Open Source Daily Journal

That is a very difficult question to ask for big businesses who normally have complex customized programs that allows them to function as a business. But the economic conditions have been forcing a lot of thought into the technology, considering both the advantages and disadvantages of the many successful open source projects that have already been out on the market. To ask that question would result in varying answers depending on who you ask, for large companies that use large programs and technology would not be so keen on adopting such a public technology. This does not however mean that they are not considering them for even some of the staunchest developers of closed systems have been trying out some of these technologies on a limited basis, proving the benefits, which is mainly cost are enticing enough for them to take notice. Continue Reading »

More and more businesses are considering the benefits in terms of cost in re-deploying their previously closed programs onto open systems that can be quite prone to hacking. Security has been on the agenda and is one of the major focus of developers and technology experts who have been promoting the new and improved open-system designs. Securing a very large distributed system that uses open technology is a very large task but developers are getting there, finally agreeing on how best to approach the security of the many projects being deployed or are already in place. Continue Reading »

The methods at which businesses and communities are trying to reach out and garner members vary depending on the technology they are promoting. Imagine FireFox that has been a long time in the making, a product of the Mozilla Foundation that came up with a web browser that was not only faster but much better than the long standing leader of the pack, Internet Explorer. They considered the changing web and how people are using the web, designed a framework, published the designs and asked for comments, suggestions and just about anything you might want to say to improve on the proposed browser. Get back down and incorporate the best suggestions in terms of improvement and release the browser into the wild that is the internet, viola, success in the making. Continue Reading »

Ubuntu has long been in the background of more prominent open-source projects that has been silently creeping, making a name for itself. It is after all based on Linux that itself is based from of course Unix, one of the oldest languages that has ruled the realm of mini to mainframe computers in the infancy of the internet. One of the best benefits of Linux and other derivatives or flavors as they are called is the ability to strip unwanted parts of the base operating system leaving only the needed ones intact. This allows an old Pentium computer to become and FTP server making for a cheap and deployable form of technology in an old package. Continue Reading »

The descendant of the hugely popular Mozilla Firefox 3.0 used to be called Firefox 3.1, but as the developers have progressed (and what a hard road that was), it was decided that Firefox 3.1 would be called Firefox 3.5 instead.

It’s no secret that the Firefox developers have had a hard time with Firefox 3.1. Now it looks likely that Firefox 3.1 will be released Firefox 3.5 to reflect the significance of the changes that have been made to the browser.

Shiretoko, as Firefox 3.1 is known, includes a number of new features that the developer team says makes it “feel like much more than a small, incremental improvement over Firefox 3″. Among these changes are TraceMonkey, tag and player support, improvements to user controls over data privacy, and significant changes to the web layout and rendering platform.

The original article lies here.

Firefox is hailed to be the best and most used browser to date which has taken over the much infamous Internet explorer from Microsoft. Why, the problems the software giant has with issues ranging from unfair commercial acts to plain ignorance of their user’s needs in terms of customization. The Fox is truly killing IE for millions now prefer to use it because they can totally customize their installation, with plug-ins that come from the users themselves who contribute to it’s improvement. Continue Reading »

Symbian users will be in for a nice treat next year as the said smartphone operating system have plans of going opensource.

The momentum to turn Symbian into an open source mobile operating system is strong, and developers can expect to see a preliminary version in the first half of 2009, said Lee Williams, nominated executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

In June, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced plans to purchase the remaining stock in Symbian and spin it into a royalty-free operating system under the Eclipse Public License. The goal was to harness the innovation of the open source environment to increase market share, as well as to attract application developers.

Go opensource!

Image Source: r2gsoft.files.wordpress.com

Foxit Reader 2.3 is an open source program that reads PDF files. This is a very good alternative for Adobe Reader. The one main advantage of Foxit Reader that Adobe can not practically compete with is its relatively small size. The download size of Foxit Reader is just 2.55 MB compared to the Adobe Reader which is a resource hog that eats up around 22 MB of your space. When you click the Foxit icon, it opens almost instantly. Thers is no splash screen that displays so and so, created by so and so. Its annotation tool enables you to highlight text, draw graphics and make notes in PDF. You can also print and save them. You can also convert a PDF into a text file. And it gives you added privacy. It does not connect to the internet without you knowing it.

Image Source: blogs.pcworld.com

Google proudly announced last October 21, that the source code for the company’s Android mobile phone operating system is FREE of CHARGE and is now AVAILABLE. Those wanting to download the source code can visit the web site for the Android Open Source Project. Google cites that an open source platform that is consistently studied and being improved on and further developed by a responsible community can hasten the development and innovation. It can also open up economic opportunities and ultimately provide the best technological innovations for a better mobile phone user experience. Google is hoping that by making the source code open, it will facilitate to faster development and many applications will be readily available, and it will bring down mobile phone prices.

Image Source:product-reviews.net

The common thing in both the Free Software and Open Source communities’ approaches is the open availability of the source code to developers. Free Software Community provides source codes to developers with the goal of which, that the user is free to do what he wishes with the software’s source code. It is more philosophical in nature. While, Open Source Community believes in providing these source codes to users, with the aim that collaborative efforts can bring productive results. It motivates the users to freely provide their suggestions for the source code and can append it to the existing one. For some years, the communities were working with the same concept and “Open Source” came to be used as a marketing term for free software to reduce the ambiguity, but somehow, it contributed to more problems. So the two communities parted and started their own way. So now you know, “Open Source” is really opposite to the original context of “Free Software”.