Ian Lamont writes "Yahoo has announced it is further opening its Web platform to developers and moving closer to a Facebook-style social networking concept. Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo, and said that while Yahoo already has open APIs for some services, it will expand the open API concept to other areas and make it more consistent for developers, while boosting the 'social' aspect of its services for its members. Analysts don't expect this to increase Microsoft's interest in Yahoo!. In fact, recent comments from Steve Ballmer suggest that Microsoft will give up entirely."

Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"

xtaski writes "Ted Ts'o, one of the earliest Linux developers, points out some serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! Ted also points out some other flaws which make it clear just how disconnected the executives at Sun are from what's really going on in their 'open source communities.' He notes, 'It was never ... Sun's intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.'"

dp619 writes "HTML 5 is extensive and may take years to complete. Microsoft's solution to hasten its development is to carve it up. The company wants to divide HTML 5 into sub-specifications overseen by different working groups. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson said that HTML 5 features including its Canvas APIs, offline caching of Web applications' resources, persistent client-side data storage, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework would be useful outside of HTML. The WC3 seems to be receptive to the idea and says that a consensus is forming among working group members to do just that."

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf brings news that Sun Microsystems will be removing the last restrictions on Java to make it completely open source. Sun wants Java to be easily available for use in Linux distributions. We've discussed the steps Sun has taken to open-source Java over the past couple years. From Yahoo! News: "'We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights,' to distribute, Sands said. 'Over the past year, we have pretty much removed most of those encumbrances.' Work still needs to be done to offer the Java sound engine and SNMP code via open source; that effort is expected to be completed this year. Developers, though, may be able to proceed without a component like the sound engine, Sands said.

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today it had accepted 1,125 students to work on 175 Free and Open Source Projects this summer. This represents an increase of almost 25% over last year. Nearly 7,100 applications were received. For those who weren't accepted, there is an offer to send Google Swag to any student who completes their project anyway."

Vandre writes "The popular AJAX library ExtJS released a new version today. There has been a huge controversy among the Ext community. Previously Ext had been accused of not being open source and trying to restrict its users' rights." It seems be boil down to whether the developers like or dislike the GPL, under which the library's new version is available -- the comments illustrate a long-standing divide when it comes to licensing. The foundation which oversees development explains why they've chosen dual-licensing at all.

conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue. "MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of 'taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market.' If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."

maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."

Da Massive writes "Mark Dowd's paper "Application-Specific Attacks: Leveraging the ActionScript Virtual Machine" has alarmed researchers. It points out techniques that promise to open up a class of exploits and vulnerability research previously thought to be prohibitively difficult. Already, the small but growing group of Information Security experts who have had the chance to read and digest the contents of the paper are expressing an excited concern depending on how they are interpreting it. While the Flash vulnerability described in the paper[PDF] has been patched by Adobe, the presentation of a reliable exploit for NULL pointer dereferencing has the researchers who have read the paper fascinated. Thomas Ptacek has an explanation of Dowd's work, and Nathan McFeters at ZDNet is 'stunned by the technical details.'"

An anonymous reader writes "From the MySQL User's Conference, Sun has announced, and former CEO Marten Mickos has confirmed, that Sun will be close sourcing sections of the MySQL code base. Sun will begin with close sourcing the backup solutions to MySQL, and will continue with more advanced features. With Oracle owning Innodb, and it being GPL, does this mean that MySQL will be removing it to introduce these features? Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."

Pickens writes "Today when most people refer to Ada it's usually as a cautionary tale. The Defense Department commissioned the programming language in the late 1970s but few programmers used Ada, claiming it was difficult to use. Nonetheless many observers believe the basics of Ada are in place for wider use. Ada's stringency causes more work for programmers, but it will also make the code more secure, Ada enthusiasts say. Last fall, contractor Lockheed Martin delivered an update to ERAM, the Federal Aviation Administration's next-generation flight data air traffic control system — ahead of schedule and under budget, which is something you don't often hear about in government circles. Jeff O'Leary, an FAA software development and acquisition manager who oversaw ERAM, attributed at least part of it to the use of the Ada, used for about half the code in the system."

jamie found a post laying to rest one potential criticism of Google's App Engine, that of the danger of lock-in to the platform. Waxy.org points out a hack called AppDrop, written by Chris Anderson, that provides a container for Google App SDK applications, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Here's Anderson's AppDrop page and his blog post announcing it.

kylehase writes "CIO.com has a writeup about MySQL's 5.1 release planned for next week. Among the enhancements are many bug fixes from 5.0, some of which may increase performance 20% or more, as well as 'partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering.'"

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."

Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"

jhealy1024 writes "The College Board recently announced it will be getting rid of the Advanced Placement Computer Science AB examination after May 2009. The 'A'-level exam will continue to be offered, though there is no word yet on what will become of the AB-level material (e.g., if it will be merged into A or just dropped). Many teachers of AP CS are upset about the move, as it seems the decision was made without consulting members of the CS teaching community. As one teacher put it: 'this is like telling the football coach next year is the last year you have a varsity team.'"

LinucksGirl writes to share an IBM DeveloperWorks article that shows how to support user verification through keystroke-dynamics processing by modifying the GNOME Display Manager (GDM). You can create and store a one-way encrypted hash of your keystroke patterns when entering your user name. The article shows how to add code to GDM to read current keystroke patterns and permit a user to log in when the characteristics are a match. An interesting idea to be sure but I know I certainly am not that consistent when I type, so I'm skeptical of how well this may work.

An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard about Intel's and Microsoft's efforts to finally get multi-core programming into gear so that there actually will be a developer who can program all those fancy new multicore processors, which may have dozens of core on one chip within a few years. TG Daily has an interesting article about the project, written by one of the researchers. It looks like there is a lot of excitement around the opportunity to create a new generation of development tools. Let's hope that we will soon see software that can exploit those 16+core babies. 'The problem of multi-core programming is staring at us right now. I am not sure what Intel's and Microsoft's expectations are, but it is quite possible that they are in fact looking at fundamental results from the academic centers to leverage their large work force to polish and realize the ideas that come forth. It calls for a much closer collaboration between the centers and the companies than it appears at first sight.'"

hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."