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Posts Tagged ‘Open Source Community’

Microsoft delays open sourcing Windows 7 tool

After committing to making the source code and binaries for the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL) last week, Microsoft has pushed back its schedule a bit. The company is blaming testing for the delay, meaning it isn’t simply rereleasing the tool under the open source license; it’s actually modifying and removing some of the code (likely proprietary code the software giant doesn’t want to be available freely). A post on Port 25, the company’s open source community blog, late last week explains:

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Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned

Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it’s open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

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Woodward says that the Tr.im code will be cleaned up and available for hacking no later than September 15th, that the code will be licensed under an MIT Open Source license, real time click data will be made available in anonymous aggregate via service provider Gnip and a foundation or nonprofit owner to control the domain name is still being sought.

URL shortening is of course important primarily because of Twitter, where links have to be shortened in order to save characters against the limit of 140 per message. This May Twitter chose to make Bit.ly its default URL shortener, replacing TinyURL. Bit.ly’s marketshare in the URL shortening world became a near instant monopoly.

This is important because these URL shorteners have all kinds of data about which links on Twitter and elsewhere are getting the most click-throughs. Bit.ly is interesting because they’ve been building all kinds of value ads on top of that data – real time analytics, semantic analysis of the linked-to pages and more. Many people believe that Bit.ly could become one of the hottest sources of news discovery on the web, challenging now slow-looking sites like Digg.

Woodward argues that the relationship between Twitter and Bit.ly has made the URL shortening business pointless for everyone else. It was taking up a lot of his time, causing him headaches and he was feeling pressure to dedicate more time to his company’s core product, the Nambu desktop client.

Last month Woodward announced he would be closing Tr.im down and a substantial number of people freaked out. The biggest concern was that all the short links that had been created would now be broken. Some developers complained that they had invested time into building services that utilized Tr.im’s analytics. In response to the uproar, Woodward changed his mind. He said he’d keep the service up for some period of time, he tried to find a seller, but today he’s announcing a permanent change to the nature of the product.

Woodward argues that Bit.ly and Twitter will not expose raw aggregate clickthrough data to just anyone to develop on top of. That’s what the new community-owned Tr.im is going to do. Working with activity data hub provider Gnip, Tr.im will make aggregate anonymized data available in real time, for free. That means that any random developer can build something exciting on top of that stream of data, not just the selected partners of Twitter and Bit.ly.

Woodward says that if the community can take Tr.im to 5 or 10% marketshare, then it should have a good sample of the data Bit.ly is seeing in the rest of the market. Opening that data to developers in real time would then become more valuable than anything Tr.im can offer in aggregate today.

Update: We spoke with Bit.ly’s John Borthwick and this is what he had to say: “I think this is great, it means there will be a future for tr.im and having more services out there is a really good thing. [Tr.im's Eric Woodward] is short on the facts though and the facts are if you look at the clicks and encodes on bit.ly in a day, 15 million yesterday for example, 60% of them are from Twitter, less than 10% come from twitter.com. It’s about product iteration and adding features. [That's why Bit.ly is so popular, Borthwick argues.] Eric made a choice and bit.ly has made a different choice.” Borthwick also emphasized that Bit.ly has to invest substantial resources into scaling, something that the Tr.im community will need to take very seriously if it is to grow.

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Linux Foundation Launches Branded Credit Card. Yes, It Features Tux.

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, is today announcing an affinity Visa Platinum credit card for people who want to contribute to advancing the OS through the organization’s initiatives. Reading the press release announcing the new credit card made me raise my eyebrows, but after giving it a bit of thought I think that this is actually not that bad an idea.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation in a statement says people can contribute to Linux in a variety of ways (writing code, marketing, etc.) but now have a convenient way of identifying themselves as supporters of the community “by carrying Tux in their pocket”. And then of course there’s the financial incentive.

The Linux Foundation is partnering with CardPartner to offer the credit card through UMB Bank. The organization will receive $50 for every activated card as well as a percentage of every purchase made with the credit card. The Linux Foundation also says 100% of the proceeds from the Visa card program will go directly towards providing community technical events and travel grants for open source community members in order to accelerate Linux innovation.

Initially, the custom Linux Foundation Visa Platinum card is only available to U.S. residents, but the organization expects to expand in the coming months. You can apply here.

Linus must be glowing with pride.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Code.Intuit.com – Partner Platform Gets a Dash of Open Source

Intuit launched code.intuit.com today, an open source community that functions as an extension of their partner platform. The new site is designed to give partner companies a free resource with code, toolkits, and documentation for building SaaS apps.

Code.intuit.com has been released as a complement to the federated applications program, which lets developers use any programming language and cloud infrastructure they like. Though it was public, the platform has been taken out of beta and is released under the Common Public License.

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Big Names

Intuit has worked with some initial partners to create flagship applications during the public beta: standout examples of the Federated Apps include those from VerticalResponse, DimDim, and Rypple.

