Category: Open Source

The code is out there

Categories
Mozilla Open Source Software

Top Windows Programs Open Source

CNet has a slide show with it’s top Windows programs. It’s a pretty good list. I’d agree with it for pretty much everything. What I found really interesting is that of the 9 listed, 7 are open source. Here’s the rundown with the license for the source of each:

Interesting to see the penetration of open source here.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Android SDK Released

We knew it was coming, and it’s now here. I haven’t looked at it too closely, but a few things I’ve noticed:

Yet another XML UI? Clearly it’s becoming a popular way to do things, but do we need so many? XUL, MXML, XAML, now Android? Surely there must be another way. XUL as a standard sadly never materialized.

There’s a mention of 3D libraries, but notes:

…the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer…

We all know how well graphics drivers have historically been on Linux. Hopefully the embedded/mobile market will prove better than the desktop.

One thing I do wonder is all the variables. The platform seems to have a fair amount of potential, but there’s no real standard regarding what you can be assured will exist on a handheld (for example 3D acceleration) or even what restrictions might be imposed by the carrier (firmware lockdown). At least with the iPhone you know they all ship with certain CPU’s, graphic capabilities, etc. It’s a very predictable platform. Android reminds me a lot of programming for the PC, there’s a ton of variations out there on the web to account for. Even if most run the same OS. Mobile has the added complexity of carriers who are notoriously restrictive. I wonder if this will really change. This is why the web as a platform is so great. It overcomes most of these limitations.

In general I have to agree with most of what Robert Scoble says (vaporware, unimpressive UI, etc.) but it’s still very early on, and you can’t judge much based on this early preview. Right now, the iPhone is a clear winner, but I wouldn’t discount Android just yet.

My general feeling is that it’s too early to make much of a judgment. There many things that can happen in the next several months that can drastically alter the fate of Android for better or worse both business and tech wise.

The next key moment in the mobile landscape will be the release of the iPhone SDK due early next year.

Then there’s always the underdog OpenMoko.

Categories
Apple Google Mozilla Open Source

The Illusive Gphone

So the illusive Gphone is finally announced, but not as a phone but an alliance.

One should note it coincides very nicely with last months announcement of Firefox Mobile becoming a priority. Firefox has a nice share of the Linux browser market. Extending it to mobile seems somewhat natural. A real win for developers. The same browser on all major PC platforms, and many mobile devices (on multiple carriers by different manufacturers) creates one of the largest platforms on the planet for a high level language like JavaScript. It also means it will be easier to port existing web applications to mobile devices knowing the browser is of the same lineage and honors true standards. It’s also nice to know that other mobile browsers like Safari on the iPhone are also very standards friendly.

Obviously absent on the list of members in the alliance is Verizon, AT&T, and Apple. I’d be curious to know what Apple is thinking. Could this be another Mac vs. PC? Or will Apple “Think Different” this time when faced with a pending platform war? I know what I would do. I’d start hacking up a Wine-like API for running Linux applications on Mac OS X. Since Linux doesn’t need to be reverse engineered like Windows, development should be much easier. Mac OS X having strong UNIX roots would also likely be helpful. At the end of the day, you would then be able to run Android applications on top of the thin(ish) compatibility layer. Casual users wouldn’t know any better. I guess in a sense Apple has started down this road. There is X11 for Mac OS X. They can of course keep it all under the radar for a while, just like Mac OS X for x86 until they need to play that card.

Om Malik makes an interesting point:

  • Google (GOOG) says it’s open source, letting you download it and do whatever — except that carriers can create their own locked-down versions of the software with Android. That doesn’t seem very open to me.

It does make me wonder if Google is doing the heavy lifting and carriers will just fork it when done and ship a closed version of the software and take advantage of not needing to pay licensing.

Very interesting stuff, but still doesn’t answer my question regarding bandwidth becoming fast enough, and affordable enough to hit critical mass. It still seems that mobile data services are just too expensive for many people to justify. Will this encourage enough competition in the mobile space to drive prices down? Or is there going to be some incentives to offer lower priced data services?

Categories
Open Source Web Development

Snoopy’s Relative Redirect Bug

Snoopy is a PHP class that automates many common web browsing functions making it easier to fetch and navigate the web using PHP. It’s pretty handy. I found an interesting bug recently and diagnosed it this afternoon.

If you navigate to a 301 or 302 redirect in a subdirectory you can get something like this:

HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:26:46 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)
Location: destination.xml
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

The key thing to pay attention to here is Location: destination.xml. Say your initial request was to:

http://somesite.tld/directory/request.xml

Our next request based on the redirect should be to:

http://somesite.tld/directory/desination.xml

Instead what Snoopy is doing is appending to the hostname, resulting in an incorrect request:

http://somesite.tld/request.xml

This is correct in cases where the first character of a redirect location contains a “/”. In this case it does not, which makes it incorrect. The following patch I wrote corrects this behavior. As far as I can tell (I haven’t read every word of the spec, but many chunks over the years) the HTTP 1.1 specs RFC 2616 only dictate that URI be provided, it doesn’t seem to require full url’s. See comments for follow up discussion on the specs. My conclusion is that it’s best practice but not required to use absolute uri’s). I wouldn’t call this a very common practice, but it does exist in the wild.

