LinuxWorld.com Feature Story
A second life for 'Second Life' with open source? October 31, 2007Until recently, the business news media fawned over the Second Life online virtual world. Stories fixated on Second Life "residents" who got rich brokering virtual real estate, or on the numerous corporations and consumer brands rushing to claim their presence within it (by building virtual kiosk centers or "islands"). Virtual world hype trumps open source hype, so little virtual ink has gone into discussing the open source initiative that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, established to further its development.
One of these projects is the Linux version of the Second Life client, the viewer application that runs on the resident's computer and lets the resident interact with the graphical environments of the virtual world. Ever since its release, the Linux client has remained in constant development by an informal team, usually three people. Their work could directly benefit the open source and Linux community beyond Second Life, in the aftermath of the hype.
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Linden Lab declined a request for current figures on the number of people using the Linux client. Nonetheless, Jason Giglio, a developer and Second Life resident who actively works on the client, says he heard through the proverbial grapevine that about 5% of registered Second Life residents, or about 10,000 people, visit Second Life with the Linux client. Giglio does client code on a volunteer basis, but it is work related: He says he earns a living managing virtual land and doing contract programming gigs in Second Life. (Read more)
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Upgraded Vyatta software attempts to make users think twice about Cisco November 1, 2007Open source may have taken another step in becoming a considerable alternative to the old guard for enterprise routing. (Read more)
Mozilla, Microsoft drawing sabers over next JavaScript November 1, 2007Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript. (Read more)
Machine learning fuels Sun music recommendation technology October 31, 2007Software that listens to and analyzes music is driving a Sun project, which has a goal of creating an open source music recommendation system that surpasses the capabilities used today by iTunes and Amazon. (Read more)
Open source ERP: Today's hottest emerging technology? October 31, 2007What's the most exciting emerging technology for enterprises in the next 3 to 5 years? Hint: It's not going to be designed by Apple. It just may be open source ERP, Gregor Bailar, former CIO of Capital One, told attendees of the CIOΙ08 The Year Ahead conference, being held this week in San Diego.
Surprised? (Read more)
LinuxWorld Podcast
Writing JavaScript in a Java IDE: Bruce Johnson November 1, 2007If you think that doing an AJAX app would be fun if you just didn't have to tweak around with browser compatibility problems, and you could use a regular IDE and debugger, Google has a development tool for you. Bruce Johnson, engineering manager at Google, explains the possibilities that Google Web Toolkit opens up for web developers. (13:37) (Read more)
LinuxWorld Community
gPC leaving money on the table? November 1, 2007The Everex gPC is for sale at Wal-Mart. The distribution, "gOS" is an Ubuntu derivative from a new company, headed by David Liu, and the desktop experience is based on Enlightment, tweaked to look kind of like Mac OS X, with Big Obvious Buttons for all the Google apps.
I talked with David about gOS before the launch, and asked the obvious question: is Google paying gOS for the ads that its customers see, Firefox-style? (Read more)
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