I can see the conversation now:

Open Source Advocate 1: 'So, dude, we really should do something about this Godawful UI. I mean we tried our best to imitate Microsoft but it just... isn't working out.'

OS Advocate 2: 'There must be some other way... some way we can avoid paying any kind of skilled user-interface master to actually develop a sweet-ass interface.'

OS Advocate 1: 'I know! I KNOW! WE'LL MAKE A MOUSE! A homebrew mouse with enough buttons to map EVERY function to it! We'll simply do away with the usual interface! GENIUS!'

OS Advocate 2: 'Er... OK. Stop waving your Perl manual around like that. You're starting to scare me.'
...

Slashdot are reporting that OpenOffice.org has a new mouse -- the succinctly-named OpenOfficeMouse. Manufactured by WarMouse (the awesome naming never ceases), this behemoth has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel and, get this, an analogue joystick. You couldn't make this stuff up. It has macro support, storage for up to 63 profiles... 63!

I know what you're thinking: OpenOffice can't possibly fully-utilise this beautiful piece of (patented) technological mastery. This thing is for gamers.

I have no idea if Egoboo's original creator named this thing, or if the name came later on after the mantle had been handed down a few times -- and I had absolutely no idea what that word meant... until I punched it into Google! Check out the definition, if you feel the need to know. If not, read on!

Egoboo is a (90 megabyte!!) 3D Rogue-like game. Rogue is a very, very old game -- the original adventure game, really -- and Egoboo builds on its legacy, throws in a little hack-and-slash... and it's even a bit of a RPG! There is loot, there are gribbly monsters that are out to eat your face, and there are plenty of pretty zones to explore (plus there's a map editor!)

To top it all off, it's fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac AND Linux) and has a thriving forum community. It's free of course. Oh, and It's quite brutal. I died several times very quickly, so I'd recommend reading the guide before you jump in.

Download Egoboo (yes, their site is so old it even uses frames! OK, iframes, but still...)

A French website [Google Translate link] is reporting that 130,000 Tax Authority computer systems are soon to make a major switch to open source software. Email and calendar duties are being handed over to Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin. The move also includes a transition to OBM's open source groupware/collaboration/messaging platform.

When the General Directorate of Public Finance was formed, two tax agencies were combined. Their users were split, with 80,000 using Lotus Notes and 50,000 running Microsoft Outlook. In the end, the new agency's decision had a lot to do with a desire not to re-license Lotus Notes and Outlook and to simplify operations by supporting a single client.

Thunderbird had already made inroads with the French Department of Defense as well as the Misitry of Culture. The new migration brings the total number of installs to more than 200,000.

Always nice to see Mozilla adoption in the enterprise!

[via OSOR.eu]

It's Sunday, and we're off the clock. Time for a little open-source RTS fun with Unknown Horizons! Though it claims to be a clone of the Anno series by Sunflowers/Ubisoft, you will probably associate this game more with the Settlers games -- a very popular, age-old series of 2D real-time simulation games.

The premise from their own website: 'The player starts with a ship somewhere amid an archipelago. The goal of the game is to found some cities on the islands and to earn money.' Such a simple concept. But as we all know -- the simple games are often the best and last the test of time.

And, believe it or not, defying most open-source expectations, Unknown Horizons actually plays rather well. If you don't mind hammering away at a very, very nascent user interface, this is a great game to have running in the background while you browse your favorite after-hours websites.

This is definitely one for the developers amongst you, but if you're developing an application in PHP and need to handle the reading of RSS feeds, SimplePie is a god-send. Some folks will point you in the direction of PHP5's built-in SimpleXML module, however it's highly intolerant of malformed XML - and certainly doesn't have any extra features such as caching that you get with SimplePie.

If you're looking for an easy way to work with RSS or Atom feeds, SimplePie is both easy to implement - and thoroughly documented to help you build on it. I've used SimplePie in a number of projects in the last year - from multi-feed collation to simply showing a list of recent blog posts in a sidebar - and every time I use it I find myself grinning like a cheshire cat at the amount of time it has saved me.

SimplePie is available under the BSD licence for your hacking pleasure, and the developers are currently seeking feedback for version 2!

The upcoming version of Mozilla's desktop email client, Thunderbird 3, just entered its 4th beta. This new beta adds significant features, including better Gmail integration, smart folders, and better search filters. If you've been looking for an excuse to stop using webmail - especially if you're a Gmail user - it looks like Thunderbird now has most of the features you would have missed.

