Links: Open Source Week in Review

It is the role of a community manager to remove the barriers — both technical and ideological — between the user/developer community and the company or group of individuals which produces the open source software

As textbooks, Cohen used Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software, supplemented by Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Lawrence Rosen’s Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. All, appropriately enough, are available in free online versions. Cohen also made extensive use of other Web pages throughout the course.\n\nThe midterm and the final exams were based on material covered in the lectures and the textbooks. However, two-thirds of each student’s grade was based on their involvement with a FOSS project.

Surprising that PosgresSQL ranks higher than MySQL here. However, I think it’s a good sign that there are two very active open source SQL databases.

Instuctions for getting an Asus Eee to connect over a Verizon EVDO card.

Open source implementation of Windows API on top of X And Unix turns version 1.0.

Social Networking Applications in the U.S. Take Hold and Market Experiences 191% Growth in 2007, IDC Finds

To summarize, Clipperz has technology for “zero-knowledge web applications” which they have applied to an online password manager as a proof of concept.

Some free, some open source tools and services that are used to develop and maintain websites. New ones for me are Piwik (http://piwik.org/) and Open Designs (http://www.opendesigns.org/).

The open source components in Reddit – Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

Given the failure of pending patent reform legislation (S. 1145) to make it out of committee in the U.S. Senate this spring, it is unlikely that we will see any form of comprehensive patent reform legislation this year. This should not be surprising given that this is a major election year and the fact that there are a few other issues on the table (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East peace, soaring gasoline prices, soaring food prices, housing market in the ditch, Midwest flooding – shall I go on?).

Media processing vendor Pika Technologies Inc. recently announced that its Warp appliance line is customer-ready and ready to slay the Nortels and Ciscos of the world in a bid for the small to midsize corporate telespace.

Stephen O’Grady sums up the current debate, begun by Savio, continued by the 451’s Matthew Aslett, and back to Savio. The question being asked is one that’s made the rounds before, and one that I’ve asked myself: are there artificial limits to the revenue potential of open source firms? As Aslett puts it, a glass ceiling?

How commercial works by Pentaho CTO James Dixon.

8 million downloads in a 24 hour period. The judges at the Guinness World Records are working to validate thevrecord attempt.

Red Hat’s new chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted his company needs to improve its approach to its customers and partners.

Black Duck analyzes progress of GPLv3 since it’s release last year. 2,345 open source projects have addoped the license. One trend was the increase of dual licensing.

The company will make money from support contracts (various fees for various levels of support) and pre-installation consulting. It will also offer some online services for Drupal setups, like a “heartbeat” or monitoring service, and an anti-spam solution

The Red Hat move that will catch the eye of most users is the Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt. \n\nAt this point, followers and users of Red Hat Linux may be asking, “What about Xen?” (the best-known open-source hypervisor technology to date.) Red Hat, according to Red Hat executive VP Paul Cormier, will continue to support both Xen and KVM. But, because “KVM is now baked in to the Linux kernel, it’s very easy for both Red Hat and other developers to work with it,” Cormier says. For the time being, Xen will continue to be important, but, as time goes by, Red Hat sees KVM becoming the dominant virtualization technology, he says.