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ETH Zurich open-sourced an experimental operating system called BarrelFish, which it built in conjunction with Microsoft Research. The purpose of BarrelFish is to explore the best ways to structure OSes for multicore systems.

BarrelFish is a completely new OS "built from scratch," so it doesn't depend on any proprietary Microsoft components. The source code is available under an MIT license.

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

We've covered Microsoft Kinect a few times, particularly the release of the hacked open source drivers for the device. Hackers have been building their own projects with it, and Microsoft will be releasing an official SDK for Windows for the product as well. Windows 8 might make use of Kinect and similar features as well.

But even better than open source drivers for the device would be a completely open source alternative. One candidate for this is TLD, aka Predator, an object tracking system that works with normal web cameras on commodity hardware.

Stuck on a Ruby on Rails problem? Call Rails Hotline, a free helpline staffed by volunteer Rails developers, at (877) 817-4190.

Rails Hotline, which was just launched this morning, is powered by Pocket Hotline, a platform designed for companies to crowdsource technical support.

Neo Technology, the sponsor company of the graph database Neo4j, has released the Community Edition of Neo4j under a GNU General Public License (GPL). Previously, it was available under the Affero General Public License.

"That means that in every scenario where you can use MySQL for free, you can now also use Neo4j Community for free," writes Neo Technology co-founder Emil Eifrem on his blog.

More than half of the 517 organizations surveyed by Gartner use open source software (OSS). When the firm first started tracking open source in the enterprise five years ago, only 10% of organizations were using OSS. Gartner published the results in a report titled Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software. This announcement summarizes the findings.

Decision makers aren't just looking to OSS because it's cheaper - they're also trying to gain competitive advantages through open source. "Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions," reads the announcement.

Contracts for Java is a new open source tool from Google that makes it easier to implement contracts in Java. According to Google's announcement, this new tool is based on Modern Jass by Johannes Rieken and inspired by the programming language Eiffel. It was created by two Google engineers - David Morgan, Andreas Leitner - using their 20% time, and was expanded as part of an internship by Nhat Minh Le.

OpenLogic provides enterprise support for a variety of open source software projects. Today the company published a list of the ten applications that its customers purchased support for most frequently.

This is an interesting list because it uses support data instead of downloads as a measure of an application's popularity. And the list is mostly what we'd expect: Apache, MySQL and Subversion are all represented. But since OpenLogic isn't the only provider of support for open source applications, this list might not be entirely accurate.

Today Foursquare released the code for two applications on GitHub: Rogue, a MongoDB query domain-specific language written in Scala, and Full-Loaded, "a caching image loader for iOS."

Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai announced the projects on Twitter today. More source code from Foursquare can be found here.

Today at CodeMash Microsoft announced a few new resources for ASP.NET developers: ASP.NET MVC3, IIS Express 7.5, NuGet, Orchard 1.0, SQL Server Compact Edition 4, WebMatrix.