In a fascinating post, Scott Hanselman pulls apart the Google Chrome browser to discover Windows inside or, rather, Windows Template Library (WTL). WTL was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2004 and went somewhat silent until now, when it popped up in Google's open-source browser.
Hanselman calls out the reason for WTL's inclusion:
Chrome uses abstraction libraries to draw the GUI on other non-Windows platforms, but for now, what sits underneath part of ChromeViews is good ol' WTL. Makes sense, too. Why not use a native library to get native speeds? They are using WTL 8.0 build 7161 from what I can see.
Speed matters, and getting top speeds on Windows may require using native Windows libraries, graciously offered by Microsoft back in 2004 as open source.
However, not everything came free of charge (and effort) from Microsoft, as Hanselman points out, and it appears from a recent PCWorld article by Neil McAllister that the effort to bring Chrome to the Mac and Linux will be even harder. Hanselman writes:
... Read moreExtJS is a cool JavaScript framework for writing web applications. It is, quite possibly, the best of its kind. My own engineers were salivating at the chance to use it.
Unfortunately, ExtJS is of many minds when it comes to licensing its product. It pretended that the software was LGPL, but only insofar as that meant many people using it...and many people paying to use it. (Hint to the ExtJS business team: LGPL and Apache licenses are impotent to compel payment.)
The company took the hint, re-releasing the code under GPLv3, causing consternation in some quarters. Why the concern? Well, because it meant that freeriders would now clearly have to pay, or distribute their own software under the GPL. Many don't like having to pay for value, particularly if it's GPL'd.
All of which has caused some to fork the ExtJS project. Given the dubious open-source provenance of ExtJS, this is not as easy (or advisable) as it might appear. If ExtJS were never truly LGPL, as the messed-up licensing would seem to suggest, then forking a proprietary product is called...copyright infringement.
It didn't have to be this way.
... Read more
If you're looking for heavy open source adoption, apparently the place to go is the Fatherland, at least according to this article in Heise. Citing zero licensing fees, access to source code, freedom from lock-in, and other factors, the Germans are on an open source binge:
In a survey of IT procurement officers from Germany, Great Britain, and the US/Canada, 59 percent of those in Germany said that they use OSS in their companies. The figures were far lower in Great Britain and the US/Canada at 48 and 38 percent, respectively.
Nicht schlecht! While I'm glad for Germany, I don't mind a 38% adoption rate in the US, either. Having said that, my experience is that the US pays for open source, whereas Europe does not (which would seem to be in keeping with the survey's finding that Germans like open source, at least in part, because of its $0.00 acquisition price). Still, with ~60% of German companies in the open source camp, that can't help but translate into money at some point.
- prev
- 1
- next
