Archive for September, 2008

Simal 0.2rc1 released

Published by Ross Gardler on September 25, 2008 in Development, Software and Community. 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce the release of Simal v0.2-rc1

Simal is a framework for building project registries. Using Simal you can quickly collate details about projects and participants. This data can then be accessed via a command line tool for scripting, a RESTful API for mashups or a web application for humans.

OSS Watch use Simal to track information about open sourcesoftware projects. However, it need not be limited to software projects.

As a 0.2 release it’s not feature rich nor is it pretty, but it is truly useful (we use it ourselves).

Key features include:

  • Ability to import DOAP from the local filesystem or a remote URL
  • AJAX browsers for finding people or projects
  • Fully categorised listings
  • Export of RDF data models
  • RESTful API

If you fancy taking a look you have three choices:

Questions and Feedback

Assistance is available on our user or contributor mailing lists, we’re always happy to hear from people interested in Simal today, or in what it may be in the next release (which incidentally will focus on integration with third party tools).

We especially welcome to recieve bug reports and feature requests, please submit them via our issue tracker.

Open and free courses offered by top Universities

Published by Ramón Casero Cañas on September 19, 2008 in Community. 0 Comments

DeviceGuru via Slashdot reports that Stanford University has started offering Computer Science and Robotics courses under a copyleft licence (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License), as part of their Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) programme. This follows in the steps of, for example, MIT OpenCourseWare by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Stanford launched its programme independently, while MIT is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a movement that groups over 200 higher education institutions in the world.

Stanford rationale for offering courses free of charge is that research and teaching transfer is an important part of their mission, and that the SEE is an important step in making this possible. The materials include lecture videos, transcripts and course handouts.

MIT offers 1800 courses covering all subjects from Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Arts. Susan Hockfield, President of MIT, explains the decision behind OpenCourseWare as ‘MIT faculty are passionate about their teaching, and they are keen to see their work benefit global society’. With an estimated cost of $10,000 to $15,000 per published course, this shows how seriously committed MIT are.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that top Universities have started offering their teaching materials for free on the Internet. In fact, it seems historically inexorable and necessary. In our Western societies with mandatory schooling until the age of 14 or 16, graduate students well in their 30s, and continuing education, it is easy to forget that ‘By 1424, Cambridge University library owned only 122 books—each of which had a value equal to a farm or vineyard’. It was largely thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press (ca. 1439) that knowledge became available to the wider society, not to talk about enabling the scientific revolution.

While cynics may argue that one goes to University for a degree, not an education (and a degree is precisely what open courses do not provide), the value of widely available high-quality teaching materials is hard to dispute. And not only for countries with worse access to education, or families who cannot afford college, but also for scientists struggling to keep up with new methods, techniques and results being produced at an ever faster pace.

Thus, open courses may be just another symptom of a social revolution that requires better sharing of knowledge, be it under the name of free or open source, open development, copyleft, open access or open standards.

Stop complaining and start doing…

Published by Ross Gardler on September 3, 2008 in Development, Software, Strategy and Policy and Community. 0 Comments

It’s no surprise to me that there is an immediate response to the Google announcement of their web browser. The responses seem to fall into three categories:

  1. “wow - this is cool”
  2. “hmmmm… more of Google take but not give”
  3. “Google are spying on us again”

The first is fine I guess. I find the second annoying as I believe they display a significant prejudice and lack of understanding of the ways in which Google gives back to the open source world - but these commentators are entitled to their opinion. It’s the final one I want to look at here.

The concerns about Google using Chrome to spy on us are ridiculous.  Of course the address bar defaults to Google as the search engine Chrome is Google’s distribution of Chromium, the open source version of the browser. They don’t invest these resources for nothing, you know. There may be bits of code in Chrome that some find invasive but such code may exist in any product, including Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and any other browser.

I have a plea for all those spending time speculating about what Google may or may not be trying to do with our data usin the Chrome browser. Either don’t use it or donate your currently wasted speculation time to something useful.

If you are a programmer review some code that concerns you (better still provide a patch that removes your concern). If you are a user get on the discussion lists and ask for an explanation of what data is sent back and forth or ask where are the switches for changing the default search engine (check the archives first - someone may have asked already). Or you can go into the Issue Tracker and ask for a new feature for example, ask for your favourite search engine to be an option, or maybe we want a feature to turn off all non-essental communication with Google servers. Chrome is a browser that is built from the open source Chromium project.

The test is not whether Chrome does things you don’t like, it is whether Chromium matures into a configurable browser tool that will do the things you do like. It can’t do that unless you get involved in any way you can - stop wasting time complaining about what might be our future and start influencing it.

Google’s Browser Strip

Published by Rowan Wilson on September 2, 2008 in Development, Strategy and Policy and Community. 0 Comments

Google chrome announcment strip p37

Google have produced a comic book to announce their new open source web browser called Chrome. Drawn by renowned artist and narrative theorist Scott McCloud the thirty-eight page comic goes into a surprising amount of detail about the browser’s code architecture, user interface design and licensing philosophy.

Google Chrome will, according to the strip, use the open source HTML rendering engine Webkit that started life as part of Linux’s K Desktop Environment and has been subsequently developed by (among others) Apple and Nokia. Some of Webkit is licensed under the GNU LGPL with the remainder available under the BSD license. It will be interesting to see how closely Google works with the Webkit project in submitting back any changes they have made to the core project, particularly as it is Webkit that powers Apple’s iPhone browser mobile Safari, Nokia’s mobile Symbian browser and Google’s browser within their forthcoming mobile operating system Android.