|
|
Linux and Open Source News for 4th January 2008
|
Linux Today News Service
|
|
Source: Linux Today Miguel de Icaza's Web Log: "No matter how good Silvelright is or how bad the alternatives are, Silverlight domination will be a really bad thing for free software so I question why Miguel wants to push in that direction "
Source: Linux Today Roundup: Analyst Henry Blodget has an interesting theory on why the Mozilla Foundation should go public. Mozilla's response, as well as some additional opinions within.
Source: Linux Today Editor's Note: Is the free software community overly paranoid and quick to blame others? In some ways, yes. But it's a mistake to dismiss the "conspiracy theorists" out of hand
Source: Linux Today Computerworld UK: "To its eternal shame, the UK Government uses far less open source than most. Worse, it seems to have a closed mind to the whole idea "
Source: Linux Today eWeek: "Enterprise customers are using open-source software more and more, but issues of interoperability are still a stumbling block to widespread adoption, say customers and open-source software vendors "
Source: Linux Today The Open Road: "I wasn't very nice to Jim Whitehurst when I heard the news that he had been named the new CEO of Red Hat to replace Matthew Szulik "
Source: Linux Today InformationWeek: "In its recently published annual report, McAfee warned investors that the 'ambiguous' license terms governing the open source software it uses 'may result in unanticipated obligations regarding our products '"
Source: Linux Today DesktopLinux: "That was fast. Only two months ago, Good OS, a startup Linux distributor, exploded on the scene with gOS 1.0, an Ubuntu-based desktop Linux with dedicated links to Google applications "
Source: Linux Today LinuxWorld: "Homeland Security requirements in the USA, along with compatibility and budget demands everywhere, are putting Linux and open source into more and more public sector IT shops "
Source: Linux Today Roundup: Recent events surrounding Microsoft Office seem to point to one unsurprising conclusion: OOXML really was just another fancy term for "customer roll-up." Articles from ConsortiumInfo and PlexNex within.
Source: Linux Today One More Thing: "Well, that was short: Intel has announced it is leaving the One Laptop Per Child project "
Source: Linux Today Linux.com: "Marc Fribush, a former 'Microsoft guy,' is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk "
Source: Linux Today Computerworld Australia: "Open source guru Stormy Peters talks about the global initiative to count how much open source software is used by enterprise, and her upcoming keynote at Melbourne's Linux Conference "
Source: Linux Today iTWire: "A new report claims to analyse the significance of Google's Android Linux-based mobile platform versus competitive platforms "
Source: Linux Today Worker's Edge: "Running Linux from a CD in Windows doesn't get you much closer to computing in a Windows-less world. To make Windows and Linux and either-or proposition, you have to set your PC to dual-boot "
|
|
News for nerds, stuff that matters
|
|
Source: Slashdot: Linux mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot: Linux Domains May Disappear writes "Chris Howard has an interesting commentary at Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 to 7.31% in December 2007 at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
|
|
The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs
|
|
Source: ONLamp.com A running joke in the Perl 6 world is that we’ll release a stable Perl 6.0.0
by Christmas. We just won’t tell you which Christmas.
As many community-developed projects have noticed, long blocks of holidays
can be very productive for contributors. Both Parrot and Perl 6 on Parrot have made a
lot of visible progress in the past couple of weeks.
Jeff Horwitz took over the maintainership of mod_parrot
a while back and has steadily made progress. The new news is that he’s writing
a user’s guide. The older news is that mod_parrot supports languages built on
top of Parrot, including Perl 6 and Plumhead (PHP on Parrot).
In terms of code, I dusted off some proof of concept code that Jerry Gay and
I wrote several months ago, with advice from Nick Forrette, added one new
feature, and checked it in. The code is pbc_to_exe and it allows
you to build an executable named perl6 by typing make
perl6 (or make perl6.exe on Windows) once you have the
Parrot source tree configured on your machine.
The initial proof of concept took about two afternoons to write up; I wrote
the first version in Perl 5 and then Jerry and I translated it to PIR (Parrot’s
native programming language). Then it sat for a few months, until someone
convinced me that the progress we’ve made would be much more accessible if we
could provide an executable file named perl6 with the compiler
linked in nicely. It took part of an afternoon to add the last missing piece
and put things in place. (For that, see downloading the Parrot source
code. Until the next stable Parrot release on 15 January, you need to
check out Parrot from source code.)
I’m proud of this little project in a sort of mortified way; it just writes
out a C file that wraps a tiny exectuable header around the PBC file and calls
a couple of functions in libparrot to run that code, much like the
parrot executable does (but without all of the latter’s
command-line options). It may be the most useful code I’ve written in a while
though.
The biggest surprise to me is that, besides myself and Jerry, Francois
Perrad, James Keenan, Patrick Michaud, Cosimo Streppone, Will Coleda, Curtis
Poe, Bernhard Schmalhofer, Jason Porritt, and Andy Dougherty have all worked on
this system in the past week. One small change — one small feature
representing perhaps an ideal day’s worth of work — inspired so much
additional polish and evolution. That’s not counting all of the other people
who might now download and play with Perl 6 on Parrot. (It gets better too.
Allison Randal and some of the other Parrot developers have resurrected the old
Debian packages for Parrot, so Debian and derivatives will likely be able to
install and run both Parrot and Perl 6 on Parrot after the next release.)
That’s not the only interesting thing.
The November and December 2007 Parrot releases were significant because each
one added a major new feature. Parrot 0.5.0 introduced the new object system
which we believe is capable of supporting all of Perl 6’s OO features (and by
extension, just about every OO system available in dynamic languages, though
there’s one design question remaining about the multi-dispatch system in CLOS).
Parrot 0.5.1 includes the new Parrot Compiler Tools, which allow you to build
compilers using, more or less, Perl 6.
Though most of my work in Parrot is fixing weird bugs and adding new
features to the platform itself, it’s been fun and a little scary to watch the
development of LOLCODE on
Parrot. Will Coleda started this on Wednesday, and the project has picked
up contributions from Simon Cozens, Jerry Gay, Patrick Michaud, Klaas-Jan Stol,
Bernhard Schmalhofer, James Keenan, and Stephen Weeks.
I know that you know that LOLCODE is a joke language, and I know that Simon
Cozens is a smart guy who worked on Parrot several years ago and then retired
from programming, but he wrote up his experiences in Parrot is really quite
wonderful.
Patrick and I gave a talk at OSCON last year about building a Parrot
compiler, and I repeatedly said that our goal is to make it possible for you to
build a working compiler in an afternoon. You won’t build a language as rich
and powerful as Perl, Python, or Lua in an afternoon, but we hope to get all of
the boilerplate out of the way in the first thirty seconds so you can spend
four hours adding just the features you want. (The frosting part of this
dessert is that you can bundle up your compiler into a cross-platform C program
you can distribute as source code to compile and run on any machine which has
libparrot installed.)
I think we’re starting to succeed.
The next Parrot New Contributor day is Saturday, 12 January 2008. Please
join us in #parrot on irc.perl.org then or anytime.
Source: ONLamp.com I’ve been asked to put together an article for someone on the most inappropriate (and appropriate) uses of Perl. My editor would like some real-life “Oh my god, you wrote WHAT in Perl” annecdotes. So if you’ve ever run across a use of Perl that made your skin crawl (in terms of just being totally the wrong language for the job), drop a line here or send me an email at turner@blackbear.biz
James
|
|
