A various selection of current news and events collected from around the globe.

Great article from Wired discussing the increased use of Open Source technologies within the defense industry. I think its a perfect match. The example in the article mentioned that an entire project failed because a single contractor controlled the system. Seems that an open-source (albeit defense internal) project would have prevented this. Open source software is continuously forked if a single developer/organization fails. The main purpose (or mission) of the software never collapses, but instead evolves.

Link here: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/cia-software-developer-goes-open-source-instead

Great article at Joey Hess’s blog that apparently demonstrates that the Palm Pre periodically uploads GPS coordinates for the current user, along with applications used and application crash logs. Seems to be a bit of a security concern if these phones where used in a corporate environment.

There is a very interesting discussion on my favorite news site, Slashdot (Link), about a developer trying to submit a fix to an open source project and not having the maintainer respond.

While this is unlikely to happen in a very vocal and active os community such as Apache or Eclipse, it still begs the question, what do you do if you are trying to help out a very niche projects. The problem basically boiled down to whether it was worth creating a new version of the project (since it is open source) so that other’s may benefit, or simply leaving it be.

I think it brings up a very good point about the viability of smaller open source projects. They are only as good as the maintainer’s are at keeping the project alive. While other developers may want to help out the project by contributing code bug fixes and features, that code is at the mercy of the particular project’s maintainer.

The answer usually is that the new developer can simply “Fork” the project and maintain it themselves. But not many of us have the time to maintain a project on our own.

Twitter suffered a one-two punch today as they were both DDOSed and targetted as a vector for a new Koobface virus payload.
Read more…

With the advent of HTML 5.0 and its support in such modern browsers as Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Google Chrome(new betas) and Opera, the entire dynamic display framework provided in both Flash and Silverlight, becomes almost a moot point.

What I like about the possibility, is that it creates an open playing field that anyone with a browser can utilize, rather than only those that have purchased expensive development kits.

The whole write up on what HTML5 really is can be found at Wikipedia here.
Some shiney examples:

• 9 elements
• Wolfenstein 3d Demo

Great article from a great blog today:

Oracle’s purchase of Sun went on hold while the DoJ continues its review. Last Friday, Daniel Wall, a lawyer at Latham & Watkin representing Oracle, said that “we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline. All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed that is never going to get in the way of the deal.” So, what does Oracle owning Java mean to technology companies? The answer depends on if your perspective.theCTO, The CTO’s blog, Jul 2009

There are a lot of questions that I’m sure developers world-wide are asking:
What happens to MySQL?
What happens to GlassFish?
What happens to Netbeans?