Microsoft's been announcing partnerships with Linux distributors left and right over the last few months. First, the company reached an agreement to share intellectual property with Novell, then Xandros, and most recently Linspire.
That's led many to wonder whether Microsoft would be partnering with Canonical anytime soon. Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, fast becoming one of the most popular Linux distributions, especially among newer Linux users. But while Ubuntu could certainly benefit from improved interoperability with Microsoft programs like Windows Media Player and Office, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says it just ain't going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
In a nutshell, Shuttleworth says that he has not intention of caving in to Microsoft's threatened lawsuits against the open source community. And while he supports any efforts Microsoft makes towards allowing proprietary software to run better on Linux, he doesn't really believe the company is committed to open standards. He doesn't rule out working with Microsoft in the future, but Shuttleworth sees no reason to do so now.
And here's a key point. Since Microsoft is working with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire, there's every reason to think that the entire Linux community will benefit. Any changes that are made to open source software will by definition be available to all developers, and could therefore be included in future Ubuntu releases.
For those who have never had the pleasure, Camino is an open source browser based on the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, but built to integrate much better with Mac OS X. Right out of the box Camino has a much more Mac look and feel, and under the hood it has integrated better with Mac OS X by doing things like storing web passwords in the Mac OS X Keychain (a centralized, secured and backup-friendly database where all Mac OS X apps store passwords). With the release of Camino 1.5, new features and even more integration can be had, such as:
The spell checking feature now uses the built-in, system-wide Mac OS X dictionary for checking spelling and storing custom words
Storing passwords in the Keychain now fully integrates with Safari, allowing both browsers to recognize, store and share the same password entries
Session saving ensures your tabs and windows are restored right back to where you left them, even after a crash
Feed detection allows Camino to pass RSS feeds on to your default reader
A more powerful and obvious pop-up blocking system, giving you control over whether you show pop-ups from a specific site once, always or never
The ability to trash downloaded files directly from the Downloads Manager window
While Camino doesn't support Firefox's popular extensions, it does have a healthy plug-in community at PimpMyCamino for those who might still need a little extra oomph from the open source, Mozilla-based browser. Camino 1.5 can be had from CaminoBrowser.org.
Fortune Magazine has a detailed article examining Microsoft's relationship to free and open source software. Although the story reads mostly as a history of Microsoft, Linux, and GNU, there are a few interesting new tidbits, including the number of patents Microsoft claims Linux and other free software infringes on: 235.
Microsoft holds thousands of patents for its software, and won't say exactly which bits of code violate which patents. But apparently the Linux kernel alone violates 42 patents, while the Linux graphical user interface infringes on another 65. Microsoft says Open Office violates 45 patents.
Just when you think there are plenty of CMS choices available, we track another one down via eHub: Skeletonz, a simple CMS based on Python and AJAX with a few tricks up its sleeve. Since it's in a 1.0 beta for now, the only way to get it is through SVN, and you'll need Python 2.4, MySQL and MySQLdb. Once you're up and running you'll be greeted with standard features like a template system, plugins and an intuitive editing system, along with built-in spell checking for those times when your content matters more than your English degree.
A wiki is also available, including information on where the project is headed. Check out Skeletonz if you've been looking for something a little different from the CMS industry.
Web-based project management seems to be all the rage lately, and activeCollab is a great example. A 100% free and open source project that is under 'heavy development', activeCollab 0.6 offers what seems to be the now-standard array of messages, tasks, projects, milestones and documents, along with a tagging system and per-user project permissions. activeCollab's site even includes a list of upcoming features and offers screenshots of a forthcoming 0.7 feature: a much-updated files section.
Of course, this app offers a few advantages over popular web-based project management solutions like Basecamp, including the fact that you can host activeCollab yourself, on your own domain.
If you're interested in learning more about everything activeCollab offers, they offer a helpful screencast and writeup to get you more up to speed without having to install and tinker with it yourself. I personally haven't used this yet, but my web host recently added it as a one-click install, so I'll post a review in a week or so once I move my sites over and have time to get things up and running. In the meantime, why not check out activeCollab for yourself?
Search engines are great, but what if you're a developer looking for very specific results: code, and sites about code? A new search engine called Krugle might just be the answer. It offers three separate search options: one for code, another called 'Tech Pages' for code documentation, forums and knowledgebase articles, and a third called 'Projects' which, as you might guess, helps developers track down open source projects. Users can even specify which language they're working with and whether they want to filter results from code comments, function calls, class definitions and more.
While I am no developer, this looks like a great tool for the code ninjas amongst us. Krugle is even hiring, too. Are there any DLS readers who have a developer alter-ego? Sound off if you think Krugle is doing you any good.
