Author Archives: meshedltd

FLOSS Weekly 510: YottaDB

Simon seemed to enjoy discovering that the era in which he started his career (the 80s) still has resonances today. In an experience he describes as “akin to finding a live trilobite on a fossil beach”, FLOSS Weekly 510 discovered that the MUMPS database GT.M is still alive, is now open source under the AGPL, is called YottaDB and is going strong. GT.M was (and is) the original NoSQL database, powering healthcare long before anyone thought to call it NoSQL.

YottaDB demonstrates one of the great strengths of open source, public escrow. While the copyright holders of GT.M have no interest in a public project, releasing it under an OSI-approved open source license has liberated the code and allowed K.S. Bhaskar to start a new kind of company to make it globally available.

FLOSS Weekly 488: Keycloak

Simon co-hosted this week’s show, which looked at a very interesting identity management system called Keycloak that puts commercial-strength federated authentication, authorisation and identity management within the reach of every developer. It’s written in Java, backed by Red Hat and has a large and active community.

 

 

FLOSS Weekly 484: The Lounge

After the Pidgin show a while back, Simon stepped in at 11:59 for Randal again, hosting an interesting show about a pure community project that makes a web-hosted IRC client called The Lounge. If you need a web client where you can maintain ongoing IRC sessions, this open source, self-hosted alternative to IRCCloud and others may be the answer. It’s written in Javascript, runs in Node and there’s a ready-to-use Docker container available.

Going With The Grain

If you’re managing community or developer relationships for your employer, a crucial principle is to “go with the grain” of the community — promote and embrace the freedoms it needs and the expectations it cherishes — rather than take actions that result in easily-anticipated opposition.

More at https://devrel.net/community/going-with-the-grain

FLOSS Weekly 479: Pidgin

This week Simon co-hosted episode 479, an entertaining interview about the Pidgin project, one of the most important Open Source Free software projects. It’s a multi-platform program that allows pretty much any instant messaging system to be used from a single interface. It also includes libpurple, a library that can be used in other software to do the same thing, and Finch, a terminal-based IM app with all the same capabilities.

Amazingly, Pidgin is developed by a tiny group of part-time developers. Maybe it’s time for the Open Source community to step in and help to guarantee the future of this important, widely-used app and library? A donation might be a start but they seem to need more…

FLOSS Weekly 476: VIPERBuilder

In a last-minute change, Simon stepped in to host FLOSS Weekly 476 interviewing the Etsy VIPERBuilder project with Jonathan Bennett. That’s an iOS tool to help developers use the VIPER architecture to build apps. VIPER is an alternative to MVC.

Simon mentioned (or should have mentioned):

FLOSS Weekly 471: ScanCode

Simon was co-host of FLOSS Weekly 471, which featured the ScanCode Toolkit. ScanCode analyses a source package and lists what licenses are found in it. The toolkit can be used as part of a larger solution and together with the new AboutCode Manager provides open source compliance staff with an easy way to know what licenses they are actually dealing with.

Simon mentioned: