OStatic

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.

Memopal is an interesting startup. Their basic business is transparent online backup of your files, as you work with them. They do this through their own MGFS file system, which is designed to handle huge files in a distributed fashion. Already established on Windows and with a Mac beta version, they offer a variety of other features including file sharing that works with large files and a web interface for file management.

Well, it's not quite as good as actually being there (unless you are in the habit of throwing really good parties in your office), but thanks to O'Reilly and (of all people) Microsoft, you can spend a good while learning about what the speakers had to say at OSCON. That's because by now most of the presentations are posted on the conference site, free to download.

We've seen plenty of open source software projects, and more than a few open source hardware projects. There are open source beers and machine tools and vehicles, as we've discussed before. But where do the limits of open source lie? The interesting firm Open Architectural Workshop got me thinking about this today.

The term cloud computing has been well-used recently; it comes up frequently on OStatic. If you've started to think of this as a common term, you may be surprised to know that Dell has actually trademarked the term (as first noted on the Google Groups cloud computing group by Sam Johnston). While not quite as obnoxious as attempts to lock up software art by patent or other means, this move seems unlikely to win Dell any fans.

The FCC voted this morning to tell Comcast that they'd been bad boys for blocking some traffic on their network. Unfortunately, as our parent blog GigaOM covered, they chose not to make any sweeping rules about the matter. So how do you know if your ISP is playing fast and loose with your packets? That's where Switzerland, a new tool from the EFF, comes in.

There's been a lot of talk about cloud computing lately, including some excellent crystal-ball reading from our parent blog GigaOM. But it's an essay from the ever-interesting Tim O'Reilly that brings together the cloud and the future of open source - and some of his conclusions may distress those who are firmly convinced that open source licenses are the only way forward.

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.