One of these days I expect Google to come out with "Google Galaxy" or some similar outward-looking companion Google Earth. But we don't need to wait for Google, as there's some good free offerings out there for people wanting to stargaze from the comfort of their computer. Among them is Stellarium, an open source, multi-platform desktop planetarium. Stellarium features over 120,000 catalogued stars, our planets and their satellites, illustrated constellations and star clusters, images of nebulae, a realistic Milky Way, and "very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset." In the eye candy department it does realistic sunrise, sunset, atmosphere, and star twinkling, shooting stars eclipse simulations, and skinnable landscapes. It can also do fisheye and spheric mirror projection for real dome shows and has scripting for recording and playing back your own star shows. Wow.
I've never used iCal, but
I've never met a Mac owner who doesn't. Since iCal is Mac-only, Borja Sanchez Zamorano decided to create a clone in
.NET that runs on Windows or Linux using Mono called MonoCalendar (get it?).
"Clone" might not be entirely fair, since Zamorano says "MonoCalendar does not try to be a iCal
substitute," but rather a substitute for the Macless. MonoCalendar seems to be making rapid progress and sure
looks like iCal, so if you've been looking for a calendar app that feels like iCal, it wouldn't hurt to check
it out.
Cbreak is a tiny
open source app for Windows that makes it easy to remove commercials from TV shows recorded as AVI files. How it works
is this: Cbreak divides the video into segments according to where black frames appear. Then it has two modes: In
automatic mode (or "autonomic," if you want to get fancy) it will toss out any segments shorter than 60
seconds (or some other length of your choosing). In manual mode it plays each segment for you and you can choose
whether you want to keep it or not. It has a lot of command line options, including—I kid you not—special
modes for skit shows like Saturday Night Live.
John C. Dvorak, who in his own words "got into various levels of trouble when [he] suggested that Apple was going to
gravitate towards Windows," now says that Apple's recent release of the unsupported Boot Camp for running
Windows on Intel Macs is "pure test marketing" to see how many Mac owners want to run Windows, how well it
works, and how much protest there is. Based on the Boot Camp results so far, Dvorak speculates that Apple's next move
will be the other side of the coin: Testing Mac OS X on conventional PCs. In such a scenario, Microsoft might begin to
see Apple as a threat and, says Dvorak, the only solution would be to turn Mac OS X into an open source project, making
"OS X versus Linux become the most interesting battle within the computer scene. With all the attention turned in
that direction," he says, "there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its
fortunes." At least, that's what I think he said. Dvorak seems to make a few leaps of logic that don't quite add
up. Head over to PC World Magazine
to try to make sense of it yourself.
Back in
October we reported on
graphics company Xara's plans to open the source code of their flagship product Xara Xtreme and bring it to Linux and
Mac OS X. At the time no actual code had been released and only a "proof-of-concept" build was available. As
of last week, however, the full source code is
available under the GPL, paving the way for anyone to run the full-featured vector graphics suite for free,
assuming they run Linux or OS X. Xara still plans to make money by selling the Windows version and a commercial version
for Linux or Mac if the demand exists, but I wonder how long it'll be before someone backports this open source version
to Windows. Head over to Xara's open source site for videos, screenshots,
FAQS, and of course the download.
If you
really, really want to kill some time today (and possibly the rest of your week), don't miss Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, a bundle of
24 open source, cross-platform puzzle games. Many of them will look familiar, like Solo (Sudoku), Mines (Minesweeper),
and Guess (Mastermind), others perhaps not, but if you like puzzles you're guaranteed to find something addicing in the
collection. I spent more time this weekend than I'd like to admit playing Bridges, Loopy (a.k.a. Slither Link) and Slant. Each of
the games has multiple difficulty levels, save and load functions, multi-level undo and redo, and a few more features,
and each one is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Palm OS. As if that weren't impressive enough, every puzzle
is a download of less than 100kb.
The
latest edition of Red Hat's community-supported Linux distribution is now available for download. If you're a Linux geek,
it doesn't get much better than this. Slashdot is linking to a video describing the improvements over Fedora
Core 4. What's one to do with Fedora Core Linux, you ask? Well, why not build a bicycle-powered telephone system? Or do
some wicked pagination? Or, perhaps coolest of all, build your own Tivo-killer!
PhotoRec is an
open source multi-platform app intended to help you recover photos from corrupted media like memory cards and even hard
drives and CD-ROMs. In addition to photos, PhotoRec can recover many other types of files, including video files,
documents, and archives (e.g. zip files). PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it'll
work even if your media's filesystem is severely damaged, and it'll work on FAT, NTFS, or ext2/3 systems. PhotoRec is a
companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost
partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again.
Microsoft's been announcing partnerships with Linux distributors left and right over the last few months. First, the company reached an agreement to share intellectual property with Novell, then Xandros, and most recently Linspire.
One of these days I expect Google to come out with "Google Galaxy" or some similar outward-looking companion Google Earth. But we don't need to wait for Google, as there's some good free offerings out there for people wanting to stargaze from the comfort of their computer. Among them is 
Cbreak
PhotoRec
