Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

One of the major themes of this year’s OSCON is commercial adoption of open source technology. There are also many for-profit companies represented here whose businesses revolve around packaging, delivering, and supporting open source software. Now there’s another one:

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation…. One of our goals in establishing the Mozilla Corporation is to further promote the success of the Mozilla project and the Firefox and Thunderbird products, which then has the effect of strengthening the commercial ecosystem around the project and providing additional opportunities for Mozilla developers.

I sat in on most of DHH’s Ruby on Rails presentation this afternoon, and I have to say I’m in danger of catching the religion. Like a good cult leader, Hansson is energetic, intelligent, and unwavering in his faith that his is the right path. Within 30 minutes of the end of the session I had installed Rails via DarwinPorts, though my schedule hasn’t left me much time to play with it.

Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL’ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.

In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing – with 30 downloads in one week, our “Activity Percentile” rose to 99.33%. Unless I’m misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.

According to their blog, the Open Source Intiative (OSI) is holding a public meeting at OSCON on Thursday July 3 at 7:30pm. I’ve been wondering what has transpired since they issued their statement on license proliferation back in April:

Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success… The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close.

In a couple days I leave for Portland, Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. In the tutorial sessions I’ll be mainly on the Python track (including one session with Alex Martelli, uber tech lead at Google and author of Python In a Nutshell). I’ve heard good things about the conference, and the list of people who will be there is impressive. I’ll try to post regular reports here.