Chris wrote afterwards: "'The revenge of the sources' was a great line from Dave Winerña powerful capsule of the driving energy in Web expressionism."

APIs are open, can write mash-ups. Has the ajax magic going on. Fully indexed backend and search, a la Gmail. Including filter by calendar, attachment type, etc.

Group scheduling, calendaring - drag and drop etc.

"web services enabled platform" - can write different clients. e.g. mobile client. open source project.

Sounds great, I've gotta check this out.

As Freshbook's Sunir Shah rightly points out, an open source ecosystem can only thrive when enough developers decide to join the community. Right now, the open source iPhone apps that are available are quite good, but there are also very few of them. Apple itself puts too many road blocks in front of potential developers, which, as Shah argues, will lead most of these collaborative projects to develop web apps instead of native apps. However, given the limitations of the web apps platform compared to the native iPhone platform, these applications won't be able to really harness the power of these devices.

Android

For open source advocates, Apple's closed operating system is clearly no match for Google's Android, however. After all, Android not only makes open source collaboration easier by making the SDK available for free (Apple charges $99 Update: Apple makes the SDK available for free, but developers need to pay to get access all the other developer resources and a chance of inclusion in the App Store), but Google has even open sourced the operating system itself.

We hope that more developers will join these open source iPhone initiatives, but currently, Apple isn't exactly making things easy for developers. Even something as simple as giving an application out to a large group of beta testers is still cumbersome.

With that in mind, Facebook decided to internally develop a library for creating JavaScript animations in FBJS. "And then we thought: 'why stop there?' The library had very little Facebook-specific code, so we took some time to modularize it, and now we're open-sourcing it for everyone," said Facebook developer Marcel Laverdet.

Facebook is following in the steps of rival web giants Google and Yahoo!, who both have open sourced internal JavaScript libraries. While Facebook's release of the animation library is a far cry from the more complete libraries released by Yahoo! and Google, such as Yahoo!'s YUI or Google's Web Toolkit, it is a step in that direction. Releasing open source development libraries is a very smart thing to do, because it builds capital with developers and attracts developers to your platform. For Yahoo! and Google, their development libraries help to attract developers to their other APIs (such as Google Maps or Flickr). For Facebook, releasing libraries like Animation could help draw more developers toward their platform.

The Animation library is described as a way for developers to create "customizable animations using CSS and DOM manipulation." It is released under a modified BSD license.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."

The related API is the same one that powers a plugin from another Automattic property, Intense Debate. Mudge told Ostatic, "I'd like to see AtD spread as far and wide as possible. I'm an inventor first and have this desire to see my inventions help people."

Interested parties can check out this demo or read the tech overview and grab the source code here.

Risa wrote that REM's open source video is "a taste of open source in the much more potentially disruptive way of open sourcing advanced by Linux, then the pay-what-you-can but still copy-written version tried on [Radiohead's] In Rainbows."

REM and Warner make a tiny but bold experiment with this one video, and it’s a hint of much bigger moves to come. For certain they’ll watch Supernatural Superserious closely to see how the video moves through distribution circuits that are not used to open source, and open source systems that are not used to them. My one humble suggestion so far would be to use open and standard protocols rather then proprietary software when trying to open source content - Flash navigation seems an unfortunate way to try and share.

Nevertheless, these tentative and awkward first steps have precedent in the world of software which suggests that the real innovations in the entertainment industry may lie along these exact lines traced by REM and Warner. No matter whether it’s large companies or independents who are making them, the future lies in seeking a balance between sharing and selling where both can coexist to expand ever wider and more sustainable networks of access and collective affluence… Maybe the future is even foreshadowed in REM’s own hanging, haunting question from 1986:

“What if we give it away?”

Inspired by the site Pulse of PDX, an aggregation of Twitter messages from users in the tech-rich town of Portland, Oregon (where I live) - these Pulse sites provide a model that could be used to create a central location for live discussions on any topic.

There's a bio page where you can learn about who is included on the site. Participants at launch include people like Ross Turk, Community Manager at SourceForge, Amanda McPherson, the Marketing Director at The Linux Foundation, Greg Stein, the Founding developer of Subversion, and many other people who are vendors, analysts and reporters on Open Source. Does that sound like a site worth checking out? I think it does.

These sites also have a mobile version and an RSS feed. It's a great way to check in on the day to day of the Open Source community.

What community would you like to see the Pulse of? News reporters, political campaigners and graphic designers come to mind for me.

Said Open Source for America's David Thomas, "Technologies enabled by software freedoms can help make government IT deployment more secure, more cost-effective, faster to deploy, with greater privacy and the ability to help eliminate vendor lock-in."

