Posts about Open Source Software as of August 12, 2009

The Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management came out for the first time this month.  I say the first time because it was always a Market Scope before the 2009 report.  If you look at it, you can learn many things.  The one thing you won’t learn is if any of the products are right for you, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Jon Marks did a good job of comparing Gartner’s and Forrester’s latest rankings and highlights how a “Niche Player” may be worth considering.

Now i know its not greatly safe to download programs from torrents and i do it at my own risk (blah blah blah), however, i’ve used them before to get “Regcure”. I recently downloaded the “Vegas movie studio platinum” torrent and when installing the actual program, it said it was removing software. Obviously i went crazy as it should never remove ANY software when installing a new program, tried to cancel, and wouldnt work. Then my computer reset itself, and reloaded saying it had recovered from a serious error.

I’m a huge believer in doing what you say others should be doing. Libraries are dedicated to open access to information. I think that’s a very good thing because when information is withheld, enormous amounts of energy are wasted duplicate efforts since everyone has to start from scratch. It really limits what you can accomplish.I keep running into situations where libraries increasingly fail to live up to their rhetoric.

Windows Azure, Azure Data Services, SQL Azure Database and related cloud computing topics now appear in this weekly series.   • Update : 8/11 and 8/12/2009 VMware’s SpringSource acquisition, other additions • My forthcoming Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform book’s cover gets a facelift(?) that’s being applied to all new Wrox Programmer-to-Programmer series members: Jim Minatel ’s New Wrox Covers post of 8/7/2009 explains the change from Wrox’s tradition of author mugshots on the cover of “Programmer to Programmer” titles.

There are four lessons that corporate innovators can draw from Y Combinator:You can do a lot for a little. It amazes me when corporations complain that they lack adequate financial resources for innovation. With open source software, online market research tools, and the ability to create virtual prototypes, you can do a huge amount for $10,000. A lack of financial resources is very rarely a rate limiter.Tight windows enable “good enough” design.

DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application for creation professional-looking DVDs. It allows not only burning of video files on DVD that can be played on any DVD player, but also creation of own-designed DVD menus. It is Open Source Software and is completely free. Features · creation and burning DVD video with interactive menus · support of AVI, MPEG and other file formats · support of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, MP2, MP3, AC-3 and other audio and video formats · using

Another one bites the dust. Add SpringSource to the expanding list of independent open source companies that have been gobbled up by proprietary software giants. Let’s consider the growing list: IBM’s purchase of Gluecode, Novell’s purchase of SUSE, Citrix’s XenSource deal, Nokia’s Trolltech buy, Sun’s purchase of MySQL, Oracle’s purchase of Sun (and hence MySQL and OpenOffice) and now VMware’s planned $420 million acquisition of SpringSource.

Another one bites the dust. Add SpringSource to the expanding list of independent open source companies that have been gobbled up by proprietary software giants. Let’s consider the growing list: IBM’s purchase of Gluecode, Novell’s purchase of SUSE, Citrix’s XenSource deal, Nokia’s Trolltech buy, Sun’s purchase of MySQL, Oracle’s purchase of Sun (and hence MySQL and OpenOffice) and now VMware’s planned $420 million acquisition of SpringSource.

PmWiki is a wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites. PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they have an “Edit” link that makes it easy to modify existing pages and add new pages into the website, using basic editing rules. PmWiki is a clean and simple wiki system with a friendly user interface made easily deployable with the JumpBox for PmWiki. Benefits of running a JumpBox Deploying an application as a JumpBox provides a dramatically-reduced path to getting started with the software.

Movable Type is Six Apart’s flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers the websites and blogs of many of the world’s largest media companies, Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers. Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social publishing platform upon which to build highly interactive websites, blogs and social networks.