See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

OpenMerchant released under the GPL. OpenSales Inc. announced today the release of the source code for their OpenMerchant online retailing solution under the terms of the GNU General Public License, according to this press release. The choice to both open the source code and to use the GPL is a very welcome one. "We have created the future e-commerce standard by providing the only channel for developers to freely use, modify and improve an enterprise-class Internet retailing solution."

Comparative Linux DBMS. LinuxPlanet has started a series of articles to take a look mSQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL on Linux, beginning with this article, which looks at installation and configuration for the three databases.

SGI Linux University Report. Jose Nazario sent us this report from his attendance at a recent SGI Linux University. "SGI's efforts at contributing to Linux are, simply put, going to be huge in at least three areas: OpenGL, where they are working with various vendors of X servers and graphics cards and working on high performance OpenGL for Linux; security, where they are doing an OpenBSD style code review and contributing software to bring Linux to C2 and B1 grades in the future (DoD scales); and the third item we heard about in Dayton, OH, was their clustering technology, bringing Beowulf up to commercial levels for management and scalability."

Embedded Linux

Gnome

Porting Abiword to the MacIntosh?. This MacDiscussions.com article bemoans the fact that no port of StarOffice is available for the MacIntosh, though support is promised in the next version. It continues on, though, to recommend another alternative, providing assistance to the AbiSource project to help finish the port of AbiWord to the MacIntosh. "AbiWord is an open source project, released under the GPL. I tried this application out and found it to be mostly complete. It would make a great addition to the alternatives on the Macintosh platform, but they need help. Paul Rohr of Abisource sent this idea: 'Rather than lobby Sun, you have another option -- round up one or two talented GUI hackers to finish porting AbiWord to the Mac...The AbiWord development community is actively thriving, and Macintosh is the one modern GUI that's still sorely missing.'" (Thanks to Louis Pierce.)

Reuters reports on Miguel de Icaza's new company. Here is more news on Miguel and Nat's plans for starting their new company. "We are creating applications like Microsoft Office, for GNOME," the 26-year-old de Icaza said in a phone interview. "We have investment. It's exciting and I get to work on GNOME full time so that's even better." The company will be based in the Cambridge, Mass. area and is expected to have about 12 employees initially.

From the press release, it appears that the Linux Fund is at least one of the sources of investment in the new company.

Gnome Development Summary. The Gnome Summary for November 9-17, 1999 covers news from the GNOME UI Improvement Project, courtesy of the first installment of the GNOME UI Summary, sound support issues, the new GNOMEnclature column by George Lebl, over on IBM DeveloperWorks, and more.

KDE

Midgard

Mozilla

Note that Mozilla is currently not safe to use with systems unless they are running glibc2.1 or higher. See the this posting for more information on that problem.

Update on Mozilla from Interview with Chris Hofmann. This interview with Mozilla lead engineer Chris Hofmann provides an update on Mozilla's progress. "At current growth rates the number of "non-Netscape" Mozilla developers will eclipse the number of Netscape developers with direct CVS checkin privileges in a few short months. I think we are at around 50-60 now and about 15-20 of these contributors that are checking in modifications to the code every week."

PHP

Samba

Using Samba from O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Associates have announcedthe release of "Using Samba". "O'Reilly & Associates has announced the release of Using Samba, which has been officially adopted by the Samba team under an open content license. This new book is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration, including such recent additions as integration with Windows NT domains and the SWAT graphic configuration tool."

Wine

Zope

Zope Weekly News. Michael Pelletier is the editor, for the first time, for this week's Zope Weekly News. Headlines include the announcement of Sybase support for Zope, the announcement of VisualZope 0.1a, plus various updates and tips.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
YAMS
Wine
Zope

More Information
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Java

Perl

On the development side, This Week on perl5-porters reports on lexical variables and eval, more on line disciplines and arcane topics ranging out as far as "Unicode Support on EBCDIC Machines".

Python

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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