OStatic

As the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) kicks into high gear, the hopes, dreams and plans for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 release are taking shape. Over at Ars Technica, Ryan Paul reports on Canonical developer Michael Casadevall's presentation highlighting some of the technical nuances of making Android applications run on Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Ubuntu's popularity aside, it is still esoteric -- Google has the upperhand in non-open source enthusiast name recognition. This no doubt plays into netbook manufacturer's opting for Android on netbooks, even though (as Paul states) Android is still very much a smartphone platform. Android can be modified, of course, but Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) are already lightweight desktops potentially requiring fewer modifications to work well on netbooks.

Will adding Android compatibility make Remix a more attractive platform option? Can it really hurt?

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating free Unix.

The New York Times has a story on alleged troubles surrounding Jimmy Wales, co-founder of open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia.....Sun Microsystems and open source backup and recovery company Zmanda have announced a partnership to deliver a global backup and recovery system for MySQL Enterprise subscribers.....The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is claiming victory in yet another infringement lawsuit over the use of the open source GPL license.....

This piece by Bruce Byfield sparked my interest a bit, because the topic of world domination, is one that keeps me up at night. Specifically -- how can Linux edge closer to a majority market share, particularly on the desktop?

When you're trying to provide a system that is appealing to former Windows users, you generally find that a lot of people expect features that are often only available from proprietary drivers, codecs, or applications. So, the question is whether Linux vendors and projects should supply proprietary software in one form or another to address those needs, or to insist only on free software.

Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

This week brings some interesting debates on open source licenses, their limits and shortcomings, and their strengths. For example, this post explores a number of misconceptions that people have about the General Public License (GPL), which is the license behind about two in three open source software projects, as shown by Black Duck Software here. The case discussed in the post concerns a Goldman Sachs Group programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, who was arrested--by the FBI, no less--and charged with stealing computer code designed to automate Goldman Sachs' massive trading business. Aleynikov's defense was that he was only trying to download open source software governed by the GPL.

Meanwhile, as Savio Rodrigues notes, on August 31st, a smackdown debate on open source licenses will take place in Ottawa, Canada. Luminaries from the open source world will each defend various types of open source licenses, and everyone is invited to submit questions for the smackdown. You can submit your questions here, and they'll be answered during the virtual event, which you can sign up for here.

If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google's SketchUp in a number of areas, it's still not much help for someone with no design sense.

This makes it even more odd that I was so excited when I spotted Elizabeth Krumbach's post on the open source, cross platform 3D interior design modeling application. I've lived in my house for nine years -- we have shades on all the windows, but only one window has actual curtains. It's just that SketchUp is a fun little application, and it's one of the only applications I've tried to run with WINE (and failed miserably in the attempt).

Sweet Home 3D, as Krumbach says, is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Because it's open source, there's the potential to model a structure (and the stuff that fills it) to a whole new level of precision. Perhaps the only drawback (and it could be a machine quirk, as everything's being difficult today) was its seeming somewhat crashprone on my Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit laptop. That could also be chalked up to my learning curve. But let's take a closer look.