It's not for everyone, but we talked to a variety of developers who are looking forward to kicking the tires. Below are opinions before launch from three developers we have a lot of respect for. Two are enthusiastic and one is skeptical.

Rob Pike also gave an hour-long talk about Go late last month.

Developer Reactions

GitHub Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath

I'm definitely on the lookout for C-like languages with good C integration and solid package support (for organization). Hopefully Go provides the former with its "syscall" package (or something similar) - building on existing libraries is a huge boon to young languages, as Scala and Clojure have shown with their Java integration.

Organizing big C projects is always a challenge, and borrowing packaging ideas from higher level languages like Python could really help.

Can't wait to see the site and play with a few examples.

Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of Adaptive Blue

Go appears to be procedural language, based on C/C++ syntax, skewed heavily towards C. It has C memory manipulation model with addresses and pointers, which is complicated and not used in Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.

There is nothing in this tutorial that attracts my eye, other than built-in parallel processing capability. C historically lacked threading (although current versions have it), but having it built in natively into the language is always great.

I am a fan of Java and Object-Orientation, so new procedural languages sound like a thing of the past to me.

If this is positioned as alternative to JavaScript, I do not see why this is necessary. Why not take JavaScript and make it better / add richer libraries like JQuery as part of the language. What Google has done with Gears for example, is built stuff using native C/C++ code and wrapped it into JavaScript calls - I think that is a better way to move forward and to make things faster.

Larry Price, Computer Systems Consultant

This is a very clean and powerful language. It's a direct descendant of C with elements of Haskell, OCaml, python and erlang visible as influences. It seems like yet another attempt to make a "better C than C", and from a first shallow glance it seems like a clear winner.

Objective-C fans (mac programmers) will probably sniff that it's nothing new, and that clean message passing semantics have been available to programmers for decades, but there are some deep differences; Go is not an object oriented language although you can use it in an objected oriented manner. In many respeccts Go is not a new language, it will seem very familiar to anyone who has used C or C descended languages; and most of the advanced features that it adds to C are implemented in other languages.

Go strikes a good balance between legibility, low-level functionality and high-level functional programming features. It will have a strong appeal to programmers who are interested in the type safety and concurrency friendly features of Haskell or erlang, but want to access them in a more familiar C-like syntax.

It has a good chance to make type-safe concurrent programming a mainstream choice.

What do you think?

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.

In response to the mobile devs, HTC has previously stated it was waiting for its own developers to provide the source before releasing it publicly. As late as last week, HTC representatives had emailed developers saying, "At the moment we do not know when the kernel source for the Hero will be released," and "We are still pushing our developers to provide us with the source code and for the links to be added." Since the Android kernel is licensed under the GPL, this delay was creating both dissatisfaction and controversy in the community.

Or something along those lines. GPL non-compliance and hints of internal process and delivery issues don't mode well for the mobile manufacturer. After unfavorable coverage of the company's "foot-dragging" on Slashdot and long threads of modev complaints, we do hope that HTC's future Android projects will be more swiftly opened.

The Hero, as a device, is significant in itself, hence the enhanced perception of cruelty in HTC's not releasing its source code sooner. It's created huge waves in geek circles, beating out the iPhone for Gadget of the Year at the prestigious T3 awards and generating enough gadget-geek slavering to power a small city.

So, will the gadget geeks and modevs have to push for open sourcing every time a cool, Android-powered device is released? Where was the major malfunction that led to these delays? Were the HTC engineers thrown under the bus to allow leadership to save face, or do the HTC powers that be simply need to get their engineering team under control? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

For now, the code has not yet been submitted to the Linux kernel and the community will most definitely look at it with a fine tooth comb. The Linux community's backlash against Microsoft is somewhat justified. In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times and likened Linux to a cancer. He said, "Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source... Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."

Nevertheless, whether for legal purposes or business purposes, it appears that Microsoft is wholly ready to release the isolated device driver code to the open source community. The code would directly benefit the company in expanding Microsoft's market share amongst administrators running Linux.

The granddaddy of Linux, Linus Torvalds has not yet looked at the code; however he made the statement to Linux Magazine, "We all "scratch our own itches". It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved...Complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source - the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the 'your' in question happens to be."

UPDATE: In response to Stephen Hemminger's accusations, Microsoft spokesperson Sam Ramji made the following statement to Port 25, "Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers." Too see the full statement, visit Port 25.

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.

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."

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

When Open Source Bridge co-founder Audrey Eschright began to think about organizing this conference, she first took a look at open source citizenship:

"We're planning a conference that will connect developers across projects, across languages, across backgrounds to learn from each other. We want people to experience something beyond "how to use tool X" or "why databases keel over when you do Y" (even though those topics are important, making up our tools and trade, and will be a central part of the conference content). We'd like to share what open source means to us, what it offers, where we struggle, and why we do this day in and day out, even when we're not paid for it.

In order to do that, it seemed important to bridge the kinds of roles we have in open source, user/contributor/owner/institution, getting down to something more fundamental. What else are people who interact in this multi-directional way? Perhaps we're citizens. Not residents--we do more than live here. We are, like citizens of a country, engaged in the practice of an interlocking set of rights and responsibilities."

It seems that there are plenty of good open source citizens in Portland. Organizers formed a non-profit organization and the call went out to find volunteers. Citizens responded immediately and there was even support from the city government. Overall, "thousands of hours went into creating this event, all unpaid. Several people who contributed were new to open source development...and made a huge impact anyway".

The Conference

One of the biggest goals of Open Source Bridge was to bring some interactivity and collaboration to its sessions and allow attendees to engage closely with one another. One way it accomplished this was to set up an innovative "track structure" for its sessions. Sessions were "technology agnostic, based around shared community experiences and focus on the similarities between projects, not the differences" and featured tracks split into five areas: business, chemistry, cooking, culture and hacks. This is a great way to structure conference sessions and did indeed promote interactivity and collaboration.

A big surprise (and a welcome change) at this open source event was the fact that there were over 20 women who either led conference sessions, spoke or played other significant roles, including co-founders Audrey Eschright and Selena Deckelmann. Notable participants include Sarah Sharp of Intel, Maria Webster (a.k.a. Ubergeeke) and Rikki Kite, Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine.

A highlight of the conference was when Portland Mayor Sam Adams opened the second day with a keynote address, vowing the city will one day be a "hub of open source". Adams says, "bottom line: the city government has unnecessarily been closed in proprietary software and has been a laggard in using open source software". Portland wants to join Vancouver, BC as a completely open city.

As the sessions at Open Source Bridge were winding down each day, the fun was just beginning. In a room high atop the Hilton Hotel in downtown Portland sat the 24-hour hacker lounge, a dedicated space for "code sprints, bug bashes, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe". On the last night of the conference there was a special Beer & Blog gathering for attendees and an open source themed taping of local tech podcast sensation Strange Love Live.

Although it might not replace OSCON for some people, it's clear that this conference was a huge success and will continue to grow and find its place among open source enthusiasts. It was exciting to see over 500 attendees from around the world, including a delegation from the Korean Software Industry Association, really connect with each other to advance the open source cause.

The only negative thing we could find was a lack of enough electrical outlets for people's laptops. We have been assured that organizers are working on the problem and that next year's attendees will have plenty of power available. Everyone we spoke with said this was a worthwhile event and will be looking forward to next year's conference. We applaud the efforts of all the organizers, volunteers and open source citizens that made Open Source Bridge possible. Be sure to check out the conference Attendee Wiki for more details and contributed session notes. You can also search the Twitter hashtags #osb09 and #osbridge for a blow-by-blow account of the week's events.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

Unlike competitor PhoneGap, Titanium claims it is better equipped to gain entry into the iPhone and Android app stores. The company believes its tools create applications that behave, look and feel identical to native iPhone applications. The idea is that Apple will be less likely to cast Titanium applications from the garden of appland after being made in the image of its predecessors.

To request access to Titanium's mobile beta fill out the form.

The motion that was submitted to the city council points out several reasons why endorsing open data, open standards and open source policies is an good idea and city councillors has resolved to:

* Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
* Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
* Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
* Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
* Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
* License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

Other cities like Washington, DC, Portland and Toronto have expressed interest in adopting open policies for their information and data, but so far Vancouver is the only one to explicitly spell it out in an agenda motion.

Problems with data transferring, usability and licensing issues have kept many municipalities from adopting such policies. Hopefully Vancouver can overcome these issues and become the world's first truly "open" city.

Miro is the free, open source, cross-platform online video player that manages queued downloads much like TiVo for the Internet. And although the number of users has tripled to about 1.1 million uniques over the past three months with the release of Miro 2.0, the amount of funds available for nonprofits such as Miro has dramatically dropped. Insert yet another generalization about the crumbling economy here.

Founder Nicholas Reville said,"We're asking users to each support a little part of the program; hopefully, it will add up to our continuing to develop and grow."

Reville also noted that the idea of code adoption, although diminutively delightful, is based on the fundamental idea behind open source software. "The code isn't something that we or anyone owns. The idea of code adoption connects really well to our mission."

Participating users will receive an official adoption page, an image of their very own "line of code" that they can watch grow over the year, a blog or website widget, and credit for their contribution in every downloaded copy of Miro.

Users are encouraged to visit the Miro Adoption Center and adopt a line of code for $4 a month. It's definitely cuter than asking for microdonations; let's hope it's exponentially more effective.

Tools and Information to Get Started

Obviously, to tackle these projects, you will need a few tools and some space on a server to host your projects.

