Arstechnica - Open Source

The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.

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Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

The project is part of Mozilla's broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

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In October 2010, Microsoft started working toward making the OpenStack open source project compatible with Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software. The project now seems to be hitting a snag—much as Microsoft's submission of Hyper-V drivers to the Linux kernel once did—but Microsoft says it is committed to making good on its OpenStack promises just as it did with Hyper-V and Linux.

OpenStack, a framework for creating infrastructure-as-a-service cloud networks from pools of virtual servers, is backed by Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Dell, AMD, Intel, and others. The project attempts to support multiple hypervisors, including VMware and Xen, but one developer handling release management for OpenStack recently suggested removing Hyper-V code, calling it "broken and unmaintained."

Microsoft, however, said it is "committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack," according to an IDG News Service article published yesterday. The situation is reminiscent of Microsoft's long project to get Hyper-V drivers into the Linux kernel itself. Microsoft submitted the drivers in 2009 after it was revealed that its use of open source components in a Hyper-V driver violated the GPL free software license. While that project stalled a couple of times, we were just told by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman this week that the Hyper-V/Linux integration is in good shape.

The same thing could very well happen with OpenStack, although it's not clear Microsoft has as much incentive to shape up its code this time around. OpenStack can give service providers the tools to build services that compete against Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or it can give enterprise customers alternatives to VMware's management tools or even Microsoft's own virtualization and private cloud management tools. But even if the Hyper-V/OpenStack integration was perfect, it might not gain a huge audience. CEO Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud Computing, an OpenStack vendor, told the IDG News Service that he's not aware of any production deployments of Hyper-V with OpenStack.

When it comes to making money, it's probably far more important for Microsoft to provide a credible alternative to VMware while also supporting data centers that use both VMware and Hyper-V. And Microsoft is already doing that with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager product, which manages Hyper-V and VMware deployments from the same piece of software.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel's stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the responsibility of working for a vendor. (The SUSE Linux project was owned by Novell, and now Attachmate.)

"There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community," Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. "But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer."

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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 10. The new version of the open source Web browser includes a handful of improvements and new features. The browser's built-in tools for Web developers got a particularly significant boost in this release. The new version also offers better support for a number of Web standards.

Firefox's developers decided last year to transition the browser to a time-based, six-week release cycle. The new release management strategy ensures that performance improvements and support for new Web standards reach users as soon as possible. The faster release cycle posed challenges, however, for enterprise adopters and other users who require a longer a longer support period. In order to address that issue, Mozilla has decided to offer an annual extended support release with a full year of updates. Firefox 10 is the first official extended support release.

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Color management has historically been a weak area for the Linux desktop, but the situation is rapidly improving. Support for desktop-wide color management is being facilitated by projects like KDE's Oyranos and the GNOME Color Manager.

Red Hat developer Richard Hughes, who started implementing the GNOME Color Manager in 2009, launched a small company last year to sell an open source colorimeter--a hardware device that is used to perform color calibration. The Linux-compatible device, which is called the ColorHug, will retail for £60 (early adopters can currently order it at a sale price of £48). He has already received a few hundred orders and is building more units to meet the unexpected demand.

Unlike existing colorimeters, the ColorHug is an open hardware design with open drivers and open firmware. The source code and hardware schematics have all been published on Gitorious. In a detailed interview that Banu published this week, Hughes described the project in detail and discussed some aspects of the hardware design.

"The ColorHug is an open source colorimeter. It's designed from scratch, and every part is 100% open source. All the other colorimeters you can buy in shops have proprietary code that means we have to reverse engineer the hardware to make it work on Linux, and then we can't modify the hardware to do something else, or fix bugs and add features like you can with open source hardware," he said.

You can find more details at the ColorHug website. The ColorHug is currently backordered, but purchasing information can be found here.

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Major e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are teaming up with PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, to implement a new system for authenticating e-mail senders to try to prevent the sending of fradulent spam and phishing messages.

The protocol that powers e-mail, SMTP, dates back to a more trusting era; a time when the only people who sent you e-mails were people you wanted to send you e-mails. SMTP servers are willing to accept pretty much any e-mail destined for a mailbox they know about (which is, admittedly, an improvement on how things used to be, when they'd accept e-mails even for mailboxes they didn't know about), a fact which spammers and phishers exploit daily.

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As Flash's ubiquity begins to erode, standards-based Web technologies are going to become the path forward for developers who want to offer a user experience that works across all screens. The HTML5 video element is already widely supported in modern Web browsers, but the capabilities and codecs that are available differ between implementations.

A new State of HTML5 Video document offers some clarity by painting a clear picture of the current status of standards-based video across the spectrum of browsers and mobile environments. The document was authored by LongTail Video, the company behind JW Player, a very popular video playback framework that supports Flash and HTML5.

