Open Source

"Or, perhaps, I should say that Oracle is firing a shot at the heart of Red Hat, and commercial Linux? This really, really ticks me off. Oracle's claims as to why it felt it had to make this move are BS."

- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, "Oracle's Red Hat rip-off", Linux-Watch, October 25, 2006

The online magazine CMS Wire recently posted an article titled, "Feeling Blue, IBM Courting Drupal". In the article, author Scott Frangos writes:

Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that.

As we reported earlier this month, a new version of Joomla! is near completion. The development team has released Joomla! 1.5 beta to allow for testing, identify bugs, and offer feedback to the developers. The following is an excerpt from an official announcement at joomla.org:

It was announced by Joomla.org that the Beta for Joomla! 1.5 is expected to be released on October 12th. Some of the goals and features that are to be included in this new version of the content management system are:

• Substantial improvement in usability, manageability, and scalability. The project team's goal is to improve Joomla! "far beyond the original Mambo foundations".

• Expanded accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Additional integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

"The first time I heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on?"

- Steve Fox, Editor in Chief, InfoWorld, September 4, 2006

A series of posts and questions on the CMS blogs are asking whether Microsoft should help finance the costs of open source projects. I have no opinion to give that would add value to this topic. However, I'm happy to give the rundown so far of the posts that speak the loudest regarding Microsoft and open source projects.

The thread of blog posts seems to originate with a post at Dave's Tech Shop. In that post, Dave talks about the need for Microsoft to better support open source projects. Dave's reasoning:

Last night, I was up late doing some administrative work for my sites as well as writing some posts. This was my attempt to procrastinate working on an osCommerce site that I promised someone would be done by the start of October.

For the first time, an alpha version of osCommerce 3.0, an e-commerce application written in PHP, was released to the public for testing. While this third alpha was made available to the general public, the first two alpha releases were made only available to osCommerce's community sponsors.

According to osCommerce, the "alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".

Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

Packt Publishing announced the top five content management systems (CMS) nominated for their Open Source Content Management System Award. The top CMS eligible for the award in alphabetical order (not in order by most nominations) are:

As the title says, phpBB 3.0 (code name Olympus) is now out as a second beta. I see a lot of encouraging things about phpBB 3.0 and it will likely be seen as a big improvement over 2.x. The features and improvements to phpBB from version 2.x to 3.x are numerous and I'll probably chat about them as 3.0 near its actual actual release date.

The only comment I'll really make here is...I'm sure glad I didn't build a near production site on phpBB 3.0 Beta1. If you read the few lines below you'll see that no update path is offered between the first and second beta. Ouch!

From phpBB: