Links: Nov 24, 2005

A week of Firefox tabs, a pile of No-Doz tabs, and an open bar tab ... it must be time for another collection of things that caught my eye this week.

• Forbes Piece On Open Source--full of fascinating tidbits: 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows boxes, Salesforce.com has competition through hosted SugarCRM offerings, Pfizer found LAMP cut development costs over J2EE, ....
• GOffice--less smooth a user experience than Writely, but they're expanding rapidly into other areas of the office space.
• Open Web Design--finally, CSS and HTML it's okay to copy!
• New Zimbra for Mac OS X--as soon as the Mac beside me finishes upgrading to Tiger, I'll install it.
• Digital Cities and Regional Broadband Conference--I was sorely tempted by this. I couldn't justify the $500 last-minute round-trip ticket to Wellington, though. I am hoping that the technology invented to network developing nations will also be applicable here in New Zealand.
• Test Run--QA on the web, assembled from open source components by one of the SixApart team. What I love about SixApart is that employees' projects done outside work time are their own.
• Swivel--integrate data from various web apps to spot trends. Found via this intriguing review [update: fixed the incorrect link--sorry!].
• ACM K-12 Model Curriculum for CS--interesting how it builds up to actual programming by first teaching analytical thought and problem decomposition. Now I remember all the computer studies classes where I had to write an algorithm for toothbrushing.
• Why Governments Really Choose Open Source--great piece from ZDNet UK about government adoption of open source around the world. A lot of FOOs in there (Rishab, James Governor, etc.). Interesting to see how often "anti-Americanism" comes up. From being in New Zealand just a week, I'm not sure it's so much anti-Americanism as simply being against seeing money go overseas for no good reason when it could be supporting local economies.
• Covalent Plug--on ZDNet. Interesting to see their uptake: 267 of Fortune 500, 71 of Fortune 100 companies have a relationship with Covalent. What are the numbers for MySQL and Red Hat, I wonder?
• Silk--open source collaboration framework, once proprietary now reborn as open source. Found through this fascinating account of how Akiva turned themselves from a proprietary shop into an open source shop because their customers wanted it.
• Swicki--not my favourite name, but one of a number of a new class of products: custom search engines. Rather than searching just your site or all of the web, you can build web subsets to search and the actions of users of the search improve the results. See O'Reilly Radar Swicki for an example.
• Matt McAlister's slides on Web 2.0--making Web 2.0 explainable to a non-in-crowd audience. Very nice (though copyedit before you reuse his slides :-). I'd like to see a few more powerful arguments for why you should encourage mashups other than "if you don't, they'll do it anyway".
• That's Linux on the Line--BusinessWeek article about Linux in mobile phones. Nothing about Surj's work, though.
• City of Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source--we'll see more of this. How are businesses taking advantage of it? Who's selling into this new environment, rather than fighting it?
• State of the Startups--interesting piece about the financial movements behind the startup industry. "Stagnant equity markets will continue to drive capital toward start-ups while the current marketplace has too many dollars and too few quality managers, according to respondents of a national survey conducted by law firm Foley & Lardner LLP. "
• Survey of Open Source Developers--"94% of Linux developers' systems have never been infected by a virus". What are comparable figures for Windows developers? I'd be surprised if the claimed bug-fix times and claimed infection rates weren't similar.
• Open Source at the World Summit on the Information Society--when will a US president say positive things about open source?
• Convergence Oceania 05--where I'll be on Friday.
• Can Open Source Defeat Microsoft?--leaving aside the pointlessly confrontational title, there's this great line inside: "open-source products have replaced Microsoft as the lowest common denominator in computing". Let the climb up the value chain begin!
• Google Paranoia--if the ten reasons why Google is evil gets you down, read today's prophecy of Google's downfall to cheer you back up.
• Web 2.0 Checklist--check! check! check! ... damn, I need a yellow fade ... check! check! ...
• Build a Skype-VoIP phone adapter--or buy the uConnect VoIP converter.