FLOSS: Free Libre OSS

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild. “All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.” Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric. Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer. A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to... more... - sofarsoShawn

"LiVES mixes real-time video performance and non-linear editing in one application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or frame rates. It is a very flexible tool which can be used by both VJ's and video editors - mix and switch clips from the keyboard, trim and edit your clips, and bring them together using the multi-track time line. You can even record your performance in real time, and then edit it further or render it straight away as a new clip !" - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

Graham: another good option to give the software a try is with the dynebolic livecd: http://dynebolic.dyne.org/index... - Mike Chelen

"The Creative Commons module allows users to select and assign a Creative Commons license to a node and any attached content. Additionally, the site admin can select a license to assign to the entire site." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

the user interface is intuitive, and the results can be displayed in machine-readable format like RSS - Mike Chelen

great roundup of tweaks that make ubuntu even better - Mike Chelen

i think that posting these things to the Ubuntu feed is good - but more importantly #Linux stuff should be posted to all technology feed - this way you get adoption and not just insiders... :) #pr #marketing!!! - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

Nate Aune's presentation at the Open Source Bridge conference. - Michael R. Bernstein from Bookmarklet

put your idea here ..it can be worth $25000 - http://bit.ly/4BE1V4 - ideas4all

"BASCA and the Swedish Pirate Party clash over p2p issue The P2P issue never leaves debates or news – In The City music conference held in Manchester, England saw its first day kicking off with a panel dedicated entirely to this topic. The Pirate Party not only attended the conference but it put forward 5 copyright law reforms it sees fit for the current state of affairs: “First, we want to reduce it to commercial use only,” said Rick Falkvinge founder and chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party, pointing out that file sharing should only be criminalized when it involves commercial purposes. The proposals went on as follows: We want to limit the length of copyright to five years from the day of publication. We want to limit the online technical measures, the purpose of which is to strip consumers of their legal rights. We want to specifically allow remixes and rehashes and encourage the mash-up culture, which today is illegal. We want to strongly keep the right of attribution – that is... more... - sofarsoShawn

"gRaphaël’s goal is to help you create stunning charts on your website. It is based on Raphaël graphics library. Check out the demos to see static and interactive charts in action. gRaphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"While earlier this year we reported about the level of uncertainty when it comes to sites like RapidShare with respect to the protection they offer to their users, their popularity hasn’t suffered since then – on the contrary, with torrent sites being intensively targeted, RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile enjoyed a massive growth in number of those looking to download pirated movies, music, games, apps or other (not that they, themselves, have been safe from legal trouble). This popularity is obvious if you consider the Alexa ranking for RapidShare – 17. Moreover, German networking vendor Ipoque point it as being accountable for 5% of all Internet traffic globally! Now, that’s huge! Also, the site told The New York Times a few months back that it hosted 10 petabytes of data and up to 3 million downloaders at a time. Vic DeMarines, vice president of products at anti-piracy software vendor V.I. Labs, emphasized the ease of use of such services which facilitate copyright infringement... more... - sofarsoShawn

"There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses. Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause." It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence:" - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"Business support services company Rentokil Initial has signed up for the biggest enterprise deployment of Google Apps to date. The implementation of Google Apps Premier Edition will eventually cover 35,000 of the company's users across 50 countries. The rollout is a major part of Rentokil Initial's ongoing five-year programme to upgrade its IT infrastructure. The company's CIO, Bryan Kinsella, told silicon.com: "As part of that work we've been taking a look across our whole information systems and technology stack and groupware was quite an important area for us to focus on, principally because as a group our history is one of a number of individual business divisions evolving their IT locally which has left us with an interesting set of problems." These problems include operating more than 40 mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange and open source products, and 180 email domains across the company's six operating divisions which Kinsella said makes communication "a little bit... more... - sofarsoShawn from Bookmarklet

"aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems, ... Currently plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip Audio CDs." - sofarsoShawn

Not sure, I've only used it in Windows, though note it doesn't play video files if you use those on your ipod or podcasts, for video podcasts just use miro - sofarsoShawn

