OStatic

At OSCON last year, Jaspersoft revealed that work was underway to re-vamp JasperForge, its developer community platform. Jaspersoft's goal was to ensure that the Forge could support its community into the future by integrating new collaboration and networking tools, while enhancing the Forge's existing features.

Today, Jaspersoft has announced that the JasperForge upgrade has moved into high gear, with all of its new features and enhancements in place and operational.

Despite the fact that open source software is often criticized for offering too many choices, it's safe to say that people like to have options. This doesn't pertain solely to end-users -- developers, designers, and quality assurance professionals all have their personal preferences when it comes to development framework and languages.

That's where it tends to get complicated. Selenium Remote Control is an open source cross-browser, cross-platform functional testing framework. However, it's a testing tool geared primarily toward developers with automated functional testing and continuous integration processes in place. Installing, configuring and maintaining the Selenium framework takes precious resources away from application development and testing.

Today, Sauce Labs released its Sauce RC (Remote Control) 1.0 utility. It's a simple web interface enabling QA professionals and harried developers to easily configure, administer, and test their applications on Selenium.

Let's face it. Even though open source conferences, conventions, and projects have seen an increase in the number of female participants, there's a strikingly male majority in the world of free software. While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework.

The approach? Think Google Summer of Code -- complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors -- with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.

There's been some intriguing discussion going on in the KDE community. Developer Aaron Siego ponders how the open source community can recognize and help struggling projects before the situation becomes critical.

Seigo says two of the more common reasons development efforts are put aside are technical issues with upstream projects and non-project demands that developers face. The first scenario is (sometimes) forseeable, but one person's life changing event can throw a small development team into a tailspin.

Can commercial software companies and open source foundations successfully advance their software efforts by offering bounties to outside developers? Although Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, says the GNOME community has had mixed results with bounties and grants, she has an interesting interview up on the topic with Stefano Maffulli,? community manager of mobile open source company Funambol. The interview apparently resulted from Maffuli approaching her about a GNOME-related grant. Maffuli describes bounties and grants as fertile incentives for solid open source software development, and cites a number of specific success stories.

If you're in the process of launching an open source project, a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly, and even keep you out of trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish, and to stay safe. Fortunately, just as free availability is a mantra for open source products, it is for many helpful resources too. In this post, you'll find our updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you're doing an open source project--or if your organization is deploying open source software.

Today, the Linux Foundation released its updated study of mainline kernel development. The report examines the slight variations in release frequency, the lines of code submitted, deleted and modified since the April 2008 study, new trends in subsystem patch signoff, and the remarkable diversity (and, perhaps, adversity outside the realm of kernel development) of the companies contributing to the kernel.

While the study is obviously pertinent to those working in kernel development, it covers so many aspects of the development process that everyone working with open source software -- developers, community managers, and even non-IT managerial roles -- can find something directly related to their positions.

It's also (perhaps surprisingly) engaging reading for those interested in the Linux kernel but a little foggy on how the kernel relates to the rest of the operating environment or how changes are approved and applied to the kernel tree.

Earlier this week, the Qt Labs at Nokia announced a new project, QtMobility. QtMobility's primary goal is to offer a new set of Qt API development tools for mobile device applications.

While this will certainly make life easier for developers working with the Qt framework on specific Nokia devices, one of the best (and intentional) fringe benefits is that the new API tools are cross-platform. A single application, then, can be built and maintained for any supported Qt platform -- regardless of the mobile device model or manufacturer.

Video editing software for Linux is, to put it nicely, quirky. Some editors only work with specific file formats, some work nicely for basic video editing but can be wildly temperamental on seemingly identical machines, and some are powerful to the point of overkill for the average user.

PiTiVi is a non-linear video editor based on the GStreamer multimedia framework. After hearing some positive comments, and seeing development efforts really picking up on the project, I decided to take it for a spin. It is very much in development, but not in the traditional sense. It feels very stable, and the interface isn't confusing or a hindrance. It is, at the moment, very basic when it comes to functionality. There are not plugins or extensions currently available (though feature requests are welcome). However, the project has taken the time to plan its path forward -- and with the basics down, I can't see why real headway won't come quickly.

The Ubuntu Project may have just unleashed a legion of Jackalopes upon the world, but is well aware that time waits for no animal, real or cryptozoological. This is why the first alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10, the Karmic Koala, is now available for brave testers everywhere.

Keep in mind that this is the first alpha, just opened for development. This means not only that it should be kept far, far away from production machines, but that many of the nifty new features that will be in the final Karmic release aren't there at all yet, never mind perfected. Currently, however, there is a new kernel based on the 2.6.30 release, and the latest development version (2.27.1) of the GNOME desktop environment. Applications are being updated (and added) quickly, and there's definitely a wild ride (and a lot of bug-squashing fun) ahead for interested testers.