Joe Brockmeier reports on the intersection of commercial interests and communities, and offers information and advice about bridging the gap between companies and communities.
Word came down from the Google-plex last Friday that the company has decided to release the source code for Google Update. Codenamed Omaha, Update is a software installer that automatically updates Google Earth, Chrome, and other Google-produced apps designed to run on Windows.
Jesse Vincent is doing Amazon's work for it. Vincent has put together an app called Savory that runs natively on the Kindle to convert ePub and PDFs dropped into the Kindle 2 document folder.
The Google Summer of Code student application period wrapped up last week, and the overall number of applications is down from 2008. However, this is shaping up to be a good thing.
If you're a perfectionist, or prefer to solve problems alone, you're going to have some problems working with community projects. Individual contributors and companies need to get used to working in the open, and be willing to work towards perfection rather than trying to nail it the first time.
There's a dirty little secret to technology conferences: Most of them suck to some degree. It's about time someone started thinking about how to make conference time more valuable and less stale, especially now that companies are cutting back on travel to shows.
Everybody's favorite penguin (Steve Ballmer excluded) is checking out for the Spring. No worries, though -- a new fella from Down Under is going to be standing in, and it's all for a good cause.
These are the kind of stats that should make the Mozilla folks very happy. According to W3Schools data, Firefox climbed to 46.
This week, Apple unveiled its iPhone 3.0 OS and wowed the world with new APIs and the addition of basic features that other mobile phones have had for years.
Rumor has it, IBM is looking at buying Sun. No surprise that we're seeing consolidation in a down market, but will this mean consolidation in the open source space?
The Linux Foundation "We're Linux" contest is entering its final stages. This weekend, the submission phase wrapped up and now it's time for the larger community to do what it does best: Submit the work to as many eyeballs as possible to find the best entries.