If you use firefox, then you are already familiar with opensource software. If you felt so inclined, you could go to http://developer.mozilla.org/, download all the source code for firefox, and interact with a massive community of developers. Flock is company who were so inclined. They just released their 0.9.0 version of a browser that is essentially a beautifully hacked up version of firefox. It is one of my favorite demonstrations of what can be done with opensource code. Everyone benefits. (Well, except for Microsoft.) And the whole community keeps raising the bar.
“That’s nice Thomas, but what does that have to do with Concordia?”
The Help Desk spends, on average, 2 hours a day on the phone helping people with browser issues. And approximately 15% of issues WebCT has to address are directly related to browser issues. If we had our own browser, based on Firefox’s opensource browser, users would have much higher satisfaction, and our support staff would be able to spend more time developing proactive support.
Operations Guides, Dashboards, Water Cooler, Fact & FAQ Lists, Making Plans.
(via lifehack.org)
Disclaimer: The product I will mention isn’t exactly open-source, so it may be outside the scope of this blog. But since it might accomplish goal #1 of this committee, I’m going to risk loss of limb and post it: E-junkie.
E-junkie is a nice and neat shopping cart driven by PHP and is used by some very respected designers. It’s also free for non-profits! Perhaps this is something that could benefit the Bookstore.
A few others that look promising:
This is old news, but not an old concept. Google uses MySQL on a number of their products, but those products require some features that do not exist in MySQL in its current state. Rather than waiting 2 years, to pay umpteenthousnds of dollars for an upgrade, because MySQL is opensource, Google just writes their own additions to the package. And since MySQL was open-source to begin with, why not open-source their changes and let anyone have them? That’s exactly what they did:
We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage solution, and as our projects push the requirements for the database in certain areas, we’ve made changes to enhance MySQL itself, mainly in the areas of high availability and manageability.
[Via Google Code]
We use MySQL on a number of our web products:
Why?
- MySQL is free
- MySQL is highly scaleable
- MySQL backups take seconds to execute or restore
- MySQL runs on linux, mac, or windows servers
- MySQL’s server requirements are minimal, to the point of being a joke (4 MB disk space; 1 MB Ram)
- Did I mention it’s free?
The OLPC Game Jam is a game design and programming event designed to encourage (simultaneously) experimentation and innovation in the game industry and kick off development of open-source games for the OLPC platform (the XO). A group of game developers will get together over a three-day period to make as many innovative games as possible for the laptop, which is being distributed to children in developing countries around the world.
[Via Game Jam - OLPCWiki]
I love codefests. We should have more of them around here. Get a whole bunch of people together who are interested in having some of the same kinds of tools; code it up; release it to the public. I think I want to setup a EDU Jam for MN Private Colleges.
Would you come?
What would you want to make?
There is an interesting article on Slashdot regarding a collection of open source tools (OS4ED) and applications that could be used to free institutions from having to use costly pay-for solutions. They describe it as a solution for K-12 schools, but I don’t see any reason why this couldn’t be implemented at a university level. It describes a package of applications that could replace Banner. Currently the system focuses on a student information system, and a data warehouse solution, but plans to increase its offerings.
(Via Slashdot)
One thing to think about in the future is providing University documents in open document format (ODF). This would ensure that users could always access information without worrying about licensing. It would also allow users to open one document with any number of products that support this open standard.
Texas, Minnesota eye move to ODF
Minnesota Preservation of State Documents Act
Can you really call yourself open source if you haven’t opened the source? I don’t think so. There’s a flood of “open source” companies selling things that work on open source but which aren’t open source themselves. I think these are proprietary products, not open source. That’s been the attitude that helped me select talks for OSCON–I only want open source products talked about. My rule of thumb is that the audience should be able to download, compile, and use the software that is talked about.
[ via Is "Open Source" Now Completely Meaningless? ]
One of the most confusing things about open source is what open source means. Is it free? Does it only work with Linux? Can you change it? Does it have to be software?
It seems there are many projects which are free, and user/developer friendly, but now are not actually sharing their source. These might be the people who are causing the most confusion. When I consider whether to test or use a new piece of software, I am primarily concerned with whether or not I can download the whole code. Whether or not I would even consider digging around under the hood–not to mention, contribute to the code–doesn’t matter. I just want to know that I could tweak things, and give those tweaks to others.
This may not be directly related to Open Source, but I am sure that it has implications on Open Source technology, particularly in the realm of Open Source hardware. Researchers are now looking into the possibility of “scrapping the Internet” as it is known today and rebuilding it from the ground up to include better security and reliability.
(via Businessweek)
I have been interested in Sunbird as a calendaring alternative mostly because I have been very happy with Firefox. Today I downloaded the 0.5pre (beta) from the nightly builds installed on my computer and managed to get it to synchronize with Google Calendaring. Through the GDATA Provider. This is an amazing thing. There are some bugs with this. Right now it does not handle recurring events, but it synchronizes nice and fast for single occurrences. This also will work with the most recent pre-release of Thunderbird and Lightening.
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