Hosting

You will need some space on a server and your own domain name if you don't have one already. There are virtually hundreds of providers out there, all of varying quality and at lots of different price points, but most will give the a similar set of tools. Most hosting services will also set up a domain name for you.

Here are RWW, we host our site on MediaTemple, but their cheapest plan is $20 a month. Others, like GoDaddy, 1and1, or Dreamhost have plans that start at $4 or $5 a month. Obviously, to some degree, you get what you pay for, but to get started, almost every hosting service will do. Just make sure you sign up for a Linux package and not a Windows service, as most of the packages discussed below are meant to run on a Linux server.

For some more in-depth discussion about how hosting works, have a look at this article.

When you sign up with a host, also make sure your hosting package comes with PHP (a programming language almost all open source web projects use), MySQL (a database package to store your data), and the Apache web server.

Most hosting services will give you more than enough space and bandwidth for your personal site (some give you more than 100GB for less than $5 a month). But make sure you look at the details before you sign up. 1GB is not nearly enough disk space if you want to host a photo sharing site.

Moving Files Around: FTP client

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the easiest method to get files from your desktop to your server. On Windows machines, we recommend Filezilla and SmartFTP (both are available for free). Our Mac users here at RWW like to use Fetch, Cyberduck, and transmit.

Some More Information You Will Need

You host will give you quite a lot of information about your account, but for our projects here, you really only need very little information: ftp username and password; database name, database username, database password. Every database has its own name - your host might give you only one database that all your programs can share (named something like db0212), or you can often add five or more separate databases. Every host does this differently, but usually they provide an easy to use user interface with all the relevant information and some also have very good tutorials.

Installation: Almost Always the Same

Most of the projects mentioned here have awesome tutorials that will get you through the install process. The first time you do this, it might be a bit intimidating, but after you have done it once, you will see that pretty much every installation follows the same pattern and asks for the same information (see above). Most of the time, you will have to edit a text document and enter your database information there. It's really just copy and paste. Some packages also just ask you for this information during the install process.

Note: if you plan on installing more than one software package on your server, make sure you set up a separate directory or sub-domain for each of them!

What to Install

Mixtapes

OpenTape

Want to host your own mixtapes? Give OpenTape a try. Installing OpenTape is a great first project, because you don't even need to configure anything. Download the latest version of the application from here. Unpack it. Upload it to your server with FTP - and that's it. You will set up a user name and password when you first surf to the site and after that, you can easily upload and play your songs.

Blogging

Wordpress

When it comes to hosting your own blog, few packages can trump Wordpress. The install shouldn't take more than 10 minutes and because Wordpress is so popular, literally hundreds of developers are building extensions and themes for it. Make sure you have your database info at hand, as you will have to enter this info into a text file to install Wordpress.

Drupal

Another blogging tool that is more flexible than Wordpress, but also a bit harder to use, is Drupal. The installation, too, is very easy, and Drupal has a highly active developer community and hundreds of addons and themes. For most users, Wordpress does the trick, but if you want to experiment with different blogging platforms, Drupal is a good place to start.

Photo Sharing

Gallery

We like to stay in control of our own photos, and our favorite application to host photos on our own sites is Menalto's Gallery (note, btw, that Wordpress now also has some good features for doing photo-blogs). Gallery is extremely flexible and powerful, but setting up your own page is actually quite easy (the install instructions make it look harder than it is). With Gallery, you can set up and modify your themes, control access to your photos, and thanks to the Gallery Remote, uploading pictures to it is extremely easy.

Lifestream

Sweetcron

We love FriendFeed, but sometimes you don't want to host your own lifestream (it's your life, after all...). That's where Sweetcron comes in. Sweetcron (see an example here), can import your diggs, twitter messages, YouTube favorites, blog posts, etc. and lets you display them on your own site.

Social Network

elgg

Want to host your own social network for a club or class? Elgg is the way to go. While it's a powerful package, installation is as easy as installing Wordpress. Elgg comes with every feature you expect from a social network: profile pages, activity feeds, blogs, forums, bookmarks, etc.

What do You Run On Your Servers?

Do you have your own favorite software packages that you run on your servers? Maybe a wiki, a Digg clone, or a micro-blogging service? Let us know in the comments.

CC-licensed picture of tools was used courtesy of Flickr user flattop341.

One of the most interesting ways to get an idea where companies of interest are headed is by watching who they hire. That's one of the reasons why we launched Jobwire, our site tracking who gets hired in tech and new media. SourceForge, also the name of SourceForge and Slashdot's parent company, has made a couple of interesting hires lately.

The company told analysts in its final earnings call of this year that it is now limiting hiring to "a few key select positions and only when we can find exceptionally well qualified candidates who might be coming on to the market." Combine that statement with Brondsema's mention of a whole new project and we're pretty interested to see what SourceForge has come up with.

