OStatic

Let's face it. Even though open source conferences, conventions, and projects have seen an increase in the number of female participants, there's a strikingly male majority in the world of free software. While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework.

The approach? Think Google Summer of Code -- complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors -- with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.

Stop me if you've heard this one before -- the reason why so many people choose Windows over alternative platforms is because there are too many choices.

All right, hold on to your hats, folks. In a few cases, I think that's an accurate statement. Why? Because people just want to use their computer. I also know that when given a computer running an alternative operating system, this same demographic happily gets on with using the computer.

On the desktop, of course, there's been a long history of vendors pushing proprietary operating systems by default. While it appears that trend will change in the future, it's already changing in the mobile arena.

Microsoft's Robbie Bach is applying the old argument to the new playing field. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, unsurprisingly, thinks this is a bad move on Microsoft's part.

Last Friday, Sam's Buffer Overflow run-down featured a piece by Walter Koenning discussing why campaigning hard for Linux on the desktop is selling open source -- and the operating system -- short.

I agree with Vincent Danen that wondering whether Linux is ready for the desktop is silly, even irrelevant -- wider usage tends to foster growth in related sectors (think cloud computing and virtualization). But Koenning's made a particularly strong (and strangely parallel) point that encouraging non-technical end users to use open source software is a great way to ease vendors into supporting non-proprietary platforms.

Batgirl and I have something in common besides wishing we were Wonder Woman -- we're both librarians. There are some striking differences between us, as well. For instance, work in my public library was seldom for the meek or passive. I'm also far more aggressive in my adventures with open source software.

There are many reasons to like open source software in libraries -- secure, stable, cost-efficient public access terminals spare librarians and patrons time and heartache. And of course, the humble card catalog has metamorphosized into the unruly beast known as the integrated library system (ILS).

Any cataloger will tell you that the nature of an ILS (even back in the days of cards shackled in long wooden drawers) is oddly proprietary. Controlled language makes the database work, but catalog cards were often sold partially completed, ready for a little customization at the local library. Today, it's not so much that the records themselves aren't modifiable -- it's ILS that's immutable.

There are a few exceptions -- Georgia Public Library System's Evergreen and the long-lived New Zealand born Koha.

Koha developers, contributors, and users might sum up the past year with a bastardized comic book tag line: With great adoption comes great growing pains. Many now, however, hope the worst of it is ready to be shelved away.

There's been some intriguing discussion going on in the KDE community. Developer Aaron Siego ponders how the open source community can recognize and help struggling projects before the situation becomes critical.

Seigo says two of the more common reasons development efforts are put aside are technical issues with upstream projects and non-project demands that developers face. The first scenario is (sometimes) forseeable, but one person's life changing event can throw a small development team into a tailspin.

While Cisco prepares to reveal the winners in its Developer Contest next week, I got the chance to speak with Team Enhancers about its contest entry.

The Local Advertising Mesh Network, an advertising platform for local ad management, is Rajesh Kotagiri's response to the challenge Cisco put forth in the Developer Contest guidelines -- to use the network as a platform approach and develop an application using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a service module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

In June, Cisco announced the ten finalists in its Think Inside the Box developer competition. The global contest centered on the network as a platform philosophy, and asked applicants to develop applications using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

The contest drew nearly 900 hopeful development teams from 75 countries. After many long hours of deliberation, the 110 qualifying teams were whittled down to 10 finalists.

OStatic has been fortunate enough to talk to a few of these finalist teams -- including Toshiyuki Sakata, from Team CampUser. CampUser, based in Brazil, developed its Locker for IP Telephony application to help network administrators maximize their organization's operational efficiency and billing policy administration through call authorization profiles and call management processing.

Merely seconds after the doors opened at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation announced its newest member -- the creators of the Splashtop instant-on platform, DeviceVM.

While Splashtop has been stealing hearts for nearly two years on roughly 200 models of laptops, motherboards, desktop systems and netbooks -- and DeviceVM already participates in the Moblin project in conjunction with kernel development efforts -- its Linux Foundation membership became official today.

Today, the Linux Foundation released its updated study of mainline kernel development. The report examines the slight variations in release frequency, the lines of code submitted, deleted and modified since the April 2008 study, new trends in subsystem patch signoff, and the remarkable diversity (and, perhaps, adversity outside the realm of kernel development) of the companies contributing to the kernel.

While the study is obviously pertinent to those working in kernel development, it covers so many aspects of the development process that everyone working with open source software -- developers, community managers, and even non-IT managerial roles -- can find something directly related to their positions.

It's also (perhaps surprisingly) engaging reading for those interested in the Linux kernel but a little foggy on how the kernel relates to the rest of the operating environment or how changes are approved and applied to the kernel tree.

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.