Gmail integration now includes syncing for your sent mail and trash folders, and uses All Mail as the archive folder. Smart Folders allow you to combine special folders (like your inboxes, and the aforementioned sent and trash folders) from multiple accounts. Advanced Filtering lets you search by a specific category, including by sender, tags, and attachments. Sure, there might still be something you can do in Gmail on the web that you can't do in Thunderbird, but that list seems to be shrinking with every new beta.

[via Lifehacker]

Tr.im's history is already a bit of an oddball saga: it was shut down, brought back to life days later, handed over from a company to one of the company's individual employees, and then made open source. Well, now the open source promise is becoming a reality, but not as quickly as developer Eric Woodward had hoped. He's announced the first open source release of Tr.im - if by "release," you mean "at least a few more days of work to do before the release." The bigger news is Woodward's plan to hand the Tr.im domain over to a third-party custodian. Much like the open source version of Tr.im, that's also still a work in progress.

On the development front, Tr.im's login and authentication module still needs to be fixed, and there are a few more days of bug fixes to do. As for the third party that might hold onto Tr.im, Woodward has only written that talks are in their final stages, leaving out the important detail of who he's talking to. This all seems like another tease to draw out the Tr.im story while people might still be interested. I actually still use Tr.im, but I'm less interested in its business dealings, and more interested in whether it works properly.

The inner geek in all of us is constantly curious about what exactly is going on under the hood of our computer; the trusty ol' Task Manager is usually pretty good at letting us keep an eye on things. Sometimes, however, said inner geek needs a little bit more control over their not-always-well-oiled machine.

Process Hacker is an open source application that incorporates all of Task Manager's features while adding a plethora of other functions, charts, and options. Included in Process Hacker's features are things such as a tree view to see where active processes came from, detailed graphs displaying each process's resource usage and statistics, and (my personal favorite) over a dozen different ways to kill a process.

Sysinternals fans may notice that Process Hacker is very similar to Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer utility. The two utilities trade off a few features; Process Explorer is a little more developer-oriented, where Process Hacker is geared somewhat more toward the average power user.

The download link on Process Hacker's home page is broken, but you can download it directly from their project page on SourceForge.

Update: Slashdot is reporting that CentOS co-founder, Lance Davis has reappeared and that the domain, trademarks and artwork are now under the stewardship of the CentOS Project. Let's hope they file the proper legal forms ASAP.

For users or businesses that want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but don't feel like ponying up the required subscription fee to get the binary, CentOS has been a great option. Essentially, CentOS take the source from RHEL (which is released to the community), repackages it and offers up the binary for free to anyone who wants it. Although RHEL isn't really my favorite server-based Linux distro, one of my web servers uses CentOS, and it's a pretty decent solution.

Yesterday, some of the developers and maintainers of the CentOS project posted an open letter to Lance Davis, the co-founder of the CentOS proect.

It reads, in part:

You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable.

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared.

You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper.

You have, it seems, sole 'Founders' rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.

(...)

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.

For quite some time, it appears, Davis has been absent from meetings, unresponsive to messages and requests and just generally unavailable to the other project developers. As one of the co-signers of the letter, Tim Verhoeven points out in his own blog entry, this is problematic because not only is the centos.org domain in Davis's sole control (and he has now secured it with an anonymizing service so the owner of the domain isn't visible), the accounts from the Google AdSense ads and the PayPal accounts where donors have contributed to the project are also completely in Davis's control.

That creates a problem because money individuals think is going to help the project is really just going to one person who is doing God-only-knows-what with it.

Open-source software is everywhere, and developers use it to speed up their development on a regular basis. This is as it should be, for the most part, assuming the developers follow the licensing for whatever open-source software (OSS) they use. Along with licensing, the open-source community is, probably rightly so, very focused on attributing credit correctly. Considering that most OSS developers do not make any money for their contributions, credit and reputation are really the only compensation they can expect.

Imagine the horror in the OSS community then, when a mini-TEDTalk was released today that had presenter Chris Hughes showing off augmented-reality software that is built on very powerful open-source toolkits, but fails to attribute any credit to them, or even mention their existence.

Ralph Hauwert certainly took issue, and wrote a scathing blog post describing the offense. To TED's credit, they have updated the page for today's video, acknowledging the furor and offering an explanation. According to the update, Chris hadn't been intending on presenting at TED, but after privately showing his project to a number of people, he was invited to do a short 2 minute presentation. Due to the extremely short format, there was apparently no time for attribution of credit for the software frameworks his software was based on.