Nevertheless, lobbying will be no easy feat as smaller open source companies will have to jockey for position against Microsoft during requests for proposals. Furthermore, in the past government officials have expressed security concerns with open source code. Critics argue that exposed source code can be examined by attackers and therefore poses a risk. Nevertheless, another argument for exposed code can be made in ensuring security. By moving away from proprietary software models and giving free access to a system's source code, governments are no longer dependent on a select few contractors for their defense. Instead, an entire programming community can be deployed to defend against attacks.

One of the government's key open source projects is actually with the National Security Agency. The agency already employs open source technologies to address multi-level security on government machines through SELinux. SELinux was first released as a modified version of the Linux operating system and has since taken on a life of its own as the NSA works with open source contractors to continue to tweak security. While Linux users were at first suspicious that the NSA might be using the code base to spy on their machines, no back doors were detected in the software. Today, thousands of government employees and Linux users protect their machines using SELinux.

Another successful open source government project is Sunlight Labs' Apps for America. In its first year, the project proved a resounding success in displaying how open source government efforts increases accountability and collective solutions. Apps for America yielded a number of great user-generated projects including call Congress Firefox plug-in and a site that tracks filibustering. Director of Sunlight Labs Clay Johnson was celebrated amongst other open source innovators at yesterday's Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

Tim O'Reilly said, "An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started." As new security risks take shape and new data sets become vital, governments need to consider open source solutions in their quest to provide better citizen-facing services.

If you'd like to contribute to government open source projects, check out Apps for America 2 and Open Source for America.

Today's keynote was a conversation between Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries and Phillip Torrone, the senior editor of MAKE magazine. In the conversation, they discussed a new movement called 'Open Source Hardware'.

Definition of Open Source Hardware

Open Source Hardware involves releasing all of the information necessary, to allow individuals to acquire the individual components of a device and understand how to assemble them together into a functioning device. Also, many individuals end up then extending a device to incorporate entirely new and novel uses. Limor talked about multiple types of open source hardware - including releasing the following:

• mechanics in an open interface markup file under creative commons;
• circuit level design in an open format released under creative commons;
• firmware source code (more like traditional open source licenses);
• data sheets and parts lists including where to find the parts (it is increasingly becoming hard to find each of the individual parts);
• finally there is the firmware and APIs, again under a more traditional open source license.

Limor and Fried reviewed a number of examples, including:

• The LinkSys WRT54G Line of Routers - provided the ability to upgrade the $75 router's firmware to make it significantly more valuable;
• Roomba - Provided access to the Hardware API, so that you can integrate additional hardware into the robotics platform. This was so successful, that iRobot just released an Educational Bot which is the Roomba without the vacuum.

Business Model

I found each of the above examples interesting, because they are 'for profit' companies leveraging 'Open Source Hardware' projects. Just like for profit businesses have leveraged Open Source Software.

Interestingly, Fried's own company Adafruit Industries actually provides kits with all of the components necessary to complete the electronics they develop and release, under creative commons with attribution license. According to Limor, this has actually become a profitable business; because people are interested in building these electronics, but they don't want to do the work to track down each component, and are willing to pay a premium to get all of the components from one source.

Conclusion

There was a lot of discussion today about the advent of "prosumers" in media and specifically web media. Today's presentation was very interesting to see how this same trend is being applied to another aspect of technology. I was actually tempted to call this post "Read/Write Electronics" :-)

But all hope may not be lost. Lifehacker reports that a group of developers are scrambling to develop an open-source version of Sandy.

The open-source project proposes to recreate Sandy from the ground up, ensuring that users still have access to the functionality that the original Sandy possessed. They're beginning to consider plans for monetization, as well.

Like many open-source pursuits, this project stems from user frustration over the lack of control they have in the situation. It will be interesting to see where the community decides to take the project now that they have more control over Sandy's features.

For now, the developers are seeking guidance on initial features and functionality:

"If you are a fan of Sandy, let us know here or at mysandy on twitter what features are most important to you, highest priority for us to focus on implementing first. Note that we won't be able to recreate all of Sandy's full feature-set for a first release. So it's helpful to know from you what your priorities are. Please keep in mind we'll need to provide features based on what's available to us open source and free, for now, so that will be a constraint on what features are in the first release."

It's also interesting to note, that there are already mentions of working with identi.ca, the open-source microblogging tool that sprung onto the scene during a similarly difficult time with Twitter.

Whatever the case, they're off to a running start. The team says they currently have a proof of concept prototype up and running.

