opensource

When open-source video jukebox Miro was in beta and known as the Democracy Player, the biggest problem it had was stability. Graduating from beta fixed most of the problems, but not even a name change could erase the feeling that this Webware 100 winning program wasn't firing on all cylinders.

In version 2.0 for Windows and Mac, all that's changed. At the top of the list of changes is a serious attempt to improve the usability. At least on my Windows XP machine, with 2GB of RAM, those modifications have paid off. The program flies now, where … Read more

Many moons ago when Mozilla introduced Thunderbird 2 (Windows and Mac), one of the neat new features was that the neat new feature of tagging could be combined with the neat new feature of Outlook-style saved searches. However, there was no documentation on how to do this, and it got pushed aside for more important things.

In other words, I forgot about it.

As soon as I remembered, I was surprised to find very little documentation about it. I could see how to save searches, but those were only for the options in the search drop-down, right? Turns out, I … Read more

Showing signs that it's working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.

Google has high hopes for Chrome--in particular, the Internet giant wants better performance, so browsing the Web is faster and Web-based applications are more powerful. Now Google is filling in some missing pieces Chrome needs in order to attain wider usage.

Brian Rakowski, Chrome's … Read more

I guess that Google Chrome really is an open-source project.

Thus far, the Web browser has been written largely by Google programmers, though shortly after the software's public release, Google started accepting patches from outsiders. Now, though, an outsider has become an official insider.

The search giant has bestowed upon the first non-Google programmer the privilege of adding code to the project, a process called committing. The new commiter: Paweł Hajdan Jr., a computer science student at the University of Warsaw who's submitted his own patches to Chrome almost daily, Google programmer Evan Martin wrote in a blog post … Read more

Recession? What recession?

It may be that the technology and advertising industries are curtailing spending in the current painful economic environment, but one start-up, OpenX, is happy to report progress in establishing its new business.

OpenX sells support and consulting services around an open-source software package geared toward publishers that need to serve ads on their online properties. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company also has been expanding online, first by hosting the software on its own site, free to lower-traffic customers, and second through a pilot test of a marketplace that lets advertisers buy ads across a larger group of … Read more

From the "unlikely, but not really unlikely" (especially given the open-source nature of the platform) section of geeky tech comes news that a developer at Chumby has fully ported Quake to the cuddly little system.

The developer posted details of how he did it on the Chumby dev forums. He's even working on getting it networked. Can you imagine a retro LAN party of Quake with everyone using Chumbys? Well I can't, but it would make for an interesting, albeit frustrating, experience--for about 30 minutes until everyone moved to Call of Duty 4.

Bunnie Studios posted … Read more

Google's Chrome Web browser is coming out of beta testing, according to a TechCrunch report Wednesday.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of user experience, told TechCrunch's Mike Arrington as much in an interview at Le Web 08, according to the report. However, there was no word about when the move might take place.

One possibility would be to announce it Thursday at Add-on-Con, a conference about browser extensions at which Nick Baum, a product manager on Google Chrome, is scheduled to speak on a panel about the future of Web browsers. Also on the panel are Joshua … Read more

On Monday, Microsoft launched Oxite, an open-source blogging platform.

However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site on Friday and made an official announcement on Monday. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft's OSI-certified open-source licenses.

Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform … Read more

Rumors have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but on Monday the company revealed an open-source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.

The reason I've been skeptical about Google releasing an operating system of its own is that the company has such a Web-based view of the world. But Web apps have limits, impressive gains of Google Docs notwithstanding, and Native Client is geared to address those.

"At Google we're always trying to make the … Read more