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Mike Gunderloy
May-2008

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News from RailsConf

The annual RailsConf just kicked off, and as usual for conferences, news of new releases is trickling out. This year's most significant changes include two new implementations of Ruby that can run Rails, a social performance-tuning application, and a new deployment scheme for larger applications.

All in all, these present a picture of a maturing Rails, readier than ever for serious use.



Will We Ever Have a GPL Test Case?

The GNU General Public License is nearly 20 years old (version 1 came out in 1989). In that time there have been at least 100 million lawsuits filed in the US (and that's a conservative estimate). Amazingly enough, not one of those millions of court cases has actually tested the GPL's validity. How can that be - and is it a problem for the open source software movement?


Microsoft's Ozzie Feels Disrupted

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie gave a talk this morning at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, one of those gatherings for top-level executives. As part of the Q&A, he was asked about the perception that Google was a disruptive force that was hard for Microsoft to deal with. While admitting that Google was a tough competitor, Ozzie went on to focus on something he called even more potentially disruptive : open source.


VIA's Open Source Notebook

If you've been scanning the news today, you might be under the impression that VIA Technologies had released an open-source notebook design. The OpenNote mini-note reference design has gotten a a sudden burst of press attention, but most of the stories don't seem to understand what's really open about this design. It's worth a look, as it shows the extent to which open is becoming a marketing term.


OGD1: Long Road Ahead to Open Graphics

The Open Graphics Project, whose goal is to create a completely open graphics card for use in personal computers, announced a milestone of sorts last week: the availability of their prototype OGD1 card for pre-orders. The OGD1 is not, as some folks seem to believe, a $1500 graphics card. To really understand what's going on here, you need to step back a minute and get a broad overview of the project roadmap.


Free Software: Better on OS X?

Ivan Krsti?, once the Director of Security Architecture for the OLPC project, has written a rather pointed blog entry about the disarray that project has fallen into. While it serves as an excellent coda for the story (which we previously covered), that's not what caught my eye.

Rather, I'm interested in his perspective - as a bonafide kernel hacker - in switching from Linux to OS X for his primary laptop. Linux doesn't come off all that well in the story.



Ingres Offers Open Source 4GL

With the open-source database market split between quite a few contenders, the ones who are not at the tip of everyone's tongue need to find ways to distinguish themselves. Ingres - the once closed-source database that was spun off from Computer Associates a few years back - continues to aim for the high-end corporate market. Their latest move in this strategy is the release of substantial portions of their OpenROAD 4GL as open source under a GPL license.


OpenSSL and Debian: A Cautionary Tale

We don't normally cover security advisories here on OStatic. There's just not enough space to do them all justice, and besides, other folks do a fine job of tracking such things. But a recent vulnerability in the Debian version of OpenSSL is worth spending some time on, because it's a case where the open source system failed for a long time to do its job of producing quality software.


Unbound Wants to Challenge the DNS Monoculture

With gazillions of sites on the internet, one of the key pieces of infrastructure is the lowly DNS server. If you think about a world where you're required to locate servers by IP address instead of name, you'll quickly appreciate DNS.

In the world of DNS servers, BIND is dominant, running over 70 percent of all DNS servers according to a recent survey. Now a relatively new entry in the market, Unbound, wants to change that.



DimDim Enhances Open Source Version

We've mentioned DimDim - open source web conferencing software - here before, and our sister site Web Worker Daily has published a glowing review. Now, the latest DimDim open source release (beta version 3.5) is a big step forward for the open source community. Among the enhancements: There is no longer a limit on how many participants can be in a meeting. With this version, it feels like DimDim is taking open source much more seriously from a partnership perspective.


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