derStandard.at: Why did you choose the Apache license as a default?
Chris DiBona: We really like it, it has a couple of things which make it very modern. Obviously you are getting a copyright grant, you are free to use and modify the software - like with all open source licenses. But it also says for any patents that we have in relation to that software we are giving you a license free of charge, and your users can too. The only exception is, if you sue us - well you don’t have that grant anymore. If you don’t - it’s yours, you don’t have to worry about us sneaking up on you later.
That’s a very good reason to use the Apache License (version 2.0) over MIT or BSD licenses.
Interesting, although is pretty clear that Gravatar rules the world (really, it is the Globally Recognized Avatar service).
From the website:
Libravatar is a service which delivers your avatar (profile picture) to other websites. If you create an account with us, your photo could start popping up next to forum posts or blog comments on any site where you left your email address.
Why is it interesting? Because it’s an open source federated service, and it means you can run your own instance and serve yourself the avatars related to your domain name.
"Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) today is announcing its intention to move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project and to no longer offer a commercial version of Open Office."
This is after Oracle’s management of the OpenOffice.org community led to a successful fork of the project: LibreOffice. Oracle, you’re doing it definitely wrong.
This is a very interesting move by vmware, the company behind the idea, that claims that this is actually the first open source platform as a service project that it’s open to different frameworks and technologies (currently Java and Spring, Ruby with Rails and Javascript with Node.js; more to come).
In the open source world we already had appscale, that is an open source implementation of Google App Engine, but it’s focused on GAP and meant to be used as a development platform prior to deployment on Google’s proprietary resources.
In my humble opinion, Rackspace guys are doing it right with the OpenStack project, working hard to build a solid community behind the product. Let’s see what happens with vmware and this Cloud Foundry, although the PaaS ecosystem is more complicated basically because of the vendor lock-in (related: Enlightening Platform as a Service).
Perhaps this is the open and open source platform is what lots of developers have been waiting for.
A couple of weeks ago I started to read documentation about Gnome Shell, that will be the new UI of Gnome 3.0.
The Shell will be an important change in the Gnome desktop, and although it’s said that changes are good, it may not be easy. So I kind of followed the steps to getting involved, and I build and run periodically the development version of the Shell (it builds most of the time!).
The idea behind this is not only getting used to the new environment, but try to find a way to contribute and, at least, do my part to fix the things that I think might be wrong (please notice that’s different of the things I don’t like).
I’m back into web development at work, so I got a copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts, because it won’t hurt me to improve my JavaScript kung-fu, and may be I’ll be able to make an extension for the Shell (yep, it uses JavaScript; no comments).
OK, may be I won’t be able to do anything, because of lack of time or lack of knowledge, but I really think that waiting for the Shell and then complain because is not what we expected (although I really don’t know what to expect) it’s not fair. Let’s see how far I can go.
Building the Shell in Fedora 14 is quite straightforward (and I upgraded my personal laptop to a Intel Core i3, so I have some spare CPU cycles for jhbuild).
First I need to figure out how the shell extensions work, and then I guess I’ll try to do something related to my weather applet.
And you? Are you going to do your part in the Shell?
"Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone. It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide. With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!"
It makes me wonder why such application it’s needed, when Canonical claims constantly that they are building an user-centric and user-experience focused desktop.
There are things that aren’t easy to tweak by a newbie in a stock Gnome system, but I believe Ubuntu has been adding lately more of those default features you can’t change (I have a Ubuntu user at home, and she eventually stopped using Ubuntu Netbook Edition because of this).
In my humble opinion, both things are wrong. One of the most important features of open source it’s the possibility of adapting it to your needs, and traditionally it’s been easy to do so. I feel comfortable at Gnome, and KDE it’s kind of too much configurable for me, but I’m convinced that the abuse of defaults turning them into we think for you, and we know what is better for you isn’t right and will annoy the users.
I’m not saying than UX and UI design teams aren’t needed, but theirs it’s a tough job and prone to criticism, because open source software user profile is far away of being uniform, thus that kind of defaults can’t work for everybody.
"The community is sick, poisoned by the component vendors with closed source software “solutions” and stymied by Microsoft themselves who are so cleverly changing just fast enough to keep developers from solving problems themselves."
Yesterday someone asked me if I knew any popular OSS web application developed with Mono (open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET). I couldn’t name one.
Do you know any popular OSS web application using Mono (.NET)?
