OStatic

Get your OSS education, people. While documentation, including tutorials, is often a weakness with open source applications--even very established ones--the good news is that there are some outstanding free tutorials on the web.

Sometimes these are delivered by the community behind particular projects, and sometimes they are from enthusiasts and other third parties. In this post, I'll round up good, free learning resources--including videos and demos--for top-notch OSS apps, including GIMP, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, SugarCRM, web development languages and more. A little time spent working on your skills at these sites will pay excellent long-term dividends.

One of the big open source success stories of the past few years is Ruby on Rails. You can argue endlessly about the relative merits of this web framework versus others, but it's undeniable that Rails has gotten substantial marketing momentum and is an increasingly easy sell in corporate markets.

But that doesn't mean that Rails developers have turned their back on open source.

Camino, the open source Mac browser based on the Gecko layout engine that bills itself as having Mozilla Power, Mac Style is out in a new version 1.6. The browser features feed detection, integrated search, saved sessions, and spell checks.

Well-liked for its snappy performance, Camino doesn't have the market share that Firefox does, but many Mac-based open sourcers use it. Check out Om Malik's summary on GigaOm.com.

A recent interview with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green (published yesterday in eWeek) makes for fascinating reading, especially in conjunction with the dustup over Sun's announcement that some MySQL enhancements will not be open-sourced.

Understanding how Sun views open source goes a long way toward explaining what's going on, and telegraphing its future strategy.

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--won't deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Because it doesn't need to.

Mac-based open source enthusiasts had plenty of great reading material to find around the Internet over the last few days. From free alternatives to expensive Mac applications and patched bugs, to free BitTorrent options and an open computer that ships with the latest version of Mac OS X, there has been much buzz.

Here's what you need to know.

For many years, MySQL has been the best-known open-source relational database. Sun bought it and the company earlier this year, leading many to wonder what the business strategy would be. This week, the CEO of MySQL revealed part of that strategy -- the introduction of proprietary add-ons that will only be distributed to commercial customers.

Reaction in the open-source world has been quite negative. What does this shift mean for MySQL?

Flickr, Yahoo!'s photo sharing site and community, has announced code.flickr, a site dedicated to information, gossip and discussion with the Flickr developer community. There are several components to the site, including Dev.blog, and discussion of Flickr APIs in a forum.ﾠ You can also browse Flickr's open source code, hack Uploadr, and more.

The announcement is part of an effort from Flickr in which it has been opening up over 10,000 lines of open source code in its public subversion repository, issued over 2,000 new API keys, and more.ﾠ