Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Ok, the truth is there’s probably no one individual project that every person is interested in. However, the great thing about open source is there is a rich amount of variety that surely there is something for everyone and there’s definitely a wide range of applications which have made Google’s list this season.
For instance, Minix is on the list – yes, the seminal work by Andrew S Tanenbaum. Perhaps many, if they’d even heard of Minix, would have considered it long since superseded by Linux. Yet, Minix is still under development and improvement and no doubt has a place in many small-memory embedded systems. It’s so small it can compile itself in about six seconds! In fact, Google are sponsoring no less than seven projects for Minix. These include porting it to the ARM embedded platform (and perhaps paving the way for Minix to replace Windows Mobile on many an ARM-powered handheld) as well as adding software RAID and a USB stack.
Other projects that are perhaps less known but with remarkable ramifications include those with the Natural User Interface Group (NUIG.) Having spent my youth playing Zork I have a keen interest in natural language processing, but NUIG’s concerns aren’t with typing but instead through visual processing and with touch and gesture recognition. In fact, one project even looks to be making an open source version of Microsoft’s Surface! Others could well bring the best bits of the Wii-mote and the iPhone to Linux.
Turning to the better known, PHP has 10 sponsored projects and two of these are focused squarely at optimisation and tuning to enhance the performance of the many web apps which use PHP. One approach being worked on will semi-compile PHP code, caching the resulting compilation. This means that within a single session repeated requests to the same piece of code will be far swifter the second and subsequent times. On the first read, the PHP code must still be read and interpreted and processed but only once, unlike the present situation.
WordPress similarly has optimisation on its mind (and rightly so!), with three of its eight works being focused directly on eking out much greater performance.
Debian fares well with 12 supported activities. One focuses on implementing a Debian-based NAS, another on fully automating and drastically simplifying setups and another on providing a comprehensive and functional network configuration management system.
There are good many other projects going on; in fact, 175 in total. Each of them will improve the world of open source. Each suite of software will be enhanced and overall the open source movement gains from the existence of more functional, more versatile and faster software offerings.
I’ll revisit these projects after pens down in August and we’ll see how the students fared and if their work has had been awarded the accolade of inclusion into the app’s real live code base.
So, that’s the summer of code. It’s here for a season, and it’s certainly a season that will spice up open source around the world.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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