Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

My employer has generously agreed to send me off to OSCON this year and I’m very excited. I’m doing the whole shebang, tutorial days and all. (Current tutorial picks: Learning Ruby, Django Master Class, Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI, and Time Management for System Administrators.)

I had a blast and learned a ton attending OSCON in 2005 and I expect this round to be even better. For one thing, my involvement in open source projects, notably Django, means I know more people. And the whole open source world – dare I say movement? – has only gotten more powerful and impressive. I get to become better at my job while learning cool stuff and meeting smart people. I’m a lucky guy.

As of yestderay, an early version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac is available for download. Not the X-Windows port, but a step toward a full-fledged native application. Until this point, you only had NeoOffice if you wanted Aqua widgetry and a semblance of native OS X experience. NeoOffice is quite good, but it launches terribly slowly. Whereas this new build of OOo launches in under ten seconds on my slowish Powerbook.

Don’t get too excited just yet; this is for tweakers only. Here are some of the problems and gaps they warn you about:

The OLPC wiki says:

If you are able to program in Python then you can start building OLPC applications right now. The core tools, Python and GTK, are available on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. It is not necessary to get Sugar up and running right away unless you want to do something complex using dbus. For most educational applications, you only need to have Sugar for the final testing phases.

That first sentence seems a bit ambitious, but it all does look pretty simple, and I like the list of guidelines:

Here it comes:

“Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered,” Ballmer said. This “is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

I’ve been working on slogans for this new campaign. For a reasonable licensing fee I will allow Microsoft to use this one:

“Don’t get sued – get SUSE!”

Today, ACCESS, a Japanese company that acquired PalmSource (not to be confused with Palm, which… oh, never mind) earlier this year, announced that they will be absorbing the PalmSource brand. Probably a good thing.

I’ve been a Palm user for about seven years now, and have done my share of pontificating and pondering their fate, but I hadn’t really read up on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). The summary on their website mostly made my eyes glaze over (“standards-based software architecture … best-in-class … combined technology portfolios …”) until I got to this part: