ReadWriteWeb

To most people, the term "open source" immediately conjures an image of two geeks sitting in a dark room (probably a basement) -- curtains drawn, McDonald's remains strewn across the desk, and 42 oz sodas within arms' reach -- coding away at their computers, listening to Linkin Park or a game soundtrack. People automatically associate it with endless lines of code, back-end technology, server rooms, computer science labs, and experimental (read: unsafe and buggy) technology.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today, Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal's capabilities.

Concrete CMS today announced the general availability of its easy-to-use open source CMS product, Concrete5. The new release builds on Concrete's foundation offering of a CMS that is as easy to configure as a blog, with the flexibility of a full web development platform. Improvements in Concrete5 include an updated file manager, embedded Picnik image editor, new help system and more. Concrete's main competitors in the CMS space are Drupal and Joomla, but Silicon Florist says Concrete5 "crushes them in terms of ease-of-use."

The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.

Thomson Reuters' Calais, a semantic markup API that we first reviewed in February, has reached its 2.0 release. The latest version aims to fix one of the main issues with Calais -- that it was too focused on business. Because Calais has roots as Clearforest, the rules it applies while parsing text are biased toward the language of business, which meant that its utility was limited. Version 2.0 has added new semantic entity types in an effort to rectify that.