The programming team behind EveryBlock, a location-specific news aggregator, has released the software's source code under the GPLv3 license. This could signal a way for the journalism industry to keep its foot in the door of local news reporting that's increasingly falling into the laps of "citizen journalists."

Since the code is fairly complex, programmers will likely start out using snippets of it to create smaller projects. Though releasing the code makes it technically possible to design all sorts of geolocation apps, St. Pete Times news technologist Matt Waite says, "If you think you just turn it on and put some ads on it and it will make money for you, you're high."

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

As predicted on the project's road map months ago, Django 1.0 is out. Though this Python-backed web application framework has been around for quite a while, declaring it to be 1.0 is an important milestone - and a big accomplishment for a dedicated community of developers.