This is a cautionary tale. Clearly someone made a mistake, and Hughes' reputation may end up bearing the brunt of the error. It's important to remember that in the software business there are always two currencies at play: the typical financial currency that we usually think of (you know, money), and credit for the work that was done. Although there is a lot of open-source software that is licensed to be free to use, that fact amplifies the focus on correctly attributing credit for the work that went into the software.

My guess is this is a lesson Chris Hughes isn't likely to forget again.

We've covered many, many Explorer replacements here in the past, so I was a little surprised that MuCommander hadn't been written up yet.

What makes MuCommander stand out is that it is free, open source, and cross-platform. The author's web site provides downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux (.tar.gz) as well as a Debian package, portable version, and a Java Web Start package.

It's actually the first JWS application I've come across since I started reviewing for Download Squad. It loaded fairly quickly on my netbook, and ridiculously fast on my quad-core AMD desktop.

MuCommander presents a skinnable, dual-pane view for file management. There's no tab support, though I don't consider that a major shortcoming - especially considering its other features are numerous, and extremely useful.

For starters, there's built-in support for FTP, SFTP, Samba, HTTP, NFS, and Bonjour. Several types of archives can be explored without extracting: zip, rar, tar, gzip, bzip2, iso, nrg, deb, and lst. MuCommander can create archives (press ctrl+I to pack) and even modify zip files on the fly without having to recompress the entire archive

There's also a command shell window with scrolling output, credential manager, and favorite locations list.

MuCommander is a fantastic file manager, and well worth a test drive for any user - regardless of OS.

Since I became irked with the limitations of Allway Sync's free edition, I've been looking for a good replacement. I've been getting by with the MS Synctoy, but thankfully a kick-ass open source app has once again come to the rescue.

Synkron is a powerful, cross-platform synchronization tool that boasts an impressive array of features.

During the install the option is given to add a context menu extension. Oh yes, I'll have that. I work my context menu like a rented mule, and if I can add one-click synchronization to it, you'd better believe I'm going to.

The program sports a tabbed interface, making it easy to set up, run, and manage multiple jobs. The interface is uncluttered and easy to understand. Folder analysis is extremely fast, and files, file types, and folders can be blacklisted to exclude them from synchronizations.

I'm always on the lookout for apps that can ease my workload or free up some room in my budget, and open source applications are an excellent way for me to accomplish both.

If you're in the same boat as me, hopefully you're already utilizing some open source options. If not, I've put together this list of two dozen great applications that I can depend on to keep things running smoothly on my office LAN and customer systems as well.

Some of these you'll recognize, but I hope that there are some that are new to you as well.

1. PING - I may be beating a dead horse here with my love of PING, but it's just a great piece of open source. Drive imaging with network and spanning support, password blanking, it's just an excellent app.
   
   
2. NTRegEdit - The Windows Registry editor hasn't seen many changes over the years. NTRegEdit offers some great additional features like recursive export, color coding, improved searching, and quick edit window below the values list.
   
   
3. Safarp - A portable alternative to appwiz.cpl (add/remove programs), it provides a few extra useful features - like silent uninstalls and repairs of Windows Installer-based apps. It also opens in a flash, unlike the clunky appwiz.
   
   
4. WPKG - Maintaining software installs on computers in a small business environment can be a little frustrating sometimes. WPKG gives you push/pull installs and it can run as a service, so silent installs run transparently with no user ineteraction.

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the big news is that the whole thing is being rewritten from the ground up. M2, as it's being called, will include all of the features of the current Ma.gnolia, but it's going to be entirely Open Source. A first look at M2 should be available by September.

So, why Open Source, and what does it mean to Ma.gnolia users? Well, you'll be able to download Ma.gnolia and run your own version of it, and that version will be able to interoperate with Ma.gnolia.com and other web services. Standards like OpenID and OAuth will be supported, allowing for maximum portability of your data -- which, in the case of Ma.gnolia, mostly means your bookmarks and tags --- between sites. If you're already thinking of creative uses for an Open Source Ma.gnolia, good! They're looking to make user feedback a big part of building M2, so keep an eye on their blog if you've got input.

Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.

I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It is not, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the cute little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate "ella" associations with the name.

Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Talk, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.