OStatic

Although it's still listed as a beta book on the Pragmatic Bookshelf web site, Mike Clark's Advanced Rails Recipes is finished and getting ready to ship. Thanks to Pragmatic's excellent beta program for books (you get to read in-progress PDFs while the author is finishing the book), I've had plenty of time to work with this one already.

My verdict: the book is a winner, and its very existence says good things about the growing Rails community.

Despite the occasional brush with critics in the open source community, Sun continues to maintain that it will ship all of its software assets as open source (though in some cases the timeframes are not clear).

One of the prominent areas where the company is following through on this at the moment is with its storage offerings.

You may not be familiar with Black Duck Software - but if you're an open source developer, you're liable to hear more about them in the future. That's because they just announced their purchase of the Koders search engine, which currently searches over three quarters of a billion lines of open source code.

I had a chat last week with management of both firms, and here's what's going on.

Ever tried to explain to your boss why bringing open source software into the company won't mean the end of the world? Or even better, has your boss ever asked for a plan to take something open source?

If you find yourself in either of these situations, check out a trifecta of white papers recently published by open-source analyst firm RedMonk.

Just in advance of its annual JavaOne conference, Sun has leaked the news that it is finally planning a really-truly, no-fingers-crossed, open source version of Java. The plan is to tweak the OpenJDK project by removing the last few encumbered bits, so that the rest can be GPL'd.

What's this likely to mean?

Pity the poor One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Though the project has sold about half a million of the cute little green boxes with a custom Linux-backed user interface, they're widely viewed as a failure. Key people behind OLPC have recently left, as well, as Reuven noted. There are various reasons for all of this: coming out of the gate at double the planned price and completely missing their own optimistic shipment projections (18 months ago they were talking about shipping 10 million in their first year of production).

But could open-source fundamentalism be the root of the problem?

Sure, there are plenty of fine GUI-based open source packages. But if you're a dedicated open source user, especially if you're using an operating system with its historic roots in Unix, you'll sooner or later feel the call of the command line. Bash, awk, sed, grep, diff, sudo, tee, tar...besides being fun to say, these are also powerful tools.

But how do you develop expertise with this tool set, especially if you're migrating from a Windows background?

We've written before about the motivations people have for participating in open source projects. Well, here's a new one for you: sign up to participate in the Hackontest and you could win an all-expenses-paid trip to Switzerland.

Oh, and you might win your share of $8,500 in prizes and help advance a favorite open source project as well.

One of the big open source success stories of the past few years is Ruby on Rails. You can argue endlessly about the relative merits of this web framework versus others, but it's undeniable that Rails has gotten substantial marketing momentum and is an increasingly easy sell in corporate markets.

But that doesn't mean that Rails developers have turned their back on open source.

A recent interview with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green (published yesterday in eWeek) makes for fascinating reading, especially in conjunction with the dustup over Sun's announcement that some MySQL enhancements will not be open-sourced.

Understanding how Sun views open source goes a long way toward explaining what's going on, and telegraphing its future strategy.