ReadWriteHack

One year after acquiring Bitbucket, Atlassian is taking aim at GitHub. The company announced Git support with free, unlimited private Git repositories today. Git support is new to the Bitbucket service, which started around Mercurial repositories.

In addition to Git support, the company also announced a new importer for GitHub as well as importers for other hosted code collaboration services like Google Code, CodePlex and SourceForge.

Yes, another contest (we aren't affiliated, just like to spread the word). This one is from Pokki. You have until November 15th to submit your HTML5 app and have it approved for posting on their app store. Pokki is a desktop app platform that combines an interface, a development framework and an app store together into one package.

Teams of up to three developers can band together. Apps will be scored on utility, appearance, user experience, and quality. There are three prize purses: first place wins $30,000, second wins $13,000 and third wins $7,000.

You can read the details, the judging panel, sample Pokki apps and other information here. Good luck!

Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the "common good," it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it often frowns upon capitalizing on one's own work, insofar as being exclusive. In practice, however, open source projects may look less like Big Brother from 1984 and more like Big Brother from reality TV.

Joshua McKenty's still-young career is, compared to those of other capitalist executives, surprisingly replete. He's led development teams for the Netscape browser, and is intimately familiar with Netscape's successors at Mozilla. His next stroke of luck was with the space program, helping to create and then lead one of the world's most successful cloud computing projects, NASA Nebula. His work with NASA spawned the open source community's most successful - and perhaps most important - project in the last few years, the OpenStack cloud operating system - and he sits on that project's governing body. In-between jobs, he just happened to pioneer an earthquake modeling system for the World Bank.

You probably have lurking around your company a collection of moldy compiled HTML files, left over from another era when those were the cat's meow and the latest and greatest in online help technology. Well, this week Mindtouch is prepared to help you convert them over into a more social setting and bring those dusty help files into something that can be more useful today. I am talking about help files that were designed by Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe RoboHelp, XMetal and several Microsoft products too.

While your app might have started out as a cool side project you created for your friends, the feedback has been great. Why not use your app development talents to bring in some additional income? That's the idea behind the Intel AppUpSM developer program, which provides developers with tools and resources to create and sell their apps across multiple platforms.

The big question among Web developers has been whether browser and platform makers are simply leveraging HTML5 as an open-ended means to a closed end: specifically, as a standard language for producing native apps for multiple platforms, as opposed to a single, cross-platform app that plays for all. That question may very soon be rendered moot if and when the leading producers of JavaScript libraries render native-looking content using cross-platform code.

That day may be drawing very close. Last week, Michael Mullany, the CEO of Sencha - whose Ext JS library renders spectacular content on multiple browsers regardless of platform - gave an early nod of approval to Internet Explorer 10, the HTML5 rendering engine for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8.

There must be something in the air. Heroku and Engine Yard are beefing up their platforms today. Engine Yard put JRuby into general availability today after several months in testing and years of development.

Not to be left out, Heroku expanded its service to add Python and Django as part of its "polyglot platform."

It's been out for a while, but hasn't gotten a lot of attention. Facebook released Phabricator earlier this summer, an open source collaboration tool for development teams. It's an early release, but already in use by more than 500 engineers at Facebook for normal review, development and sharing of code.

Development of Phabricator is spearheaded by Facebook's Evan Priestley and is being done on (where else?) the Phabricator.org Web site.

This week 3scale is increasing the breath of its services by adding three collections of APIs that it can handle with its API management platform. Until 3scale, companies needed to put their API infrastructure as a proxy layer in front of their CDNs, slowing if not completely disrupting the API provider quality of service, architecture and business model. The three collections include user management APIs for portals and integration with CRM services, billing APIs, and analytics for push and pull data analysis. These add to their existing traffic management APIs that have been used by Skype for nearly two years and other customers include Softonic and FullContact.

In a Best Practices online advisory to browser-based Web site developers published last week, Microsoft paints a compelling picture for favoring JavaScript libraries - especially jQuery - for rendering client-side UI, over the use of plug-ins. If Microsoft is to score a blow against Adobe Flash, it has to strike at plug-ins' very reason for existence, arguing that jQuery is faster, easier, cheaper, and prettier.

Microsoft's patterns and practices team had been advocating the use of its Silverlight plug-in for composite applications since 2008, with a project it calls Prism. That project remains ongoing, though the emphasis in recent months has shifted to Project Silk, which focuses on what the company describes as "building cross-browser Web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest Web standards, including HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5, along with modern Web technologies such as jQuery, Windows Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3."