OStatic

Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the lifetime value of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

Godin writes Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

When two of the X.org folks get involved in writing an email system out of frustration, it's safe to say that email clients need a kick in the pants. Carl Worth, with some help from Keith Packard, have announced Notmuch, a search-based email system for handling large volumes of mail.

Packard says it?s a sad commentary on the Linux desktop that the most important feature for many people using Linux has no credible GUI application. One might quibble with Packard for singling out Linux. GUI mail clients across all platforms have really failed to evolve as well as, say, the Web browser. While the current crop of GUI clients work fine for processing smaller amounts of email, people who process hundreds of messages daily start seeing pain points in the GUI clients pretty quickly.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed Weightless, the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was worth trying again with a new language that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.

JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.

The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Bilski vs. Kappos on Monday, November 9th. Not surprisingly, many open source advocates are on the edge of their seats because it's an opportunity for the Supreme Court to decide that software is not patentable. Confused about the details? As part of its mission to advance Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) through law-related services, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has provided a backgrounder with information on briefs filed by parties of interest to the FLOSS community.