OStatic

Before you get all excited, we're not giving away $5000. But someone else did, and this is the story of what happened with the money. You see, back in April .NET blogger Jeff Atwood donated $5000 of his ad revenues to the ScrewTurn Wiki project, to use however they wished. He recently followed up and discovered that the money had been used for ... nothing.

You've probably heard this sage advice about figuring out what open source software to write: scratch your own itch. The intent of the advice, of course, is to tell you that the easiest way to choose a bit of software to work on is to find something that you want and write it. But easy though this advice is to give - which may account for why it's given so often - there are times when it is, I think, just flat-out wrong.

Now that I've got your attention, don't worry too much: Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the popular World of Warcraft online game, isn't trying to shut down open source software entirely. But in a recent legal filing (reported by the Virtually Blind weblog), they are asking a judge to take an unusual move: prohibiting a developer from releasing a particular bit of code as open source. Read on for the details.

Launchpad, the open source hosting site sponsored by Canonical (who are, of course, the folks driving Ubuntu Linux) has announced their 2.0 relaunch. The new version of the site offers several big improvements over the old one, and points a way for other sites to follow. But is it the right place for you to host your next project? Here's a rundown on the new features to help you decide.

The Open Solutions Alliance (which you might recall as one of the sponsors of the Open Source Census) has released the results of a survey it did recently looking at business trends in commercial open source. The results paint a picture of an industry segment doing well, with a few challenges looming but easy continued growth.

Web development and design agency water&stone has released a thorougly-researched report on Open Source CMS Market Share. By looking at a wide variety of internet metrics, they try to identify the leading and up-and-coming open source software for content management systems. While the data is interesting itself, and useful if you're looking to implement a CMS backed by a vibrant open source community, there are also some wider lessons for developers here.

Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP) has been somewhat controversial, which is probably not what the company intended. The OSP is basically a we won't sue you promise to developers who implement software based on any of a variety of Microsoft specifications. Due to longstanding distrust or specific legal issues, some open source developers have viewed the OSP as a threat rather than a promise. As OSCON today, Microsoft tried to lay some of those fears to rest, and also extended the reach of the OSP.

Microsoft's IronRuby project is an interesting anomaly in the software world. On the one hand, it's a bona fide open source project aimed at a compliant implementation of Ruby, one of the most popular dynamic languages for open source projects. On the other hand, it's a product of Microsoft - who many still regard as an implacable foe of open source. At OSCON this week, the IronRuby team made a group of announcements that confirm their intent to be full members of the community, despite their corporate home.

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

The news came today from the Software Freedom Law Center that they've filed another suit to enforce the GPL on behalf of the developers of BusyBox. This time the company in the sights is Extreme Networks, manufacturers of various switches and other products. Will we finally get our test of the GPL in a US court?