Apr 21 2009

Google Brings 3D To Web With Open Source Plugin

maxheadroom writes “Google has released an open source browser plugin that provides a JavaScript API for displaying 3D graphics in web content. Google hopes that the project will promote experimentation and help advance a collaborative effort with the Khronos Group and Mozilla to create open standards for 3D on the web. Google’s plugin offers its own retained-mode graphics API, called O3D, which takes a different approach from a similar browser plugin created by Mozilla. Google’s plugin is cross-platform compatible and works with several browsers. In an interview with Ars Technica, Google product manager Henry Bridge and engineering director Matt Papakipos say that Google’s API will eventually converge with Mozilla’s as the technology matures. The search giant hopes to bring programs like SketchUp and Google Earth to the browser space.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 21 2009

Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code

mask.of.sanity writes “Over a 1000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations. The program, created in 2005, has exposed some 2500 students to “real-world” software development and opened employment opportunities within mentor organisations and in fields relevant to their academic study. The United States scored the lion’s share with 212 accepted students; 101 from India; 55 from Germany; 44 from Canada, 43 from Brazil. The Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria were new entrants to the program each with a single accepted student. Check out the slideshow summary of some project highlights, with hyperlinks back the detailed project pages.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 20 2009

Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus On Price

Microsoft’s supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on “value” instead of “cost” with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant’s recent “Apple Tax” message. “While I’m sure Ramji meant well, I’m equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 20 2009

Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus on Price

Microsoft’s supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on “value” instead of “cost” with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant’s recent “Apple Tax” message. “While I’m sure Ramji meant well, I’m equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 19 2009

2009 is an Android year declares Google’s Schmidt

By Sylvie Barak IT WILL BE THE year of the paranoid Android, according to Google chief, Eric Schmidt. On Google’s Q1 analyst call, Schmidt said it looked “like Android is going to have a very, very strong year” adding “the open source part of the …

Share

Apr 17 2009

A Closer Look At Chromium and Browser Security

GhostX9 writes “Tom’s Hardware’s continuing series on computing security has an interview with Adam Barth and Collin Jackson, members of Stanford University’s Web Security Group and members of the team that developed Chromium, the open-source core behind Google Chrome. The interview goes into detail regarding the sandboxing approach unique to Chromium, comparisons between the browser and its competition, and web security in general.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 16 2009

The Long Term Impact of Jacobsen v. Katzer

snydeq writes “Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year’s Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling ‘enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.’ In other words, in Moskin’s eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin’s firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 14 2009

Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet

pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that “Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 13 2009

Sun’s Phipps Slams App Engine’s Java Support

narramissic writes “Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, said in an April 11 blog post that Google committed a major transgression by only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform. ‘Whether you agree with Sun policing it or not, Java compatibility has served us all very well for over a decade,’ Phipps wrote. ‘That includes being sure as a developer that all core classes are present on all platforms. Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden for a really good reason, and it’s wanton and irresponsible to casually flaunt the rules.’ Phipps characterized his remarks as non-official, saying: ‘This isn’t something I could comment on on Sun’s behalf. My personal comments come purely from my long association with Java topics.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share

Apr 13 2009

Google Open Sources Updater

Jamie noticed the news that Google Update is now Open Source. The article acknowledges the privacy and security concerns of an application that is always running in the background of your machine, and authorized to install new software. And Google made the logically obvious conclusion that releasing the source code would alleviate those concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share