FreeSoftNews

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don’t be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

As it currently exists, the GXP technology is firmly tied to Java, although a C++ code generator is in the works (and the existing code is included in the open source download). Now, if you’re building web sites with Java backing, especially within the enterprise, the odds are pretty good that you’re currently using JSP. Given the number of tools and frameworks that support JSP, why should you consider switching?

Read more at OStatic

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.

In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.” Perhaps, the agency has conceded, some “new, unforeseen technology” might warrant an “exception” to this formalistic test, but in the agency’s view, no such technology has yet emerged so there is no reason currently to use a more inclusive standard.

Read more at Patent Law Blog

What’s it like working at Google HQ in Mountain View? I was lucky enough to get a visit on a recent trip to the US, read on for my notes on the brief tour.

With the release of statistics today showing that Google continue to capture market share in the US search market (up from 63.92 percent one year ago to 69.17 percent in June), I thought it was a good time to write about my recent trip to Google HQ in Mountain View, about an hour out of San Francisco.

I wasn’t there for long, but did pick up some bits of information which I thought were interesting.

Read more at APC Mag

Today, Google announced that it is rebranding DoubClick’s Performics Affiliate as the Google Affiliate Network. Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion. The Google Affiliate Network is not yet integrated into Google’s AdSense and will continue to be hosted at ConnectCommerce.com for the time being. Companies currently featured on the network include Target, Kohls.com, Citibank, Circuit City, Zazzle, Bank of America, Verizon, and Barnes & Noble.

Read more at Read/Write Web

In an earlier post I talked a bit about a start-up called Kickfire who are releasing an accelerated database appliance for MySQL applications in the 1TB-3TB range that gives comparable performance to an equivalent Oracle RDBMS setup for around a quarter of the price.

Kickfire sounds compelling for utility LAMP computing applications that need to be fast and cheap, but it doesn’t address ultra-scalable and cheap, at least not yet. If you want to build some big Web 2.0-type application, such as a Facebook, a Yahoo or a Google, or even something very storage and database intensive like a bioinformatics application or geophysical data modeling, you are going to need to store very, very large amounts of data, in the hundreds of terabytes.

Read more at ZDNet

Google Desktop has been available for some time now on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. However, Google Gadgets–mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the desktop–have, until now, only been available on Windows and Mac. Jim Zhuang, of Google’s software engineering team, announced the first Linux version on Tuesday.

“Since releasing Google Desktop for Linux, we’ve added almost all of our most requested features, like 64-bit support and the ability to search applications and documents. All [but for] one major exception: Desktop Gadgets,” wrote Zhuang on the company’s open source blog. “Gadget support is not just a single feature, but rather an entire platform for miniature applications. It’s a complex undertaking, but we’re now putting the finishing touches on the product.”

Read more at ZDNet

Contrary to some reports, everything that makes Android “Android”, including all the core platform components and libraries needed to port Android to new devices will be open sourced under commonly used, industry standard licenses, says Google.

What is open
I confirmed with three different Google employees at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco that the core Android platform will be 100% open source. Even multimedia codecs, which historically are held close to the vest will be open. Except where noted, everything will use the Apache software license (ASL v2). This is the same open source license used by projects like the Apache HTTP server, Tomcat, Harmony, and many other large projects in the open source community.
Read more at ZDNet

Google I/O Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Subversion, and it needed a new date parser.

One day, a coder came along and wrote one. But he insisted on tagging the source code with his John Hancock. And that was against the rules. Subversion’s founders said that name tags would undermine collaboration.

When the founders asked the coder to remove his name, he refused, threatening to leave the project and take his date parser with him. It was a good date parser - just want the project needed - but the founders stood their ground.

Read more at The Register

Google reportedly took a moment to show off a prototype mobile phone based on its Android operating system at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Android is Google’s open source, Linux-based mobile phone OS, middleware stack and software development platform. Android has the backing of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of hardware, software and telecom companies. If the Open Handset Alliance is the car, Google is essentially the driver.

Read more at LinuxInsider

“I like to make browsers do things that they weren’t supposed to do,” Brad Neuberg likes to say. As a developer advocate for Google Gears, Neuberg has a wide scope for pursuing this interest, not only as an active developer, but also as a frequent speaker at conferences. His message is that Gears is not a means of working offline with Internet content — which, so far has been its main function in applications like Google Reader and Google Calendar — but also a potential universal update mechanism for browsers that could help to keep the Web free.

Read more at Linux.com

Google has thrown its weight behind a fledgling security reporting group for the open-source community.

The search engine giant, long a proponent of open-source software, is now one of three sponsors of oCERT, the Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team.

