OStatic

Lots of people are addicted to microblogging service Twitter - including substantial chunks of some open source communities. There are a fair number of Ruby on Rails developers twittering these days, for example. But Twitter's scaling and reliability issues lately have many people wondering whether it's time to look for an alternative. Identi.ca, backed by open source package Laconica, wants to be that alternative.

A few weeks ago we reviewed the case of the Microsoft Sandcastle help file builder. At the time, you may recall, the project had been removed from Microsoft's CodePlex site because of a discrepancy between license and action: the license was the open-source MSPL, but the source code was nowhere to be found.

One of the nice things about open source software is that it can experiment easily. Projects that don't have an obvious commercial route to success can still thrive and prove their usefulness, free of the demand to make money. One interesting project I've run across recently is WikidBase, which as the name implies crosses a wiki with a database.

I previously introduced you to BitNami, which is doing an excellent job of packaging popular open-source applications for turnkey installation. They've not been idle in the past few months. In addition to adding ever more applications to install, they've now taken the next step and modularized the process.

Most people think software when they hear open source - but there are plenty of other things using open source principles to distribute their intellectual property. We've covered some of these: the OpenMoko phone, the Open Graphics Project, VIA's OpenNote, and even the RepRap self-duplicating machine. But they're just the tip of the iceberg. Here are five more projects that show how healthy open source is beyond the software arena.

I've seen a certain amount of gloating recently in the open source press about a memo from Bill Gates that the Seattle PI recently dug up. You know the one, probably: Bill tries to install some software from the net, and ends up flaming his people for a couple of pages with choice bits like The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. But so what?

Every once in a while you run across an open source project that has the potential to make a lot of lives easier - without making anyone richer. Open source is a good fit for this sort of altruistic project: giving stuff away and reaching out in practical ways just seem to go well together. One such project is WebAnywhere, a new take on the speech-enabled (and thus accessible to people with limited or no sight) browser.

There's an uneasy relationship between Linux and some of the bits that make it work on many computers - closed-source kernel modules. These modules - NVidia video card drivers are the most notorious example - add substantial, and sometimes critical, functionality to Linux without themselves being open source. Now a group of kernel developers are on the record with their opposition to these modules.

As we've written before, the use of the Subversion source code management system is slowly declining in the open source community, as new alternative git gains ever more attention. But that doesn't mean the Subversion folks have given up - far from it. In fact, they recently released version 1.5, chock-full of new features on both client and server.

As virtualization technology becomes more pervasive and starts to make its way into the operating system, it seems that more and more vendors want to get their slice of this particular pie. Now Linux vendor Red Hat has joined the fray, announcing its own embedded hypervisor at its annual user conference.