FOSS: The major players in Linux and free- and open-source software

David M Williams
Monday, 01 October 2007 18:25

Business IT - Open Source

As free and open source software receives greater attention and recognition, several companies and packages are emerging as clear leaders and important influencers as well as visionaries that are sure to make a mark in the very near future. Here are my picks for who’s making a mark today and tomorrow on the FOSS world.

Google

The ubiquitous Google is continuing its seemingly relentless path of being involved in, well, simply everything! Part of this is the extremely generous and well-received annual “Summer of code” project. The 2007 event brought together 900 students and almost 1,500 mentors across 90 countries, contributing to a very impressive 130 different open source projects.

Most of these open source projects had a number of Summer of Code projects running; for instance, PHP – the popular general-purpose scripting language – had sponsored projects to improve PHP’s trigger for marking when a variable can be freed from memory and to bring greater quality and ease of documentation among others. PHP benefited – and thus its bevy of users – by Google paying a stipend to students. This freed the students from having to seek other employment and allowed them to contribute to the project, ultimately producing real working production code.

Popular blogging platform, Wordpress, also had a variety of sponsored projects. These included enhancing facilities for readers to deposit comments, adding podcasting support, internationalisation concerns and more.

What’s most astonishing about the Summer of Code is that Google really do not clearly appear to benefit. Instead, they are using their own money to fund development of clearly defined and external open source projects. Personally, I’d have been ecstatic when a University student to have a paid vacation opportunity like this (but we didn’t have the World Wide Web when I was a boy :-) Consequently, Google really do deserve acclaim for their tangible support in enhancing and promoting free and open-source software throughout the world, not to mention steeping new generations of graduate software developers in open-source ways.

OpenMoko
October 2007 will go down in history; this is the month that OpenMoko will be releasing the Neo 1973 mobile phone. It’s not just any phone and the apparent lack of mass hype (compared to the Apple iPhone at least) betrays the significance of this product.

Let’s cut to the chase: OpenMoko have developed the world’s first truly open-source smartphone. Every piece from the boot loader through to the end-user applications are open, and users are actively encouraged to develop them. Other attempts have been made in the past by other companies, but the OpenMoko is right at the point of release, without having compromised its design intentions.

A developer version is, in fact, already available and can be purchased now, the only caveat being it is short on finished apps. A special advanced version is also available for purchase which comes in an extremely handsome padded case and includes hardware debugging facilities along with a Torx screwdriver to open the device’s casing – there’s no vendor problems with poking around inside, here!