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?By Wagner James Au
It's been several months since I introduced OStatic readers to OpenSimulator,? sometimes described as the the Apache of virtual worlds. The open source project originated as a reverse-engineered spinoff of Second Life's GPL-licensed viewer code, and continues growing and evolving far beyond it.? Especially with the recent addition of an important feature: the Hypergrid , a new core OpenSim network architecture which may well establish the HTTP protocol of the metaverse.? It's the brainchild of Cristina Videira Lopes, a Xerox PARC alum now an ICS professor at UC Irvine who also happens to be an OpenSim developer and co-founder of a metaverse development company.
By Wagner James Au
You've probably read a bit about OpenSim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and OpenSim interoperable. Besides that project, what's OpenSim about, who's working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here's a starter's guide, created with the help of Tish Shute, whose virtual world blog UgoTrade is an indispensable resource on the latest in OpenSim news.
If youﾒre a Web developer, you likely already know about Firebug--the amazing web development add-in for Firefox. (It was one of WebWorkerDaily's 6 recommended Firefox extensions for web workers and readers wrote in about it in response to our list too.) But if you havenﾒt been following the Firebug development blog, you may not know the latest news: Firebug 1.2 has moved from alpha to beta, and itﾒs ready for Firefox 3. even though the Release Candidate for Firefox 3 doesn't yet work with many other extensions. WebWorkerDaily has a report on version 1.2's better Javascript debugging, new console and more. Check it out.
By Raj Bala
Many people, even technology folks, really don't know what to make of the Semantic Web. Then there are several camps that disagree on the meaning of various Semantic Web terms. Now that the general concept is finally getting some traction, there is even some groupthink going on about moving away from the current moniker. Some people want the moniker to be Linked Data Web, because that's supposedly a better description of the technologies and components surrounding the Semantic Web. We'll continue to refer to it as most people understand it, and the open source community is pitching in, through the Jena project.
By Aaron Huslage
Let's face it, open source software runs the Internet. Without it we wouldn't have basic services like DNS, or even the web server that's sending you this page. This isn't a new phenomenon. People have been writing and distributing OSS software since the Internet was born. I'm always amused when people characterize it as a new-fangled thing. That does a complete disservice to the hard work of folks all over the world, and the phenomenal software they have written.
Multitouch display technology has been at the center of many a geek's attention since the release of the iPhone almost a year ago. The ability to combine computer vision, projector display technology and the electronics to control it all had been the provenance of big companies and university research labs. Now Stefan Hechenberger and Addie Wagenknecht of New York based NOR_/D have put together an open source alternative called Cubit. This is worth taking a gander at.
We thought it would be good to give open source VOIP pioneers Digium equal time, given our recent post about Freeswitch. Digium's founder, Mark Spencer was the original author of the Asterisk PBX, one of the more mature open source VOIP platforms. The company's VP of Marketing, Bill Miller, told me that Last year was a big year for us; at the year-end we had finished our 24th straight profitable quarter. We had grown to about 130 employees. While Digium doesn't disclose financial figures, its sales have reportedly been doubling over the past few years and it has taken at least $14 million in venture capital since launching.
ﾠLike many people, I downloaded and installed the new Ubuntu Hardy Heron release last week. While I was installing my favorite applications and getting everything configured, I realized something: Ubuntu could end up actually delivering on the oft-written about and dreamed of Web operating system concept. Many people have opined on this general topic, but it's actually a very difficult challenge to deliver and champion such a product. I'm betting that Canonical, the company that delivers Ubuntu, is capable of coming through.
By Nate D'Amico
For the Eclipse lovers out there, IBM has another free toy for you to experiment with. It's geared toward web application development, and is dubbed Project Zero. With Project Zero, IBM hopes to entice Java, PHP, and Groovy developers to use its platform for creating next generation web applications. Among the interesting aspects of Project Zero, developers are encouraged to compile PHP into Java classes to have it run in the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the rest of Project Zero's Java code. The project leverages communities in ways that open sourcers will recognize.
Trends in data storage and server computing are changing rapidly, and there are some unexpected shakeups to come, with open source implications. Hardware continues to get cheaper. Bandwidth isnﾒt quite free yet, but itﾒs hardly expensive. High-quality open source software now abounds in enterprise data centers, but grid computing solutions remain half-baked and hardly commoditized.
These trends are all behind why I think Yahoo! and EMC are set for a future technology collision, given their respective philosophies--and open source is too.
