OStatic

Everyone here at OStatic is very honored to be recognized by PC Magazine (now exclusively on the web as PCMag.com) as one of its editors' choices of Top 100 Blogs in its annual roundup. Our sister blogs WebWorkerDaily and NewTeeVee were also named, and congratulations to their excellent editorial teams. Blogs depend more heavily on participation from the reader community than many other kinds of publishing entities, and we want to extend our most sincere thanks to the readers of OStatic for reading, participating, and even correcting us when needed. OStatic will deliver several new and exciting kinds of editorial content in 2009. Please stay tuned! PC Magazine's writeup follows, below the fold.

WebWorkerDaily is giving high marks to cyn.in, an open source collaboration application that organizes your various collaborative efforts, like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, in addition to facilitating file sharing and repositories. The WWD post walks you through a free demo of an enterprise edition of cyn.in, and Darrell Etherington writes: I?d recommend Cyn.in for consultants working with larger, established companies looking for an alternative to their current collaboration solution. Check out the review and screenshots.

While a lot of the 2009 predictions about open source and Linux are rosy, here is a decidedly negative take from Datamation. Among the predictions: The marginal run that Ubuntu and OpenOffice had for the desktop will come to a screeching halt, and a desktop derivative of Google Android (which is Linux-based) will be a surprise success. Some of the points made are good, but some I definitely disagree with.

Matt Asay weighs in today on whether OpenOffice is profoundly sick, as Novell employee Michael Meeks claims it is. Meeks argues that OpenOffice is not getting better with age and that a big part of the problem is that Sun Microsystems exerts too much control over the suite, not allowing more contributors to innovate and improve. Matt correctly points out that most big open source projects move along thanks to a small, core group of committers, but, whether Novell's Meeks is right or wrong here, I get the strong sense that he has an agenda that may not be apparent at first glance.

Today there are quite a lot of lists of predictions for 2009 appearing. This list of 10 predictions for Linux has some ideas that I agree with, including bright futures for embedded Linux, virtualization, Linux-based gadgets and more. (I'm not so sure Linux-based game consoles have a bright future.) It's the first prediction on the list, though, that I think will have a big impact on open source next year: More buyouts and mergers. We are in a business environment right now where people are lulled into believing that very abnormal things are normal. The unwinding of this will be a huge 2009 story in open source and in the technology industry overall.

One of the big debates going on in December among the open source cognoscenti is whether fee-based models are going to start to proliferate. This post contends that 2009 will see a lot more business models built around formerly free software, and this post? points to support among CTOs for charging for open source software. I tend to agree that we'll see more of this, but charging for what was formerly free has to be handled deftly. Here are some important points about monetization models.

Back in November, we took note of the progress that Mozilla has made in ramping up its Fennec mobile browser.? Now, Fennec is available in an Alpha 2 test version for Windows, the Mac and Linux desktop users. Yes, it's a strange concept to test a mobile browser on desktop systems, but that's how Mozilla will leverage the largest possible community behind Fennec. Quite a few reports are coming in about how Fennec's interface works, and, although I intend to wait to use it in a more stable version, I'm very encouraged by what the earliest testers are saying. Could this open source project redefine how people think about mobile browsing?

The Register has an item up that caught my eye regarding a letter to IBM's software group, suggesting that it would be a good move for Big Blue to open source the Lotus Notes/Domino e-mail, calendaring and collaboration suite. The letter is from Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It argues that IBM's software group and the software market as a whole would be better off with an open source Notes/Domino offering. Here is why this makes a lot of sense.