"iPhone OS 3.1 was released almost a month ago and subsequent update to OS 3.1, OS 3.1.2 was released three days back on October 9. Till now only Pwnagetool 3.1 and pwnagetool 3.1.3 can jailbreak iPhone G & 3Gs 3.1 and there is no working tool to jailbreak iPhone 3.1.2. Well this time you don’t have to wait longer as Geohot has released Blackra1n jailbreaking solution for the new iPhone 3.1.2 firmware for all devices. The good news is Blackra1n can jailbreak iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 2G & iPod Touch 3G running 3.1.2 firmware. Blackra1n is currently for Windows only, a Mac version of this app can be expected soon. So, what is Blackra1n? Blackra1n is a 30 second ALL device 3.1.2 jailbreak." - sofarsoShawn

geohot rocks. - Maxamad (Amazigh)

"For most of this year, Google has been holding back on its M&A activity. But its recent acquisitions of On2 Technologies in August and reCAPTCHA a week ago signal that Google is regaining its appetite for acquisitions. CEO Eric Schmidt told Reuters today that he wants to buy at least one small startup a month primarily because it is a great way to hire the best talent. So what type of startups is Google likely to buy? One way to figure that out is to look at what kinds of startups its bought in the past. The Google acquisition and investment map below was created by the folks at MeetTheBoss (they’ve made similar visualizations for Amazon and eBay). There are a few deals missing like last week’s reCaptcha acquisition (see CrunchBase for a more complete list), but the subway-map visualization above gives the broad outlines of Google’s acquisition path. The longest lines with the most stops (each stop represents a deal) are technology (dark violet) and web services (green). Startups... more... - sofarsoShawn

Techcrunch's failed attempt at Techcrunch's failed attempt on appropriating the design of @iA's @webtrendmap http://informationarchitects.jp/wtm4... FF: http://friendfeed.com/seeming... - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

LOL it looks more like the London Underground http://images.google.com/images... Dumbledore has a scar that's an exact replica of it on his knee - sofarsoShawn

"LavaRnd turns real world physical chaotic events into random numbers in 3 stages: Stage 1: Digitization of a chaotic source Stage 2: Chaotic to Random Transformation Stage 3: Presentation " - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"This radial browser was designed to display complex concept network structures in a snappy and intuitive manner. It can be used to visualize conceptual structures, social networks, or anything else that can be expressed in nodes and links." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, it provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"WebcamStudio is software that helps you to create a virtual webcam that can show others over services like Ustream, Blogtv and Stickam." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"Using information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that is made public by data.gov" - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one professional quality application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates. It is a very flexible tool which is used by both professional VJ's and video editors - mix and switch clips from the keyboard, use dozens of realtime effects, trim and edit your clips in the clip editor, and bring them together using the multitrack timeline. You can even record your performance in real time, and then edit it further or render it straight away. For the more technically minded, the application is frame and sample accurate, and it can be controlled remotely or scripted for use as a video server. And it supports all of the latest free standards." - sofarsoShawn

"Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software, and we are proud to give back to the open source community through various open source projects." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

" Microsoft has launched a nonprofit organization with the aim of encouraging commercial software vendors to participate in open source software development. Microsoft has provided the organization, which is called the CodePlex Foundation, with $1 million in funding to get it started. This move arrives on the heels of a controversy over a Microsoft patent auction—allegedly aimed at undermining Linux—that compelled the executive director of the Linux Foundation to criticize the company for foul play. It's unclear if the CodePlex Foundation has been established in response to the controversy: the foundation itself appears unrelated, but there is certainly a possibility that the timing wasn't coincidental. The typical role of open source software foundations is to serve as a neutral vehicle for copyright assignment. This allows the developers to have an independent entity with a collectively directed governance model that can handle functions like relicensing and license enforcement.... more... - sofarsoShawn

"Regardless of its remarkable features, including its outstanding online documentation, a flat learning curve and a strict application of the Model-View-Controller pattern, the CodeIgniter PHP framework still lacks an important characteristic that other competitors have already implemented in the form of native libraries. In this eight-part series, of which this is the fifth, we go some way toward remedying this oversight. Yes, as you might have guessed from this article’s title, in this case I’m talking about the existence of a generic model class that lets developers perform CRUD operations in database tables by means of a unified API. Of course, this lack isn’t as bad as it seems at first sight; there are some third-party model libraries like DataMapper and IgniterRecord, to cite the most popular ones, that can be seamlessly integrated with CodeIgniter. However, if you’re interested in learning how to build your own generic model class for CI, then in this group of articles you’ll... more... - sofarsoShawn

"Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

The BOSH extension for XMPP is the missing part of the real-time web for clients. Thanks for the pointer to this library. - Matt Mastracci

related: http://github.com/metajac... - Renato Albano