Earlier this month, we reported on the hire of a new CEO at SourceForge. Scott Kauffman will take the helm on January 5th. Kauffman has a diverse background, ranging from music to advertising companies.

Neither the company nor the new developer hired have responded to several inquires this morning about the new project. It won't likely be a software index, that's taken care of already, nor an open source development tutorial site - the company's already got one of those too.

What will it be? We look forward to finding out more.

Update: A spokesperson for the company contacted us today and confirmed that a new project is in the works but said that "SourceForge is not quite ready to talk about it just now over the holidays." Watch this space for coverage when the news is ready!

The first demonstration of the OpenKnowlege system is aimed to enhance the abilities of those seeking health-related information on the web. Instead of solely relying on a doctor to prescribe a course of treatment, people today tend to seek out medical information on their own using the web. Unfortunately, that data is often inaccurate and misleading. What OpenKnowledge intends to do is provide patients with structured information that has been checked for accuracy. To test this system, OpenKnowledge is working with Cancer Research UK on a project related to treatment methods.

2) Emergency Response

When there's an emergency situation, there is often a centralized point that disseminates critical information to people in need. But if that system itself breaks down, people are out of luck. OpenKnowledge aims to decentralize those systems so that a "backup" decentralized network of peers could be put into place. There, people could help each other out when the centralized system failed. This is currently being testing with emergency response authorities in Trentino, Italy.

3) Protemoics Research

Protemoics research (the study of the structure and function of proteins) can also benefit from the OpenKnowledge framework. In this area of science, many researchers worldwide rely on a small number of databases, creating a bottleneck of sorts which stresses the infrastructure of the databases themselves as well as those that maintain them. Researchers also find it hard to share data and results directly with other groups. In addition, the quality of the information in those databases is very mixed.

OpenKnowledge aims to solve all three problems by letting the researchers share data with each other directly, peer-to-peer style. This relieves the burden on the databases while the feedback will continually improve the quality of the data shared. This is currently being tested in an existing proteomics network in Spain called ProteoRed.

So...What Is It Exactly?

Understanding how a system like this works is difficult and the Open Knowledge web site doesn't make the process of comprehension any easier. Even despite the cute, Harry Potter-themed slideshow meant to describe the process, the actual details are hard to grasp. Obviously written by brainy researchers, they can't even call the slideshow a "slideshow," instead referring to it as a "simple pictorial introduction."

Still, if you can wade through the academic speech on the site, what you may find is a creative idea for sharing information. Basically, through open source downloadable code, OpenKnowledge sets up a peer-to-peer network where users can trade in information and data similar to how BitTorrent users trade mp3s and video files.

In the OpenKnowledge system, anyone can easily become a peer or even create their own peer by sharing existing code or writing their own. In order to become an OpenKnowledge user, you simply need to download the OpenKnowledge kernel from here together with some additional components that you might want to use. In addition to users, services, such as WSDL services, can also be made into peers on the OpenKnowledge network.

OpenKnowledge is more of a framework for decentralizing the systems on the web. It's not so much of a consumer-friendly web app than it is a model for information sharing that can help advance areas of science and research. You may not ever use OpenKnowledge yourself on your home computer, but your life may very well be impacted one day by the innovations it made possible.

1. Chrome Privacy Guard

Chrome Privacy Guard was the first tool to automatically delete the unique Client ID that Google assigns to your Chrome installation. With this tool, that ID is automatically deleted before each run of Chrome. To use Chrome Privacy Guard, you launch an executable file ChromePrivacyGuard.exe instead of launching the browser itself. The tool cans the "Local State" file inside the Chrome directory and removes all information regarding the Client ID. It then automatically starts Chrome.

2. UnChrome

Like Privacy Guard, UnChrome also removes your unique ID from the browser, instead replacing it with a null value. This is a bit more convenient because UnChrome only needs to be run once. After you download and run the tool, you will see a pop-up advertisement for the developer's other applications, but again, it's only a one-time thing. Afterwards, your browser will forever have the unique ID removed.

3. Iron

Iron is a fork of Chrome's Chromium core, the open source project behind Google Chrome. Developed by a German software company SRWare, Iron goes even further than the above tools to protect your privacy. Where the other tools simply remove the unique ID from Google's version of the Chrome browser, Iron is actually its own, separate browser. In addition to removing the unique ID, Iron also makes sure that no user-specific info is sent to Google, including crash reports. When you enter in a URL incorrectly, Iron does not present any alternative error messages like Chrome does. Finally, Iron does not come bundled with the Google Updater tool, which checks with Google to see if there are any new updates for the Google products you have installed.

Do you use any of these tools to protect your privacy? If so, share your experiences or your preferences in the comments.