OStatic

As reported on our parent blog GigaOM, there's a new piece of software out there trying to fill the niche recently occupied by Muxtape. Muxtape, as you may know, is a music sharing and mixing site that's apparently been shut down by the RIAA. Now there's Opentape, which bills itself as a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. But is it?

Intrigued by Microsoft Surface, but don't want to spend $10,000 - or deal with Microsoft? Then take a look at the TouchKit project, which can help you get together a table-sized screen with a multitouch interface, using open source components.

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

Social bookmark sharing site Ma.gnolia has long been shadowed by the more popular de.licio.us, even with all the issues that the latter site has had with pushing out timely updates. But at today's Gnomedex conference, the Ma.gnolia team announced a new effort that they hope will help them leap ahead: they plan to rewrite, federate, and open source their code. It's a bold step, but will it work out in the end?

We've covered the Software Freedom Law Center's GPL enforcement efforts several times in the past. But their efforts on behalf of the free software community extend far beyond trying to right wrongs in court; they also do what they can to prevent the wrongs from happening in the first place. Their latest move in this direction is an online white paper titled A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance.

When last we looked at Google's Android mobile phone OS project, there were some rumblings of discontent in the developer community. This week, though, developers have a lot less to complain about (though, perfectionists that most of us are, we can still find a few issues). That's because Google has pushed out an 0.9 beta version of the SDK, making its vision for the first Android release much clearer.

It turns out that there may be a happy (from the open point of view) ending to Dell's attempt to trademark cloud computing, which we covered two weeks ago. Whether it was all the publicity that the Patent & Trademark Office's original decision got, or whether someone there simply took a second look at things and understood the issues, it appears that they're on the way to denying the application after all.

The BBC's iPlayer site has been a target of open source community ire since it started. Originally delivering content via Microsoft DRM-protected technologies, it was condemned by the FSF (among others) for dictating unfree technology choices on viewers. The technology behind the iPlayer has changed somewhat since then, but by and large it's been a proprietary stack that doesn't play well with free software.

A court case that might otherwise not have much significance for most OStatic readers - it centers around a dispute between two vendors of model train software - has given rise to an unexpectedly-clear ruling on the merits of open source licenses. As reported by Groklaw and Lawrence Lessig, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (who are the last resort before the Supreme Court for this sort of case) has upheld the basic theory that most open source licenses are based on.

The Chandler Project has been around for a long time. How long? Long enough for a book to be written about it; long enough to be used as a bad example of how to run a project; long enough to be cited as evidence that dynamic languages can't scale. And yet...despite setbacks and revisions, the project never went away. Last week, version 1.0 of the note-to-self organizer software shipped.