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Gnash, the free software Flash player, has released its first beta. The new release is a milestone for both the project and the GNU/Linux desktop, which remains dependent on the proprietary Adobe player for handling Flash files (.swf). Although Flash support is not complete in version 0.8.2, Gnash has now reached the point where it is usable for the most common everyday purposes, such as watching videos on YouTube -- a point that Gnash was exaggeratedly reported as having reached last June. However, in many other ordinary circumstances, Gnash's success remains hit or miss.

Forgive The VAR Guy if he says “I told you so.” Earlier this month he predicted that Asterisk — the open source IP PBX — would win a global distribution deal. He was right. Specific details about the news, involving Digium — one of the top Asterisk companies — emerged today. Here’s the scoop.

In order to carry samples of my audio and video work to tradeshows, I need to be able to play a wider variety of audio and video formats than is available on any of the pocket devices out there. Fortunately, the open source Rockbox operating system doesn't require sacrificing nifty features like FM tuning and recording or voice recording and playback. And format compatibility is not the only reason one might want to install Rockbox. In fact, Rockbox was developed primarily with another purpose in mind: improving sound quality.

Arguments rage over the importance of adding comments to your code versus the importance of writing clear code that speaks for itself, thereby potentially eliminating the need for comments. The dichotomy boils down to this: writing comments versus writing self-commenting code, as if comments and clear code are somehow mutually exclusive.

I was surprised last week to see a posting from Michael Tiemann, the President of the Open Source Initiative and a VP at Red Hat. Any posting with a subject of line of "Simon Phipps Was Right" is bound to catch my eye, but this one was especially unexpected because in the original discussion I had thought that Michael was largely right!

A little under a week ago, GNOME co-founder and Microsoft admirer Miguel de Icaza called me a jihadist. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that. When a man from Mexico uses words from the east one is unsure what he means to convey - but I thought it would be worth examining in detail the great developer's sayings.

With new social networks launching everyday most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto, typo and other open source solutions. Yet there isn't an open source social network platform, until now. Built with Ruby on Rails this open source project has all the basic features you will need to setup a basic social network.

Over the past 2 years I've been getting into Linux more and more. After getting over my initial fear to move away from Windows, I realized in order for me to stay away from M$'s OS I would need to get my favorite applications to run in Linux. That's where Wine comes in.

While not directly related to Linux or Open Source, this is the man whose vision predicted so much of our current world. His visions of future have directly and indirectly shaped the technological playground that we take for granted today. Men like him show us not only where we have been, but where we can go if we only set our minds to it.

The official 1.0 release of MonoDevelop was announced late last week. The open source development environment includes a number of advanced features such as project management tools, a graphical user interface designer, a unit testing system, version control integration, and an add-in system that facilitates extensibility. MonoDevelop provides code completion, passive error notification, code navigation, and autoindent functionality for several programming languages, including C#, VB.NET, and C/C++.

Alexandre stated back in October 2007 that he knew of no 1.0 release blockers even then, and suggested we pick Wine's 15th anniversary for the actual date. Depending on how you look at it, there are several possible birthdays for Wine. Given that the exact birthday is a bit fuzzy, we'll simply continue with our normal biweekly release dates. That puts the 1.0 release at June 6th if it's ready by then, or June 20th or July 4th if it's not.

[I personally never thought I would live long enough to see a 1.0 release from Wine :-) - Scott]

Pat Quinn, the vice president of IT at lighting manufacturer Acuity Brands Inc., is quick to admit the irony. Nine years ago, he opted to go with an enterprise resource planning system from Oracle Corp. primarily because of Windows. "At that time, Oracle was one of the few vendors that could run on Windows, and we had a real Windows bias," Quinn said. Today, although Acuity Brands still considers itself a Windows shop -- many of the company's applications are developed in .NET and run on Windows -- its Oracle enterprise systems run on Linux.

This document describes how to set up the Open Ticket Request System (OTRS) on Fedora 8. Taken from the OTRS page: "OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries."

2008 Linux/Open Source on Wall Street will focus on enterprise Linux and open source technologies, and their adoption in the datacenters of financial markets firms. Killer applications, including virtual appliances and virtualization, Linux-as-a-Service and realtime/low latency Linux will be explored, as will the practicalities of deploying open source stacks in business-critical, high availability scenarios.

The Open Source Initiative, the organization that certifies Open Source software licenses, is holding an executive board election soon. I am standing for election. The board is self-electing, and I'm told I don't have a chance unless I can show community support for my candidacy. One problem I'd like to help solve is the over-representation of vendors, particularly the kind that have an Open Source product as their profit-center rather than part of operations. The vast majority of Open Source developers, paid or volunteer, are not in that sort of business, yet vendors tend to dominate the leadership of organizations like OSI and conferences about Open Source in business.

[I signed. Bruce for president^Wboard member! - Sander]

When I wrote about file managers in my review of KDE 4.0, I noted that several important features had been removed from Konqueror, including the tree-based detailed view. Many power users regard the tree view as the most effective mode for advanced file management and mourned the loss of this feature. Developer Peter Penz reports that the tree view has been restored and that it will be fully functional in time for the KDE 4.1 release.

Glyn Moody wrote an interesting article for the Guardian earlier this month titled “Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft.” It got me thinking about commoditization; specifically pondering the question: Is Linux driving the O/S towards commoditization as many would have us believe? The key point of Mr. Moody’s article is that several converging market forces are poised to impact Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system and productivity software markets.

Overall, Linux is not known as a resource hog. The free operating system is a fairly lean machine out of the box -- some distributions moreso than others. Still, there are some tweaks you can make to any Linux installation to speed things up.

"Linux is an excellent alternative to Windows and, as a Unix flavor technology, competitive with other Unix offerings," Slashdot blogger yagu told LinuxInsider. "It's not for everyone, but unfortunately large numbers of users for whom Linux would be perfect don't even know what Linux is," he said.

[The reason I noticed this story is that one of my posts to LXer is quoted. - NoDough]

One of the problems with open source is that much of it happens invisibly. Whereas proprietary software, which is sold, has to publicised at some point, open source can simply be written: whether or not it gets used is a question of the author's personal inclinations. Even the big-name open source projects – Linux, Apache, Firefox – have the problem that contributions are made in all sorts of ways, and that there is nobody really tracking who is doing what where. That makes a paper from SAP Research's Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle particularly welcome, since they do the hard work of tracking down just how much coding is going on these days. They start from a hard core of open source activity, ignoring projects that are dormant.