Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

I haven’t been following the SCO case very closely, having only mentioned it once since I started this blog. So I missed this ass-kicking order that came down over the summer from Judge Brooke Wells. It’s long and detailed (GrokLaw speculates that this is to discourage SCO from a tedious appeal), so don’t be afraid to skim for the good parts. For example:

The court finds SCOs arguments unpersuasive. SCOs arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know. SCO received substantial code from IBM pursuant to the courts orders as mentioned supra. Further, SCO brought this action against IBM and under the Federal Rules, and the courts orders, SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that you know what you stole Im not telling. Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus entire inventory and say its in there somewhere, you figure it out.

In the wake of OpenDarwin’s shutdown announcement, Apple has launched Mac OS Forge, a home for selected open source projects from Apple and from the community.

The present site feels a bit like a stub – e.g. the WebKit link still goes to OpenDarwin – but it’s good to see Apple stepping up to the plate. Just seeing tickets and commits from Real Apple Developers is exciting. And I give them bonus points for using Trac, too.

Yesterday, the OpenDarwin project announced it is shutting down:

OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative…. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.

I’m disappointed that no strong movement emerged in support of a Darwin-based open source operating system, but perhaps it’s just a testament to the growing power and polish of other available OSs, e.g. Ubuntu.

During the same period that I thought I’d be playing a lot with an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux (but haven’t), several notable Apple fans have made, or are seriously and publicly considering making, the jump from OS X to open-source operating systems like Ubuntu.

Mark Pilgrim led the way. (He does work for IBM, though he’s gotten remarkably few snide remarks about that in the comments.)

Cory Doctorow is talking like he’s about to do it as well. Cory has a Mac tattooed on his bicep, but that might not last either.

Late last year the Xiph QuickTime Components project took up where the moribund qtcomponents.sourceforge.net had left off – great news for lovers of open audio formats like Ogg Vorbis. (Vorbis encodes music at higher quality than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, and is unencumbered by patents and licensing.) The latest release of the components, earlier this month, features Intel compatability and preliminary support for FLAC (a lossless encoding).

The thing that makes this project so useful is that QuickTime components can transparently provide services to any OS X application relying on QuickTime – such as iTunes. So while you can’t play Ogg Vorbis (or Speex or FLAC or…) files on your new iPod, you can play them in iTunes. Getting there.