Friday, October 31, 2008

The Feel Good Drag

In our game, you can usually quantify success by observing not only your own growth, but also what affects you are having on the greater community and those around you. Judging by that, I'm glad to report that one of my favorite open source projects, Magento, are well on their way to achieving success--if they haven't achieved it already.

Since their 0.6 release which is not too long ago, they've already reached 500,000 downloads. Their user community is also over 44,000 strong and they have over 60, thats right 60, translations. It is a true testament to the Magento team and their philosophy and dedication to the community model and to Open Source.

As if that doesn't suffice, others in the eCommerce space have begun to open source their offerings as they feel the heat from Magento. Oxid, a very popular German eCommerce software producer recently announced Oxid eShop is going open with eShop Community Edition. (Link is in German)

I stand by what I said months ago, Magento is killing it.

UPDATE: As I write someone showed me that Matt Asay posted about this as well on his Open Road blog.

Plymouth

Here's a link to a really great write up that the guys over at Phoronix did about Plymouth. Just remember, when you see it making its way to other distros, you saw it here first!

Jack

Thursday, October 23, 2008

I'd Rather Be With an Animal, Part 1

My life is very adventurous. It seems that every time I go away something HAS to happen. I arrived at FSOSS earlier today and as you probably guessed, something happened. Stay tuned after the jump, because it really is quite an interesting and, even I have to admit, funny, story.

A quick summary of day 1 of the symposium first. Got in, got to Seneca, Got there right in time to see Greg moderating his panel. I've been mostly involved in the Teaching OSS @ FSOSS track, and pretty much spent all day in that room. What came out of it were some really good ideas. One particular idea which struck me the most were the alternative models for engaging the academic community. Specifically, one which came up quite a bit today and one which I mentioned before to a few people, is getting academic schools other than CS/CE, mainly business and law interested in Open Source. Personally, I think its a great idea, particularly since from a research perspective, there maybe more practical implications for a Business major or a Law major surrounding Open Source, than there might be coming from CS/CE.

At 2:00 was our big parlor meeting type thing revolving around finally putting together all the disparate pieces in order to get re-focus our energies surrounding Open Source in Education and advancing the cause. Our big idea was that we need some neutral, third-party space in which we can begin to coalesce and join up in a unified voice. The first steps, we agreed, was getting up a list of current institutions and individuals who are already doing Open Source education well so that we stop reinventing the wheel and create a pool which we can draw from. Some sort of consortium was thought to be the best idea and we are starting slowly but surely. For now, anyone who is doing any open source in academia related stuff would do themselves well by checking this site and maybe adding to it: http://tinyurl.com/tos-group

After we disbanded, the real fun happened when I wanted to track everyone down again when they went to dinner. On second thought, I'll post up the story in the morning because I'm tired and want to go to bed. Just know for now that it doesn't involve anything getting broken and is sort of a Twilight Zone meets Jurrasic Park type of tale.

Okay, really tired, going to sleep. To be continued...

Monday, October 13, 2008

Linux Foundation's End User Collaboration Summit

Just got back from the EUCS. It was pretty cool and I got to meet a whole lot of interesting people. The point of the EUCS was to bring together developers and community managers with end users to get some conversation started and analyze the present to come up with some cool stuff for the future.

The day started off with Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's Executive Director MCing some panels and talks by a few people including Red Hat's own Paul Cormier. Also, Anthony Williams, author of Wikinomics gave a keynote. He is one smart dude.

There were many cool sessions in a variety of different areas, including virtualization, power management, desktop-y stuff and mobile linux and I got to talk to some interesting people about a few pretty cool topics. Lots of people from Japan were there too, which was cool. All in all a cool day, although I tried to find education interested people and there werent many. I even tried to start an education break away session and no people came. Not that this was the right venue, but hey!, it was worth a try.

Jack