Posted 09/17/09 at 06:50:38 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A couple of weeks after eBay agreed to sell 65% of Skype to a group of investors, the founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, contrived to gatecrash eBay’s party. Joltid, a company in which the two Skype founders are stakeholders, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype. Skype's founders retained control over the peer-to-peer technology at the VoIP client’s core even after selling Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion. They had agreed to license the source code to eBay.

Joltid has accused eBay of unlawfully modifying and sharing the source code. An adverse decision could even force eBay to shut down Skype until it can come up with an alternative version. The San Jose-based internet company has said that it is making arrangements to face any such eventuality. However, the presence of a contingency plan should not be construed as a lack of confidence on its part. “We remain on track to close the transaction in the fourth quarter of 2009,” an eBay spokesperson said.

Analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Sanford C. Bernstein believes he has pinned down Joltid’s real motive behind the lawsuit. According to Jeffrey, Joltid is still smarting from its failed bid to buy back Skype earlier this year. And that it now wants to preclude the sale of Skype until it is presented with “a financial settlement or the opportunity to buy the business back themselves at a lower price than Silver Lake, et al are offering."

This lawsuit is an extension of Joltid’s legal onslaught against eBay – and Skype’s potential buyers. It fired the first salvo in March, when it filed a similar case against eBay in a London court.

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Posted 09/11/09 at 08:04:57 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The nonprofit CodePlex Foundation is being set up with backing from Microsoft. The Redmond based software company has contributed $1 million, and provided numerous Microsoft employees to run the nonprofit’s board. Microsoft’s former senior director of platform strategy, Sam Ramji, will serve as the temporary head of CodePlex.

Before you go thinking this is totally out of the ordinary for Bill Gate’s baby, the CodePlex website clears a few things up. CodePlex says that commercial companies are under-represented in the open-source world. While this may seem like a natural situation, the new Microsoft backed venture intends to change that.  The “about” page on the foundation’s site says that companies will be encouraged to contribute code, not patents.

With code still bound by patents, it is unlikely that the larger open-source community will care to get involved. There may be a certain logic to the CodePlex Foundation, though. Allowing a company to contribute code, without giving up their patents may bring new ideas to open-source in the long run. Even with these favorable conditions, will businesses cooperate with an open-source foundation?

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Posted 09/10/09 at 08:00:42 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Facebook announced today that they were open-sourcing the real-time technology from the recently acquired FriendFeed.  The Python based code is now collectively known as Tornado. "Tornado is... designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services," said David Recordon of Facebook. The hope is that developers will quickly begin work on new services that take advantage of the Tornado real-time technology.

Tornado was originally developed by FriendFeed after finding existing Python frameworks did not perform adequately. Tornado is known as a “nonblocking” framework, as it is capable of many concurrent connections. FriendFeed co-founder, Bret Taylor, said that building their own framework resulted in throughput more than "four times higher than the other frameworks."

What about FriendFeed itself, you ask? Fear not, avid FriendFeed users, the service isn’t going anywhere. Facebook’s press release stated that, "Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain."

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Posted 08/27/09 at 03:30:20 PM by David Murphy

It sounds like Buzzword Bingo, but a new Mozilla Labs project is applying an open-source, crowd-sourced routine to solve common Web developer issues. The program's called TestSwarm, and I must confess, it's a novel idea for increasing a developer's ability to test out new JavaScript framework on a variety of browsers at once. And the fact that this an open-source project is cooler still: Aspiring testers can load the framework onto their own servers and set up their own test

TestSwarm was developed by one of the Mozilla Foundation's JavaScript Tool Developers, John Resig, to deal with the scalability issues that factor into JavaScript code testing. To Resig, the proper testing platform includes at least five different browsers split into 12 total versions per operating system. Although he doesn't go into this length in his example, you should triple that number to factor in the Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 operating environments.

Factor these (now) thirty-six tests against an average of ten test suite iterations--a minimum number of variances that Resig runs in a common jQuery testing environment. That's three hundred and sixty runs for every test you create, more if you're expanding to include OSX and Linux platforms. And did I mention that the best results tend to occur when actual human beings are behind the testing instead of some automated attempt at user interaction? Yeaaaah...

So how did Resig address this grand problem of JavaScript testing scalability? You should know--you're a part of the solution, after all. Click the jump.

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Posted 07/21/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Even Microsoft recognized its latest move as "a break from the ordinary," which certainly describes the largely closed-source company coughing up 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. But settle down, Windows isn't going open-source.

Instead, the code includes three Linux device drivers, which have been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the LInux tree. Microsoft says the driver code will enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

"We are seeing Microsoft communities and open-source communities grow together, which is ultimately of benefit to our customers," said Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). "The Linux community, for example, has built a platform used by many customers. So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open-source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for."

So we guess it's true - we can all just get along after all.

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