OStatic

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. In the summer and fall of 1999 I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would eventually become the world's
largest open source development site.

I refer, of course, to SourceForge.net, which launched on November 17,
1999. The history and beginnings of SourceForge.net can teach executives and managers today the value of trying crazy things that might (and probably will) fail; of letting your young guns run wild with imagination; and not squashing innovation within your company. This post is about SourceForge.net, the site that was before its time and how it came to be.

Open source network monitoring software vendor Zenoss announced the release of Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, the company's commercial version of its flagship product. It sports several new features, most notably Amazon EC2 monitoring that provide users with dynamic snapshots of performance and the ability to drill down on performance issues with inside the instance monitoring.

Zenoss Enterprise 2.5's focus is on scalability and security with an eye toward future datacenter platforms and technologies. Additional new features include:

The Google phone is coming soon. There are rumors that Google is getting into the phone-building business.

Netherlands' open source policy goes double Dutch. A report from an open source conference in Amsterdam.

Has Windows Mobile lost 28 percent market share in a year? That's what Gartner researchers report.

KDE 4.4 due out in February of 2010. Here is what to expect.

When two of the X.org folks get involved in writing an email system out of frustration, it's safe to say that email clients need a kick in the pants. Carl Worth, with some help from Keith Packard, have announced Notmuch, a search-based email system for handling large volumes of mail.

Packard says it?s a sad commentary on the Linux desktop that the most important feature for many people using Linux has no credible GUI application. One might quibble with Packard for singling out Linux. GUI mail clients across all platforms have really failed to evolve as well as, say, the Web browser. While the current crop of GUI clients work fine for processing smaller amounts of email, people who process hundreds of messages daily start seeing pain points in the GUI clients pretty quickly.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed Weightless, the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.

Opengear, open source infrastructure management solutions vendor, announced a new centralized monitoring system this week aimed at the IT needs of medium-sized businesses. Opengear Monitor helps customers easily monitor their distributed environments, and rectify problems with just a few clicks in a browser window.

Opengear Monitor comes with the popular infrastructure monitoring system Nagios pre-installed in a 1RU CMS6100 hardware appliance, and is capable of managing up to 255 distributed hosts and more than 1,000 services. A wide variety of plugins for Nagios means the system is extensible for monitoring additional apps and services.