Google hosted a get together of random open source people at their Buckingham Palace Road London headquarters. The fifty invitees were sadly diminished by the vulgarities of the English public transport system, but a good range of people did turn up for pizza, beer and energy drinks, courtesy of everyone’s favourite search engine. In true open source style, when offered the choice between imported beers and energy drinks, most of us were on energy drinks after their first.
A range of people were there, talking about the projects, the ones that struck a cord with me include:
Grash. A bash(1)-like shell navigating a JavaVM rather than a filesystem; think ls(1), pipes and method invocation. Still rather a long way from anything even approaching POSIX compliance.
OpenStreetMap. A project of people mapping the things they care about; think footpaths, canals and neolithic sites rather than motorways and roundabouts.
Selenium and webdriver. People finding better ways to test web applications. Webdriver is more developer oriented and Selenium is more end-user oriented. Webdriver offers the possibility of true cross-platform, cross-broswer testing, while Selenium offers to possibility of end-users (or at least advanced non-developers) submitting tests.
Fortress. Sun trying to wean engineers and physical scientists off their fortan addiction. Pros: mathematical syntax using standard mathematical notation in Unicode; functional style; designed by Java originator James Gosling; easily parallelisable. Cons: Unicode maths (notoriously tricky and hard to implement); not even a working prototype yet; unclear whether it will ever gain the requisite momentum. Fortress is portentially huge in physical sciences and engineering departments as well as in modelling heavy specialisms (climate modelling, bio-medical modelling, etc.).
Well done Google for this! I wonder how much such an evening actually costs. Do you think OSS Watch ought to set up one?