Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Google uses "thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more," wrote Kenton Varda, a member of Google's software engineering team, in a blog post. "Most of these formats are structured, not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all?"

Full article: pcworld.com 

Labels: data, languages, Open Source, protocol

gOS is a new operating system based on Ubuntu. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Due to the fact it leans heavy on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology it also does not use much hard disk space for applications, the whole system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB of hard disk space. Also many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small harddisks. In this respect a gOS PC has many similarities with a Thin client.

gOS primary features include the usage of a Mac-like Dock featuring icons linking to the following various google applications and built in off line applications:

Firefox Webbrowser, Google Mail, Google News, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Froogle, the Blogger YouTube and Facebook online communities as well as Meebo to online chat with a.o. Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users, Rhythmbox (ITunes like program for music and radio), Skype, Wikipedia, and the Xine media player. Other programs can be added to the Dock as well.

gOS also supports mini applications that run on the desktop, of which one is the clock.

Download: gOS 2.0.0 Beta 1 

Labels: beta, gOS, Linux, live, Open Source

gOS is a new operating system based on Ubuntu. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Due to the fact it leans heavy on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology it also does not use much hard disk space for applications, the whole system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB of hard disk space. Also many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small harddisks. In this respect a gOS PC has many similarities with a Thin client.

gOS primary features include the usage of a Mac-like Dock featuring icons linking to the following various google applications and built in off line applications:

Firefox Webbrowser, Google Mail, Google News, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Froogle, the Blogger YouTube and Facebook online communities as well as Meebo to online chat with a.o. Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users, Rhythmbox (ITunes like program for music and radio), Skype, Wikipedia, and the Xine media player. Other programs can be added to the Dock as well.

gOS also supports mini applications that run on the desktop, of which one is the clock.

Download: gOS 1.0.1 

Labels: gOS, Linux, live, Open Source

Addressing an audience at the Open Source Business Conference, Free Software Foundation (FSF) lawyer Eben Moglen discussed the upcoming version 3 of the General Public License (GPL 3). Moglen anticipates broad adoption of the license even among open-source projects that do not use the current version of the GPL. Moglen also took the opportunity to nudge Google and encouraged the company to release the source code of open source application improvements used internally.

Full article: arstechnica.com 

Labels: companies, GPL, Open Source, Software