Open Source Daily Guide

Ever wanted to develop an opensource program or software for your Symbian OS powered smartphone, but found it nearly impossible because it wasn’t an opensource type of OS? Or are you feeling a bit left out becuase you can’t enjoy opensourced applications on your Symbian phone? Well, there’s good news in the horizon as it maybe going opensource next year.

The momentum to turn Symbian into an open source mobile operating system is strong, and developers can expect to see a preliminary version in the first half of 2009, said Lee Williams, nominated executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

In June, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced plans to purchase the remaining stock in Symbian and spin it into a royalty-free operating system under the Eclipse Public License. The goal was to harness the innovation of the open source environment to increase market share, as well as to attract application developers.

Go opensource!

Source

写真提供:oreillynet.com

オープンソースと無償ソフト市場はユーザーアプリケーションの継続で活発になってきました。 Linuxやその他のような無償ソフト製品はサーバーの境界から個人のデスクトップやラップトップに移動しつつあります。 無償ソフトとオープンソースプロジェクトとソフトウェアのアイデアは使用者にもあまりよく理解されていません。 なぜか、私達はこれらの言葉を混同して使っています。 私達は無料のソースとオープンソースを平行して使用するため、これらのものは無料で使えると考え込んでいます。 実際には「無料」というのは誤った名称です。 「無料のハンバーガー・Free burgers」は「言論の自由・free speech」と混乱すべきではありません。 このため、両方のソフトの幾つかが無料なのです。ただダウンロードすればよいのです。 しかし、全部が全部公共というわけではありません。 方法は違いますが、これらの組織は協力して開発者にオプションと自由を提供します。 見方と哲学が違います。

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Creativity will never reach its peak without competition. Just like online video companies. And if every tool for videos are not open sourced, free speech will be hindered. Thats why Miro came out to be. It was designed to give more freedom to video producers and its viewers. Miro was designed to work without hitch with numerous video hosting websites and video search engines. It is always best to have competition rather than monopoly. It is always best to have options in choosing a service that would work well for your specific need. What Miro does is it converts a media RSS feed to a channel. RSS is an open source program that works with so many web tools. Blogs benefit so much from RSS feeds.

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Last Tuesday, Google proudly announced the release of the source code for its much awaited mobile phone Android’s operating system. It is now available for everybody FREE of charge. By this bold move of making the operating system an open source code, Google is hoping that many applications will be written and appear for the mobile phone, as will cheaper phones. The Android is to be released under the Apache license. With this license, it doesnt obligate the developers to share the changes they made with the code in the open source community. It Google also hopes to enable manufacturers develop and innovate more on the platform so there will be differences with what phone manufacturers has to offer to the users.

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The open source and free software market is rising high with its continued user appreciation. The free software products like Linux and others are moving from the boundaries of servers, to personal desktops and laptops. But the idea of free software and open source projects and softwares is ever so unclear to many of the people who use them. Somehow, we interchange both terms. We use free source and open source side by side, leading us to believe that these things are available for free. The word “free” is actually a misnomer. “Free burgers” should not be confused with “free speech”. Thats why, some of the softwares from both communities are available for free. Just download it. But not all of its utilities. These communities work hand in hand to offer options and freedom for developers but with different approaches. Different prospective and different philosophy.

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The ‘ dd ‘ command is one of the original Unix utilities and should be in everyone’s tool box. It can strip headers, extract parts of binary files and write into the middle of floppy disks; it is used by the Linux kernel Makefiles to make boot images. It can be used to copy and convert magnetic tape formats, convert between ASCII and EBCDIC, swap bytes, and force to upper and lowercase.

For blocked I/O, the dd command has no competition in the standard tool set. One could write a custom utility to do specific I/O or formatting but, as dd is already available almost everywhere, it makes sense to use it.

Like most well-behaved commands, dd reads from its standard input and writes to its standard output, unless a command line specification has been given. This allows dd to be used in pipes, and remotely with the rsh remote shell command.

Unlike most commands, dd uses a keyword=value format for its parameters. This was reputedly modeled after IBM System/360 JCL, which had an elaborate DD ‘Dataset Definition’ specification for I/O devices. A complete listing of all keywords is available from GNU dd with

# dd –help
Using dd you can create backups of an entire harddisk or just a parts of it. This is also usefull to quickly copy installations to similar machines. It will only work on disks that are exactly the same in disk geometry, meaning they have to the same model from the same brand.

Now and then, the giant  software wholesaler do something that their customers are locked into the proprietary products they put on the market. Some may think that because of the enormous amount of licenses and certifications, that’s why others are completely switching to Linux. One should not shift it’s gear yet merely because of the benefit of open source revolution. Open-source application is still lacking of something and so far the most popular open source Windows program are the free Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Aside that it is still running in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefoz are substitute  browsers that anyone could use.

Ubuntu is an open source operating system designed for desktops, laptops and even servers. It is distributed by Linux based on Debian GNU/Linux. Ubuntu is owned by Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur from South Africa where the name Ubuntu originated. In case you are curious about the concept of Ubuntu, it is rendered as �We are people because we are people�. Ubuntu wants to make this OS available for everyone that�s why they made it a free software. It aims to give its users an up-to-date yet stable OS. Ubuntu supporters testifies that even the average users will enjoy Ubuntu due to its usability, easy installation and the user-friendly interface.

One of the languages developed on top of the Java Virtual Machine is the Jython, and this project began in 1997. the development of the language has been passed on to several lead developers until Sun Microsystems took over and worked full time on it. Jython 2.2 which is the latest release matches up to the CPython 2.2 release but later, its developers shifted to a new direction for its implementation using ASM and ANTLR to hasten development time. With the interactive interpreter found inside the jar file, you can discover the capabilities of Jython, most specially in executing files.

When using the Open Source Software for commercial gain minus the tricks and preserving the community and openness aspects, there are two things to consider: that payment is collected proportionate to the advantage gained from the software; and that active user in the community can have the assurance that their license charges is compensated in relation to their code contributions. This means a user is allowed to have open access to the source code, allowed to redistribute it, and free rights to make changes to the code; being able to initiate some limited charges supported by certain restricted types of program execution, and agreeing to cash or in kind payments.