Books. Linux. Osdev. Git. Pep. Ebooks. An Introduction To Open Sim: the "Apache of Virtual Worlds& By Guest Editor - Aug. 18, 2008Comments (7) By Wagner James Au You've probably read a bit about OpenSim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and OpenSim interoperable. Besides that project, what's OpenSim about, who's working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here's a starter's guide, created with the help of Tish Shute, whose virtual world blog UgoTrade is an indispensable resource on the latest in OpenSim news. What's OpenSim's Relationship To Second Life? Coded in C# and developed to operate under Mono or Microsoft .NET runtimes, OpenSim was created with libsecondlife, an open source library derived from the source code to the Second Life's viewer (which Linden Lab released in January 2007.)
Related to that, Frisby clarifies that OpenSim is not itself a virtual world, but code designed to run virtual worlds. What are the server grids running OpenSim? 4 OSs that Should Be Open Source. More often than not, the question arises on OSNews why certain projects or pieces of abandonware aren't released as open source software. Supposedly, this would speed up development, facilitate the growth of a community, all that jazz associated with open source development. Here are four projects I'd like to see released under a MIT license. 4. BeOS Many who read OSNews regularly probably know that both Eugenia and I have a special place in our hearts for the BeOS. So, why isn't the BeOS number one? 3. SkyOS is a massive undertaking, especially taking into account it is mostly written by one man: Robert Szeleney.
Still, the project appears to be stuck in a perpetual state of 'testing'. I used be a strong supporter of the closed source nature of SkyOS, but in recent years my position swung to the other side due to an apparent lack of focus and the absence of a release. Just like the BeOS, QNX has a special place in my heart. Which is a sad thing, as there is so much potential in QNX. 1.
Pyspread. Poly/ML Home Page. The One in Which I Say That Open-Source Software Sucks. These days, arguing that open-source software is crap seems dumb. How many websites are powered by a combination of MySQL, PHP, and Apache? How many IT applications, written in Eclipse, run on Java, using SWT widgets? How many design studios rely heavily on The GIMP and Inkscape for their everyday photo-retouching and page layout needs?
Er, wait. That last one. Doesn’t quite ring true. In fact, as good as most people seem to insist that Inkscape and The GIMP are, I’ve yet to see a major shop that ran on anything other than Adobe or Quark. Okay, but, at least I can point to the many offices that run OpenOffice or KOffice! …well. I mean, yeah, there are some real businesses, here and there, that actually use those products, and some of them are successful. Why does open-source fail to reach critical mass anywhere but the server closet? Easy: because open-source software is, incontrovertibly, a total usability clusterfuck.
Programmers are superb optimizers. But what about using software? The unknown hackers. Not many Linux-come-latelies know this, but Linux was actually the second open-source Unix-based operating system for personal computers to be distributed over the Internet. The first was 386BSD, which was put together by an extraordinary couple named Bill and Lynne Jolitz. In a 1993 interview with Meta magazine, Linus Torvalds himself name-checked their O.S. “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux,” he said, “Linux would probably never have happened.” Linux obviously did happen. Why? Eric Raymond, the open-source evangelist, believes it came down to a question of personal style.
In his A Brief History of Hackerdom he praises 386BSD at the expense of the “crude” versions of Linux that were around at the time. The deciding factor, argues Raymond, was not technological but social. The Jolitzes had a very different style. Bill and Lynne Jolitz are charming and forthcoming. Intel’s now-ubiquitous chip design for personal computers, the x86, was then in its infancy. 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community.
For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware. Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place. We looked at the WHY because software forking is often seen as somewhat of a waste of development resources and isn’t considered a good thing. Sometimes the results can be great, though, as many of the examples below clearly show.
Ubuntu from Debian What: Ubuntu is the world’s most popular Linux distribution. When: October 20, 2004 Firefox from Mozilla Application Suite Joomla from Mambo When: August 17, 2005 OpenBSD from NetBSD. Piwik - Web analytics.