OStatic

There's no moss growing on StatusNet these days. The company has been busy announcing cloud service plans, an enterprise network service, and the 0.9 release of the open source StatusNet microblogging platform.

To get a sense where all this is going, I took the chance to ask a few questions of StatusNet's CEO, Evan Prodromou. He gives the scoop on the new stuff coming to StatusNet and provides a few thoughtful answers on where he thinks social media is heading.

On March 19th, in conjunction with PayPalX, Sun Microsystems, Embarkons.com and session sponsor Cooley Godward Kronish, developers, lawyers and financers will be gathering at the Peer Financing for Developers conference in Menlo Park, California. The goal of the conference is to examine new and innovative approaches to peer financing of projects.

The half day conference will take place at Sun Microsystems' campus,and interested attendees can get tickets at peerfinancing.eventbrite.com. OStatic readers can also get $20 off the cost of a $95 general admission ticket by using the code OS20. We asked Trevor Cornwell, founder of Embarkons.com, which focuses on peer financing for developers, to write a guest column on the topic. You can find it here, below the fold.

It seems like there's been little but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle.

Turns out, there's plenty of interest in the fledgling database project. Specifically Rackspace is investing heavily in Drizzle for its Rackspace Cloud. Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor, Eric Day, Lee Bieber, and Stewart Smith have all landed over at the hosting company to work on Drizzle. According to Pipes, Rackspace sees Drizzle as the answer to problems that MySQL can't solve:

If you've been longing to wrap your baby, significant other, or even your coffee in Linux-y goodness, now you can -- while supporting a valuable FOSS community resource at the same time. Linux.com launched a new store filled with all kinds of geeky t-shirts, baby onesies, mugs, and other fun paraphernalia.

The Linux.com Store carries goodies bearing clever phrases only a geek would understand, ( Fresh Kernels, anyone?), cool Tux logos, and sticker sets to adorn your laptop. All profits go to furthering Linux Foundation activities, strategies and goals.

More than 100,000 app developers have reportedly signed the iPhone Development Program License Agreement allowing them write software for the iPhone, however few people outside the inner circle of developers have ever seen the documents thanks to a non-disclosure clause included in the agreement.When NASA released the NASA App for iPhone, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seized the opportunity to get a copy from the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act.

The EFF scoured the pages and released a fascinating look at the agreement, teasing out some of its finer points for closer inspection.

No matter how smart a worker you are, there are plenty of open source tools that can make you more productive. They range from hugely useful Firefox extensions such as iMacros (which lets you record repetitive, multi-step tasks and then execute them with one click) to collaboration applications for efficient co-working. Here, you'll find five of our best posts and collections on productivity enhancement tools. Everything found here is free.

Would you like some Libre content to go with those free and open source applications? One of the initial challenges that the open source community has had in supplanting proprietary solutions is not just the software itself, but the entire ecosystem that has built up around proprietary software. Case in point: While you can find top-notch free and open source tools to create artful documents, finding clip art and templates that are free is a much bigger challenge.

Luckily for FLOSS enthusiasts everywhere, projects like the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) are stepping up to fill the gap. A little bit of history. The project started in 2004 to hold freely available clip art. What started out as a modest site with a small collection of clip art has blossomed into a monster-sized collection of goodies.

At the core of the Nokia 900's Modest email client is Tinymail, a library for developing mobile apps with email features. Three years in the making, Tinymail 1.0 has made it out the door. In addition to making it past the 1.0 barrier, this release brings a bunch of improvements and new features for the project.

Tinymail is aimed at Linux-based mobile devices like the Nokia 900, and started life as a replacement for Evolution for resource-constrained systems. The first pre-release went out in September of 2007, and it's come a long way since then. The 1.0 release brings improvements in IMAP and POP3 support, better reliability on 64-bit systems, and new widgets to display mail and folders.