Based on statistics from various browser marketshare trackers, LongTail says that two thirds of Internet users are running browsers that support HTML5. Support for standard HTML video element attributes is relatively consistent, though there are gaps: Android and iOS both lack support for the preload and autoplay attributes, for example.

Fullscreen playback and support for adaptive streaming are still highly limited. The latter will likely be remedied in the future as MPEG's DASH standard sees adoption. Codec compatibility is still a tricky issue—some browser vendors are standing behind H.264 while others favor Google's WebM.

LongTail says it will keep the document updated as the status of Web video evolves.

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The developers behind the KDE project have released version 4.8 of the open source desktop environment. The minor release brings a number of new features and technical improvements to the KDE platform, desktop shell, and application stack.

The Plasma Workspace has been undergoing an overhaul to take advantage of QML, a declarative user interface development framework that is part of Nokia's open source Qt toolkit. Several parts of the Plasma environment, such as the device status notification system and the splash screen, have been updated to use QML.

QML has also been adopted to power some new features in KWin, such as the much-improved keyboard window switcher, which is now configurable and supports several visual styles. The KDE developers are building a specialized Qt Quick Components widget set for Plasma, which was introduced in this release and will make it easier for Plasmoid creators to adopt QML.

A number of programs in the KDE application stack also got noteworthy improvements. KMail got an architectural overhaul and Dolphin has a new display engine that is said to be more efficient.

On the platform side of the KDE software collection, there's a new password management framework called KSecretService that is designed to conform with the Secret Service API, a new cross-desktop password management standard that was drafted through FreeDesktop.org. This means that GNOME and KDE are finally on a path towards having fully interoperable password managers.

Kubuntu 11.10 users who want to get their hands on 4.8 can obtain it from the backports PPA.

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation is building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The board, which is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards, entered the manufacturing stage last month. There will be two models, priced at $25 and $35, with different specifications.

The board is built around the Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, which is designed to handle intensive multimedia. In a recent interview, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2. Upton worked for Broadcom on the team that developed the hardware.

At the SCALE 10x conference this month, developers from the XBMC project demonstrated their software running on a Raspberry Pi board. XBMC is a popular open source media center application that has advanced library management features and support for playing video in numerous formats. The XBMC developers ported the media center to the Raspberry Pi using a developer hardware unit supplied by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The demo, which can be viewed in a YouTube video, shows that XBMC runs reasonably well on the Raspberry Pi hardware and is relatively responsive. It was able to smoothly play an H.264-encoded 1080p video. Another video that was published this month shows Nokia's open source Qt toolkit running on the Raspberry Pi, demonstrating the use of OpenGL shaders in Qt's declarative QML user interface framework.

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HP has published the code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. It is available from a public repository on GitHub and is distributed as open source software under the permissive Apache license. The release of Enyo is the first step in HP's plan to completely open the webOS mobile platform.

The webOS platform is built on top of Linux, but has a proprietary application stack that is made with HTML and JavaScript. HP obtained the platform in its 2010 acquisition of failing device manufacturer Palm. At the time, HP said it intended to ship the webOS software environment on a wide range of products, including tablets, printers, and desktop computers.

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President Obama will present the annual State of the Union address to Congress this evening. Mozilla and PBS have teamed up to add an interactive facet to the event. Volunteers will be able to help transcribe and translate the President's speech.

The crowdsourced captioning will be attached to a Web-based video stream. Viewers around the world will be able to experience the State of the Union address with subtitles in their own native language. The captions will also help make the speech more accessible to viewers with hearing impairments.

The browser-based transcription tools are built on the Universal Subtitles system created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same organization that develops the open source Miro video player. Captioning the State of the Union is part of a broader program launched by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called Open Election 2012. The initiative will bring similar volunteer transcription to election coverage.

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Experimental support for WebRTC has landed in the Chrome developer channel. The feature is available for testing when users launch the browser with the --enable-media-stream flag. We did some hands-on testing and used some of the new JavaScript APIs to make an HTML5 photo booth.

WebRTC is a proposed set of Web standards for real-time communication. It is intended to eventually enable native standards-based audio and video conferencing in Web applications. It is based on technology that Google obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions and subsequently released under a permissive open source software license.

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Mozilla is drafting a proposal for a new Web standard called MediaStream Processing that introduces JavaScript APIs for manipulating audio and video streams in real time. The specification is still at an early stage of development, but Mozilla has already started working on an implementation for testing purposes.

Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan, the author of the MediaStream Processing API proposal draft, released experimental Firefox builds that include MediaStream Processing support. He has also published a set of demos (note: you need to run the experimental build to see the demos) that illustrate some of the functionality defined by the specification.

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LG has become the latest in a long line of Android handset vendors to sign a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft. The agreement allows the South Korean conglomerate to use Microsoft patented technology in phones, tablets, and other consumer electronics running both Android and Chrome OS.

This is the eleventh agreement between Microsoft and Android-using OEMs, with other licensees including Samsung, HTC, and Acer. In total, Microsoft says that more than 70 percent of all Android smartphones sold in the US are covered by a similar patent agreement. The only major manufacturer now without a license agreement is Motorola Mobility.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the form is likely to be comparable to that of the other license agreements, which all involve payment of a royalty to Microsoft for each handset sold.

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At yesterday's NVIDIA press conference here at CES, Asus took the stage to talk about using NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 mobile processor in its tablets. Fans of Asus's Tegra 3-powered Transformer Prime tablet will be thrilled to know that the 10-inch device will have an Android 4 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") update pushed out beginning Wednesday.

But the real news came when ASUS CEO Jerry Shen showed off an upcoming 7 inch tablet dubbed the EeePad Memo (pronounced "MEE-moh"), which runs Ice Cream Sandwich on a Tegra 3 processor, has an "incredible" rear-facing camera, and features a "magical" price. That price? $249.

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At AT&T's Developer Summit in Las Vegas, company CTO John Donovan announced that the company had officially become a contributor to OpenStack, the open-source cloud architecture project that emerged from efforts by NASA and hosting company RackSpace. AT&T is the first telecom services provider to join OpenStack.

Donovan said that AT&T had been participating in the project for more than a year, and "has already contributed a blueprint for a potential new function within OpenStack, focused on transactional task management." AT&T already has three data centers running the OpenStack platform, and plans to double its open-source infrastructure this year.

AT&T announced the move as part of the unveiling of a new AT&T-hosted cloud product, AT&T Cloud Architect—which Donovan described as "a developer-centric cloud." The service will be focused on providing developers of cloud apps low-cost entry into AT&T's hosting services, and a choice of public or private access, as well as an option for "bare-metal" provisioning of hardware for developers requiring specific server configurations, and options for cloud storage, network configuration and monitoring.

Donovan didn't give details on what these options are, but said the service will become available in "the coming weeks." There was also little in way of actual details on the service's pricing plans, aside from mention of hourly or monthly billing options.

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The real beauty of open source software isn't that it's free; it's that it's free to change. Developers can tinker with it, strip it down or build it out, depending on their wants and needs.

In the case of Google's Android, this increasingly means that we don't have one Android operating system. Instead, we have a family of different Android forks and flavors.

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In 1999, Linux founder Linus Torvalds joked about plans for world domination. But as the Linux kernel celebrated its 20th birthday this year, Linux, and open source in general, have achieved a limited version of world domination. As we reported in August, Linux in its many forms now powers a majority of the world's supercomputers. Apache web servers running on Linux and other Unix operating systems serve up the majority of the web sites on the Internet, and Linux powers some of the biggest sites on Earth—including Facebook, Google and Wikipedia. And embedded versions of Linux are part of the explosion of network-connected consumer devices, most notably as the basis of Google's Android mobile OS.

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Another six weeks have gone by, and another version of Firefox has been released. Still not officially "live," Firefox 9 improves on Firefox 8 with a JavaScript engine that's up to 30 percent faster and, well, not a whole lot else. Mac OS X users will have a little more to gain, as Firefox 9 also includes two-finger gestures for backward and forward navigation on that platform.

The new version includes a number of bug fixes to improve stability and security, better support for HTML5, CSS, and MathML, and some improvements to its Do Not Track feature to allow scripts to know if tracking is enabled or not. All told, the new release includes more than one thousand bug fixes and improvements.

But if Firefox users will notice anything new in Firefox 9, it's the JavaScript engine. The updated engine is potentially a big win for Firefox. Common JavaScript benchmarks have shown performance improvements of around 30 percent, and a paper about the new technology claims that real Web sites can see performance gains of 50 percent.

The new JavaScript technology in question is called type inference. JavaScript is a dynamic language—a variable in JavaScript could be a number, or a string, or an array, or a function, or even change from one thing to another. This makes writing scripts forgiving, but makes it much harder for JavaScript engines to generate high-performance x86 code. When adding two variables, the engine has to consider all the different possibilities.

With type inference, Firefox's JavaScript engine can, in many situations, figure out what type a variable is. In turn, this allows the generated code to be faster and more specific; it no longer has to consider all the different possibilities.Google's Dart tries to tackle the same problem, but requires a whole new language to do so.

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