open-source

VLC for iPhone may get pulled from App Store--by the developer

News of the weird: Remi Denis-Courmont, one of the developers of the VLC Media Player app, has apparently sent Apple a "formal notification of copyright infringement" and asked that the app be removed from the App Store.

Yes, we have apparently crossed over into Bizarro World.

In the old days, it was Apple that did the app yanking, usually for obscure or arbitrary reasons. In recent months, however, the company has lifted--or at least loosened--many of its previous restrictions. Prior to that, it's unlikely the VLC Media Player would have been allowed in the first place.

As … Read more

Firefox 4 release slips to 2011

Mozilla has pushed back the planned Firefox 4 release to 2011, a delay that's no surprise given the difficulties in releasing the first full-featured beta of the open-source browser--but that also gives breathing room for several competitors.

Mozilla had hoped to release Firefox 4 in 2010, but a newly updated Firefox 4 schedule shows the first release candidate arriving in early 2011.

"Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down, and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the 'feature complete' Beta 7 milestone against which our add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a mailing list message yesterday. "The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December. Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind."

Six beta versions have arrived in recent weeks, but Firefox 4 beta 7 hasn't appeared, despite more than six weeks of frenzied development. One big issue holding up release has been the integration of Firefox's older Tracemonkey engine for running Web-based JavaScript programs and the new JaegerMonkey engine that draws on Google's V8 engine in Chrome.

Mozilla's arewefastyet.com site shows progress matching Safari and Chrome JavaScript execution speed, but new JavaScript engines can be tough to tune. Several JavaScript bugs are blocking Firefox 4 beta 7. … Read more

TweetDeck CEO: You're wrong, Steve Jobs

One Valley exec's "daunting challenge" is another's "hackalicious" Candyland, it seems.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs had some forceful words about Google's Android operating system in Monday's company earnings call--Jobs' first appearance on a quarterly call in two years--calling the open-source mobile software "very, very fragmented and [it] becomes more so every day." Android boss Andy Rubin hit back at him with a tweet full of open-source code.

Iain Dodsworth, the CEO of Twitter client manufacturer TweetDeck, joined the fray on Tuesday morning with a Tweet that read, "Did we … Read more

Firefox for Android beta: A good first effort

The first beta of Firefox 4 for Android arrived Thursday, offering users of Google's mobile operating system a browser interface with both smart new features and some weaknesses.

I tried the new beta on HTC's Google Nexus One, and I came away impressed overall--far more satisfied than with unstable and slower nightly builds for developers that I'd tried before. It's not going to be my default phone browser at this stage, but I'm not going to uninstall it, either.

Fennec background Before we get to my impressions, though, here's the background. Mozilla is trying … Read more

Make the CASE

Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) automates the software creation process from front to back. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides the interoperability that enables the benefits of CASE. ArgoUML is a UML CASE tool for analyzing and designing object-oriented software. Apart from being open source freeware, it has many unique aspects that set it apart from commercial tools, including its use of psychological research to design an environment that increases productivity by supporting programmers' cognitive requirements and its pure Java nature, which allows for widespread compatibility and access.

ArgoUML's installer lets you include the Java Runtime Environment, if your … Read more

IE9 beta takes a bow

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded: Microsoft releases beta version of Internet Explorer 9 Craigslists rules out reopening adult services Facebook competitor Diaspora releases source code Apple iOS 4.2 brings the iPad up to par Playstation 3 firmware update includes 3D Blu-ray support

'Anti-Facebook' project releases first batch of code

The open-source Diaspora project released on Wednesday the first iteration of its so-called anti-Facebook social-networking application.

According to a blog post, the development team aims to work with the community to enhance and extend the software in order to create a better project. Hardly an original idea in the open-source world, but certainly a logical ideal in light of the fact that social-networking applications require a good bit of insight from users and developers--something we've seen Facebook embrace, occasionally forcibly by its own community.

There are a number of capabilities in the current release that start to outline how … Read more

Xeround scales MySQL for the cloud

Today, Xeround officially announced the release of the private beta of its "MySQL for the Cloud" service--an elastic, linearly scalable, relational database designed to run applications in cloud environments.

Xeround is based on an in-memory database and has been tested in a number of telco production environments, according to CEO Razi Sharir. The software utilizes virtual partitions where data partitions are decoupled--or abstracted--from physical resources. These virtual partitions hold copies of both the data and the indexes, in order to ensure high availability and performance.

Despite the ubiquity of open-source MySQL, the database has in the past suffered … Read more

French start-up bringing open-source BPM to U.S.

A relatively new French open-source start-up is set to soon make landfall in the U.S.--BonitaSoft, a maker of open-source business process management (BPM) software. BonitaSoft aims to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary suites from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and SAP that dominate the BPM market. (Other French open-source start-ups in the U.S. market include Talend and eXo.)

The company is built around the open-source Bonita project, first developed in 2001 at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). The development team was then hired by French software giant Bull … Read more

How GE uses Hadoop to analyze big data

One of the most talked about open-source projects is having its second annual Hadoop World Conference next month in New York. On the heels of a successful inaugural event , 2010 promises more than 25 presentations from the likes of Bank of America, eBay, HP, Orbitz, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo (full agenda here). Also, for the second year running, here is a code for my readers to get a 20 percent registration discount: CNETHW2010.

To provide a small taste of what the event will offer, I corresponded with Hadoop World speaker Linden Hillenbrand, product manager of Hadoop Technologies at General Electric, … Read more