Free Software Linux

Mozilla Corporation has claimed that the transition to Firefox 3.1 won’t be “a major pain-in-the-ass” and pledged developers will not be hit by “surprises along the way”, after royally hacking off users with the 3.0 launch.

Soon three quarters of the world's smartphones will be running free software.

read more

Years ago, there was a great deal of worry about the possibility of burning out Linus. Life seems to have gotten easier for him since then; now instead, I've heard concerns about burning out Andrew. It seems that you do a lot; how do you keep the pace and how long can we expect you to stay at it?

The headline was that most developers are still not targeting Windows Vista when they write new apps. Only 8% of the 380 developers surveyed were writing for Vista; 49% were still targeting Windows XP.

I have been trying to digest two unrelated stories from last week. The first was the report by the Standish Group on the $60 Billion dollars open source is purported to be costing the proprietary software industry. The second was Steve Reubel’s, “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid“. As I looked introspectively into these stories I wondered how relevant they were.

read more

Recently, on another site, someone suggested that the development and marketing of Ubuntu was done by paid staff of Canonical. Having been actively involved in the Arizona Team for 8 months I would like to say that I really doubt that the suggestion can be taken seriously by anyone who knows a little about Ubuntu.

read more

In the beginning, there was Linus Torvalds, a single developer who put together the original Linux kernel. Fast forward to 2008 and Torvalds is no longer the lone Linux developer.

I don't normally blog about heavy developer issues, because that's not the focus here. But I think this news is important:

Asus has launched a software developer kit or SDK for the Eee PC. Let's ignore the fact that the Eee PC uses open source software, so you shouldn't really need an SDK to develop applications and just focus on the fact that this kit includes tools and instructions for writing applications that can be easily added to the Eee PC's easy mode interface.

...

the SDK includes the following components:

* Xandros Desktop Open Circulation Version 4.5
* QT
* Eclipse
* QT plugin for Eclipse
* Debian packaging wizard developed by Xandros

The user guide also includes detailed instructions for creating applications and icons that will work in the Eee PC's Easy Mode interface.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Academics say developers should be cautious following confusion over which parts of the OOXML specification are covered by Microsoft's "covenant not to sue".

Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution for Gnome and XFce desktop environments. Entertainer is written completely in Python using object-oriented programming paradigm. It uses GStreamer multimedia framework for multimedia playback.

Earlier this month, Owen Taylor announced Reinteract ("a system for interactive experimentation with python"). I've been wanting something like this for a while now.

In this article, we're going to turn it into a ROX application. In the past, this has meant taking a copy of a program and renaming and changing things to fit the ROX application structure. The trouble is, the ROX version and the original upstream version diverge over time. So, we're going to look at how improvements in tooling can make things easier for us.

read more

One of the great advantages of open source for library authors is that you get access to your users' unit test suites. Ensuring that your library passes its own test suite before release is good, but sometimes your users are relying on features (or undocumented behaviour) you didn't test. Running their tests too can give you extra confidence, and it's easy to make this happen automatically in your release script.

read more

Recently I created a small command line python utility to process some stuff on a TCP socket connection. I used the standard python SocketServer class because it was dead simple to use for my purposes.

However, as the requirements of the utility grew (a GUI), I hit the main problem with SocketServers - they block - which is not so good for GUIs.

So, instead of using nasty old threading, I worked out how to use gobject.io_add_watch() to do everything in the gobject/gtk main loop. This makes it very simple to have this run in a gtk UI without needing threads.

read more