We'll continue to keep tabs on the open-source Sandy, even without the original Sandy around to remind us to do so.

Importantly, it also means that Six Apart has finally removed the one major advantage that Wordpress has had over Movable Type - that it is open source. I'm sure representatives of both companies will argue that they still have advantages over the other (in fact, they usually do so in the Read/WriteWeb comments!). But given Movable Type's history - MT was once the darling of early adopter bloggers, but when Six Apart introduced licensing fees the tide quickly turned towards Wordpress - the open sourcing is both a necessary and welcome move by Six Apart.

MTOS (Movable Type Open Source) is an open source project that will consist of a GPL-licensed version of Movable Type 4.0 and resources for the community of Movable Type developers. It was originally slated for Q3 release, but was pushed back to Q4 - today to be exact. The main points:

In a blog post, Six Apart's Anil Dash says that the open sourcing of MT is all about "freedom". No doubt aware that Movable Type has some work to do to position itself as an open source publishing system, Dash claims that there is "a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years". He notes that "there's always been a free (as in beer) version of Movable Type" and "from TrackBack to Atom to OpenID, we've always released standalone open-source implementations of the key technologies that we've created or popularized with Movable Type."

Those are good points by Dash, but really the open sourcing was forced on them by Wordpress' success over the past 2-3 years. I'm glad to see Movable Type finally out in the open, because it's the system we use here at RWW (although we also use Wordpress on some of our network blogs). In the end, the users will win when there are two quality open source publishing platforms available!

Grub, which works something like the SETI@Home project by using spare processor cycles donated by users to crawl the web, will become an open source technology located at Grub.org. The source code will be released "as soon as possible." Emre Sokullu wrote about building an open source distributed Google clone back in May, and envisioned a project that seems similar to Wales' goal.

Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer at LookSmart -- name just a coincidence as far as I know, said in a release that Looksmart was "pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license."

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Apache License

The Apache License allows developers to distribute and modify the source code in any way they want, and developers are not required to distribute the new code under the same license. The new license does not even have to be an open-source license, which will give companies the option to develop their own, proprietary platforms on the basis of Android.

iPhone and Android Compete for Developers

It will be interesting to see where developers will take the Android platform now that they have full access to it. We have already seen the release of quite a few very interesting programs for Android in anticipation of the G1 launch.

This announcement also sets Google apart from Apple, which is trying to keep complete control over its iPhone platform. While most users probably don't care about the politics behind the scenes, the Android platform might siphon off quite a few developers from the iPhone - especially given Apple's erratic behavior around including applications in the iTunes store lately.

The Marketplace looks and functions essentially like eBay, where people can offer services and support for open source software projects listed at SF.net (think installation, customization, training, etc.). Listings are free, and SF.net takes a cut of sales, usually about 10%.

Because the Marketplace doesn't dabble in auctions -- people are putting up their services for sale with a set price -- it seems a bit odd to follow the eBay model, rather than let people create a menu of offered services. These are services, not products that can sell out, and can presumably be offered for sale more than once. Why not let people list once, and take multiple sales from the same listing?

The site has about 700 listings now, but SourceForge.net counts over 160,000 projects and 1.7 million users, which means the potential market for the Marketplace is enormous. The company is aiming to serve the "long tail" with this effort -- companies that want to use open source software or can provide services but lack the means or capital to deal with larger firms or land big clients. "I don't think there's anyone serving the long tail right now but us," SF.net VP Mike Rudolph told IDG News.

SF.net declined to specify how they think the Marketplace will fit into their overall business model. "This is a long-term strategic play for us," continued Rudolph. "We've done some staffing up to support this. Ultimately, our hope is that it affects the economics of our business. But we are not forecasting that revenue at the moment."

On his blog, Schwartz revealed that Sun would soon be announcing a new set of MySQL support services. "Though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL," he wrote, "many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support." Previously, Sun sold support for competing open source database, PostgreSQL

Schwartz also talked about having "assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet." Sun's open source web development stack now includes Java, OpenSolaris, MySQL, and GlassFish. It would appear that Sun is hedging its future on open source (though the acronym is harder to pronounce than LAMP).

Though many industry watchers see the Sun acquisition as a smart move and great fit, some point out potential difficulties moving forward. Raven Zachary, an analyst at The 451 Group, thinks the purchase of MySQL "raises a whole bunch of issues concerning Sun's close ties to Oracle, as well as their investment in PostgreSQL." And Larry Dignan wonders, "if Sun makes MySQL more enterprise acceptable does that diminish its mojo with startups?"