Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

High bit depth support, non-destructive editing (so called "effect layers") and colour management. Three hot topics in photography editing - that users have been waiting for for a long time now to appear in GIMP. Today Linux & Photography blog features an exclusive interview with Martin Nordholts, one of the core contributors to GIMP. Nordholts speaks about the current state of affairs, explains what is going on deep inside the GIMP (and GEGL) and also lifts a corner of the veil about what is to come.

Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success? is the pace of change important? Does successful QA exist to create process to slow and reject changes, or by accelerating inclusion of fixes improve quality? Is success having complete, up-to-date and detailed specifications for every feature? Is success getting everyone to slavishly obey laborious multi-step processes, before every commit? Alternatively does success come through attracting and empowering developers, who have such fun writing the code that they volunteer their life, allegiance and dreams to improve it?

The Linux kernel does not lack for low-level memory managers. The venerable slab allocator has been the engine behind functions like kmalloc() and kmem_cache_alloc() for many years. More recently, SLOB was added as a pared-down allocator suitable for systems which do not have a whole lot of memory to manage in the first place. Even more recently, SLUB went in as a proposed replacement for slab which, while being designed with very large systems in mind, was meant to be applicable to smaller systems as well. The consensus for the last year or so has been that at least one of these allocators is surplus to requirements and should go. Typically, slab is seen as the odd allocator out, but nagging doubts about SLUB (and some performance regressions in specific situations) have kept slab in the game.

Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008.

MySQL, the lovable little database engine that could - for reasonable values of could - is starting to feel the pain of being an open source project distributed by a large company. With a slower release cycle, community contributions are having a hard time making it into the mainline codebase, and an illicit market for patches and forks is emerging.

KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the user find their data.

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut. CC is one of the default directories; it was already there, alongside big names Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Answers.com, eBay and Wikipedia. The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organization lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

We have just had the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, the day when Doug showed the mouse that everybody knows about in public for the first time as part of the oN-Line System (NLS). It is not so widely known how much more Doug demonstrated that day. He started out with windows, graphics, structured text editing, hypertext, video chat, and much more that became the foundation of all Graphical User Interfaces by way of Alan Kay's Smalltalk at Xerox, and the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.

The white paper definition describes crowdsourcing as a "neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, gives a much better definition and describes crowdsourcing as "the application of Open Source principles applied to fields outside of software." I've been bringing the concept up in more conversations because I've come to believe that it's a very powerful, useful, and cost efficient model that entrepreneurs should know about. However, no matter who I talk to, whether it be a successful businessman or founder of a new tech company, I've had to repeatedly explain what it is. If it isn't already, I predict that crowdsourcing will be one of the new, hot buzzwords in 2009. (We certainly need more, the term "Web 2.0" is beginning to make me puke.)

Linux Mint version 6 Felicia came out on December 15th and I have been running it on my Dell Inspiron 530 Q6600 system for the past week. I ran Hardinfo on the system if you want to see the specifications on the box. It is a quad core with 6 GB of RAM, so I was a little disappointed that the 64 bit version of Linux Mint was not released the same day the 32 bit version came out. Even though they have a 64 bit version of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa available I wanted to try out the latest version. Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and uses GNOME for it’s desktop environment. For those who prefer a different desktop, community editions of Mint 6 featuring KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox should be out soon.

Journalists are often the bearers of bad news; it simply comes with the territory. And with the economy in the tank, there's no shortage of ugly stories to cover. So I'm always pleased when there's a legitimate bit of good news to write about. And counterintuitively enough, three of my columns this year contained good news about employment for techies, despite the downturn.

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

Entrepreneur Dave Rosenberg has a Christmas wish for you. Dave wants to make everyone pay for open source in 2009. Money is the fuel that keeps things going. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. It is reasonable for entrepreneurs to dream of getting more money out of people. But Dave is missing an essential point. In an open source world, business models must be voluntary.

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold. I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Open source software can offer functionality well beyond its price, but it doesn't come without costs. Deborah Moynihan of Progress Software looks at some of the perils of using open source software and offers some solutions that address those problems.

There's no question that the open source community is a passionate one -- and one with significant influence on technology directions and options. We're way past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe to depend on in business. Open source is now a mainstream part of the technology fabric. Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper. Yet it remains connected to its roots around a passionate community working together to solve problems and share the fruits of their labors with others. Any endeavor based in community is bound to spark passionate debate. After all, without contention, how else to determine the best way forward?

Google Maps gives you a quick and easy way to add maps to your Web site, but when you're using Google's API, your ability to display other data is limited. If you have your own data you want to display, or data from sources other than Google, OpenLayers, an open source JavaScript library, can give you more options.

First there was Compiz, a compositing window manager that brought very interesting desktop effects to Linux, and then Beryl came about as a fork of Compiz before it ultimately turned into Compiz Fusion. Today though, on Christmas eve, the world can now meet Compiz++.

Compiz++ is a branch of Compiz that brings several new features to the table and there are huge changes...

A Sun Microsystems executive has provided a glimpse into the company's future plans for open sourcing JavaFX, its recently released technology for building RIAs (rich Internet applications) for the desktop, mobile devices and other platforms. Sun's corporate image is grounded in its embrace of open-source software and some components of JavaFX, including the JavaFX compiler and elements of graphic libraries, are now available under the GPLv2 open-source license, according to the official JavaFX FAQ.

Tux is no mere drone -- he likes having fun every now and then. When it comes to gaming, open source tools and applications have a lot to offer developers, but that's not where it stops. Open source games themselves can be had for little or no cost, and a lot of them offer just as much baddy-blasting entertainment as proprietary titles.