Launched in late March, oCERT aims to be a clearinghouse for data on security vulnerabilities in open-source products, keeping open-source distributors on top of flaws and helping small software projects ensure that users of their code are aware of any issues.
Read more at LinuxWorld

Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different.

For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007. Those students will work with 175 Free and Open Source Projects as mentors to  help improve and expand their development.

Google pays each accepted student developer a stipend of $4,500 and provides $500 to the mentoring organization. So doing the quick math for 2008 — Google is pumping $5.625 million into open source this summer.

Read more at internetnews.com

Google has released Picasa version 2.7 for Linux, which promises many of the same improvements of the PC version, including (drum roll, please) uploading and downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

Further improvements include:

Read more at downloadsquad

Dear Google Analytics users,

We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings. If you have logged into your account recently, you may have noticed that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

• Read more: New Optional Benchmarking Feature Available in Google Analytics

Summer of Code - Get Paid to Work on Open Source This Summer

Google Summer of Code is an exciting opportunity for students to “intern” with an open source project for a summer. The FreeBSD Project, as one of the most successful and oldest open source projects, is an excellent place to do this internship. Founded in 1993, the project now consists of several hundred “committers” and tens of thousands of contributors. FreeBSD is the foundation for many commercial products, including Apple’s Mac OS X, NetApp’s OnTap/GX, Juniper’s JunOS, as well countless other products, from Cisco anti-spam appliances to Isilon’s cluster storage hardware, and is widely used in the Internet Service Provider and corporate IT worlds. Many of these sponsors participate daily in the FreeBSD community, and students have the opportunity to develop software in an exciting environment with many real world applications, and under the mentorship of experienced developers.

After the summer ends, many of our students are sponsored by Google or the FreeBSD Foundation to attend operating systems and open source conferences to present on their work, and a significant number go on to become FreeBSD developers. It’s also a great job networking opportunity!

There are many dozens of example project ideas listed on the FreeBSD web site here:

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode.html

and for many other open source organizations as well:

http://code.google.com/soc

Some of the example projects include working on embedded operating systems, unix filesystems, network performance and implementing new network protocols, and more. Most sample project ideas include developers you can contact to discuss a proposal, and we recommend doing so in advance of submitting a proposal. Strong C language skills are recommended for most projects.

We’ve just announced the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code™ 2008, and you can check out more details for each of them on the program home page. After reviewing over 500 applications, we finally narrowed our selection to 175 Free and Open Source projects. Originally, we had planned to work with 150 projects this year, but due to the overwhelming quality of the applications we received we chose to take on an additional 25.

We had to make some very tough decisions this year, as we simply aren’t able to accept every great project that applied. We want to thank everyone for their applications and would encourage those of you who were not accepted to apply for future instances of the program.
Read more at Google

I’d like to share the following news by Zonker also here:

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to
Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss
application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.)
Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply
to Google. See our ideas page
(http://en.opensuse.org/Summer_of_Code_2008), and Google’s SoC 2008
FAQ (http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html) for more
info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for
organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this
afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the
number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Discussion about openSUSE’s participation in Google’s SoC 2008 is most
appropriate on the opensuse-project mailing list,

Andreas

The FreeBSD Project is happy to again participate in Google’s Summer
of Code program. This program provides $4500 in funding to allow
students to spend the summer writing open source software. If you or
someone you know would be interested in this program, please visit our
website at :

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode.html

There you will find a large list of interesting projects in diverse
areas of modern Unix operating system development. Some example tasks
involve writing kernel/networking regression test suites, working on
peripheral device driver infrastructure, improving multibyte character
support, improving the IPv6 support in userland utilities, and much
more.

You will also find a list of senior developers who have agreed to act
as mentors to interested students. Once you have identified a project
and a mentor, you should complete a proposal and submit it to Google
before the March 31 deadline.

Thanks,

- Murray

PC’s running a Google focused version of Linux have been dropped from sale in Wal-Mart stores.

The Everex gPC launched in October with a $199 price tag and an operating system that put Google front and center. The gOS Linux Distribution offered direct links into Google services such as Gmail and Google Docs, as well as links to Wikipedia and Facebook. We asked in November whether gOS is the direction computers were heading, where the Operating System is nothing more than a conduit to the cloud, with minimal local applications.

Read more at TechCrunch

Hi all,

As you probably know, Google is organizing one more edition of their
Summer of Code (GSoC) program. More information about the program can
be found here:

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

GNOME has participated in all GSoC editions as a mentoring
organization with some nice results in terms of contributions and new
contributors. So, we want to participate this year too!

Our first organization kickoff meeting will happen on March 6 at 18h
UTC in the #soc-admin channel (irc.gnome.org). We’re looking for
volunteers to help us to organize GNOME’s participation in GSoC 2008.
So, if you want to help in any way, join us!

Cheers!

–lucasr