— Snoopy.class.php    2005–11-08 01:55:33.000000000 -0500
+++ Snoopy-patched.class.php    2007-10-13 16:10:38.000000000 -0400
@@ -871,8 +871,18 @@
                                // look for :// in the Location header to see if hostname is included
                                if(!preg_match("|\:\/\/|",$matches[2]))
                                {
                                        // no host in the path, so prepend
                                        $this->_redirectaddr = $URI_PARTS["scheme"]."://".$this->host.":".$this->port;
+                                       // START patch by Robert Accettura
+                                       // Make sure to keep the directory if it doesn’t start with a ‘/’
+                                       if($matches[2]{0} != ‘/’)
+                                       {
+                                               list($urlPath, $urlParams) = explode(‘?’, $url);
+                                               $urlDirPath = substr($urlPath, 0, strrpos($urlPath, ‘/’)+1);
+                                               $this->_redirectaddr .= $urlDirPath;
+                                       }
+                                       // END patch by Robert Accettura
+
                                        // eliminate double slash
                                        if(!preg_match("|^/|",$matches[2]))
                                                        $this->_redirectaddr .= "/".$matches[2];

Code provided in this post is released under the same license as Snoopy itself (GNU Lesser General Public License).

Hopefully that solves this problem for anyone else who runs across it. It also teaches a good lesson about redirects. I bet this isn’t the only code out there that incorrectly handles this. Most redirects don’t do this, but there are a few out there that will.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

IBM Joins OpenOffice

I guess everyone wants in on the office space. IBM is joining OpenOffice. Not a bad move considering IBM’s general investment in non-Windows based OS’s. IBM seems to have favorite projects when they participate in open source communities. I wonder what specifically IBM is planning to work on. For example IBM’s big interest with Mozilla was XForms. It’s going to be interesting to see what they do. There are many things that they could be interested in.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

The Future Of Thunderbird

Mitchell today announced that the Mozilla Foundation is now looking for a new home for Thunderbird since it doesn’t directly meet the mission of the foundation, which is putting most of it’s efforts into Firefox. Three options have been initially proposed (though there seems to be room for more options).

Continue reading “The Future Of Thunderbird”
Categories
Mozilla Open Source Software

Patent Wars 2.0

In 1.0 we had Unisys and SCO. In 2.0 it looks like it will be Microsoft:

He says that the Linux kernel – the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware – violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces – essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up – run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

Emphasis is mine.

Email programs? Thunderbird? Evolution? Chandler? Kontact? Mutt? Pine? The fact that it’s plural says quite a bit. Is it the concept Email itself (RFC 822)? SMTP (RFC 821)? An address book (no RFC, but there’s got to be prior art here)?

I can’t think of too many things that are shared across “Email programs”.

This will be very interesting.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Shaver on Silly Season

Shaver’s got some interesting thoughts on silly season (prior reading, highly recommended). My favorite is this little nugget:

If you choose a platform that needs tools, if you give up the viral soft collaboration of View Source and copy-and-paste mashups and being able to jam jQuery in the hole that used to have Prototype in it, you lose what gave the web its distributed evolution and incrementalism. You lose what made the web great, and what made the web win. If someone tells you that their platform is the web, only better, there is a very easy test that you can use:

I took the liberty of highlighting the Web 2.0ish language.

Both of those are great reads, I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read them.

Categories
Apple Open Source Software

OpenOffice Carbonized for Mac OS X

Sun will be supporting the development of a Mac port to OpenOffice. The cited reason is that the Mac market share is growing. In the comments it’s also clarified that it’s a carbon port planned (which is great).

No timeline is mentioned, though I would suspect there’s a good 18 months before we will see anything workable. I’m thrilled to see Sun make this move. OpenOffice is a great product, and would be awesome to have in Mac OS X. Office X is not a bad product, but it’s far from affordable. Apple’s alternatives aren’t quite as robust and compatible as one may sometimes need. This is a great thing for any Mac user. Currently you can run OpenOffice through X11, but that’s a pretty bad experience.

If you remember back in 2005 Google threw some bodies at OpenOffice though it wasn’t targeted at the Mac platform. The battle against Microsoft Office continues.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Open Source Joost

You all know about Joost (formerly “The Venice Project”) by now right? You know it’s based on XULRunner right? Well it’s using a ton of open source stuff, and it displays it rather proudly. You can see it all by visiting their open source site.

They use a lot of open source.