Template Systems (via) The Google Online Security Blog reminds us that simply HTML-escaping everything isn’t enough—the type of escaping needed depends on the current markup context, for example variables inside JavaScript blocks should be escaped differently. Google’s open source Ctemplate library uses an HTML parser to keep track of the current context and apply the correct escaping function automatically.
Ext Core 3.0 Beta Released. The Ext JavaScript team have just released the core library (similar to jQuery or Prototype) under an MIT license. The rich GUI elements that go on top are still under the GPL.
DB2 support for Django is coming. From IBM, under the Apache 2.0 License. I’m not sure if this makes it hard to bundle it with the rest of Django, which uses the BSD license.
Whoosh. A brand new, pure-python full text indexing engine (think Lucene). Claims to offer performance in the same league as wrappers to C or Java libraries. If this works as well as it claims it will be an excellent tool for adding search to projects that wish to avoid a dependency on an external engine.
Apache Qpid. A new open source AMQP message queue with implementations in C++ and Java, developed by engineers from Red Hat, IONA and JP Morgan Chase. Anyone tried this yet? Looks pretty good on paper.
google-mobwrite. Neil Fraser’s terrifyingly clever differential synchronization algorithm (for SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web) is now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library.
Project Voldemort. Yet Another “big, distributed, persistent, fault-tolerant hash table”—this time from LinkedIn, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The approach to consistency is interesting—instead of using distributed transactions, they use versioning and “resolve inconsistencies at read time”. It also uses consistent hashing (as seen in libketama) to select servers. The design document has lots more information.
The simple truth is that in the age of Web 2.0/3.0, in the era of cloud and utility computing, the application server is a commodity. A commercial, proprietary app server simply cannot survive in this environment anywhere outside the lethargic, soft-padded walls of the enterprise.
2008
[In Mali...] The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as "the first world standard" and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it's a legal way of getting quality software for free.
OurDelta Builds for MySQL (via) A community supported “alternative distro” of MySQL, incorporating new features from Google and other sources by maintaining a clean set of patches against the MySQL source tree (which I guess is why it’s not considered a fork). I recognise some of the patches from the excellent “High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition”.
License Hacking. Wikipedia is making the switch to a CC license, by asking the Free Software Foundation to include that as an option in the latest version of the Free Documentation License which Wikipedia currently uses and which includes an auto-upgrade clause. Devious.
Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 (via) Launched today, the pricing includes rental of the Windows license. Regular Windows is 25% to 50% more expensive than Linux, but SQL Server comes in at a hefty $1.10 per hour, which is $9636 per year (nearly three times as much as a Linux server running an open source database).