Intuit has also gathered an advisory board of fairly big names in the open source community: Jay Sullivan, VP of mobile at Mozilla, Michael Coté of Redmonk, and Jason van Zyl of the Apache Maven project. Also C. Michael Pilato from CollabNet, which is providing the software to run the community side of code.intuit.com.

How Open is Your Source?

The site may be out of beta, but exactly how welcoming it will be is unclear. Intuit comments:

“The initial Intuit-sponsored open source projects are designed to expand a shared infrastructure to make it easier for developers to integrate their applications with the Intuit Partner Platform. In the future, Intuit will sponsor additional projects and encourage involved developers and organizations to create and run their own Intuit Partner Platform-related projects.” [Emphasis added]

Intuit is creating an interesting mix of open and proprietary systems for development around its small business platform. No actual Intuit products are being open sourced, but with code.intuit.com, they’re clearly hoping to capitalize on the advantages of being open by letting third parties participate in a moderated way.

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The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Apps on the iPhone are a big deal, but there are so many of them that it can be hard to find the good ones. It’s fun to compare your own selections with favorites from friends and we thought it could be fun as well to see what some well known geeks around the web say are their favorite apps.

Below you’ll find app recommendations from the following people: Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, Chris Messina, open source community organizer, Marnie Webb, co-CEO of TechSoup Global, Baratunde Thurston, Web Editor at The Onion and Andy Baio, founder of Upcoming.org and now CTO at the soon to launch startup Kickstarter.com. We hope you enjoy these recommendations and we encourage you to share your own in comments.

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Repeat offenders

Only three apps were named by more than one person on this list! They were smart travel social network Tripit, memory augmentation and note taking service Evernote and Twitter client Tweetie. All three are worth checking out.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging software, when he was 19. He’s now 25 and a man of travel, tunes and publishing.

In addition to Tripit, Matt said his favorite apps were:

Taxi Magic lets you get taxis in major cities without making a phone call.

Shazam identifies the music your phone picks up in a room.

WordPress has an iPhone app! It lets you write and edit posts, upload images and more.

Chris Messina

Chris Messina designed the Firefox ad in the New York Times that kicked off mainstream adoption of the browser, he co-founded the international Barcamp conference series, he’s on the Board of the OpenID Foundation and he’s one of the leading thinkers behind the movement to create a standard format for user activity streams across social networks.

In addition to Tripit and Tweetie, Chris said his favorite apps right now are:

Instapaper Pro is a bookmarking app that saves a copy of articles you want to read off-line on your iPhone.

Foursquare is a popular new location-based, game-like social network.

Summizer is a multi-search tracking tool for Twitter.

Things is a to-do app that gets great reviews.

NYTimes is a beautiful off-line reader for the Times, which we’ve reviewed and like a lot.

BrightKite is a cutting edge location-based social network that we reviewed here as well.

Comixology is an iPhone comic book reader and library.

FlightTracker Pro checks airline flight status.

OpenTable lets you make restaurant reservations.

Marnie Webb

Marnie Webb is co-CEO of TechSoup Global, a nonprofit that distributes software to other nonprofit organizations and hosts NetSquared, a group that helps nonprofits share what they’ve learned about using Web 2.0 technologies. She’s also a mom and her iPhone app list shows it.

In addition to Evernote, Marnie says her favorite apps are:

Have2Pee is key, Marnie says. “I have a 4 year old and knowing the closet public restroom is game changing.”

iDialUDrive – “I spend a not insignificant amount of time commuting. Programming calls like a playlist helps me to just hit start and get in touch with the people I need to.”

Ominfocus – “I’m a GTD geek and, after playing with far too many productivity tools, I’ve settled on this one.”

The Extraordinaries does on-demand volunteerism by mobile phone. Marnie says: “not a lot in it yet, but huge potential to volunteer quickly and effectively.”

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston is a contributor to the Huffington Post, a comedian, Web Editor at humor site The Onion and the host of Discovery Channel’s forthcoming show Popular Science’s Future of.

In addition to Tweetie, Baratunde says his favorite apps are:

Asphalt – a car racing game.

Boxee Remote lets you use your iPhone as a remote control for the web TV service Boxee. “It helps me bypass the cable company,” Baratunde says.

CityTransit NYC Subway Map

Movies (By Flixter) – find and discuss movies.

Apple’s Stock Quote app. “I launch it a lot by accident and scream out loud at not being able to delete it.”

Andy Baio

Andy Baio is a social software developer and writer. He co-founded the events site Upcoming.org and has just become the CTO for soon-to-launch social project funding site Kickstarter.

In addition to Tweetie, Any says his favorite apps are:

Yelp

RJDJ remixes the sounds around your phone into music. Whoa.

Touch Term SSH is an SSH access tool for your iPhone.

ZenBound a puzzle game with wooden structures and rope.

Field Runners is a Tower Defense game.

Eliss is a retro game.

Edge is a Tron-like game where tilting your phone navigates a cube through an obstacle course.

That’s what these folks like to use on their iPhones. How about you? Here are some of the favorites of ReadWriteWeb’s staff.

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