I’m quite highly anticipating the release of Google Chrome OS – Google’s net book and appliance cloud operating system. There are a few main reasons behind this.

Simplicity and Openness

Note that I combine the two here. It is very important that both software user friendliness is combined with the nature of free and open source software to prevent device and software simplification becoming a model for restricted development.

Apple do one of these well – simplicity. Apple products are almost always considered to be highly user-friendly and easy to use for all consumers, taking the iPhone and iPad as the latest examples within the consumer electronics market.

However, Apple has a very closed nature to their software models, especially with the iPhone and iPad, where all application acquisition is restricted to a specific Apple controlled ‘App. Store’ and all application developement is restricted to a Apple controlled SDK (software development kit) which is platforme restricted and incompatible with all platforms other than Apple’s own Mac OS X platform.

Promotion of Open Source Software

Since Google Chrome OS is to based upon a Linux kernel, and use many existing Linux systems, not only will this bring improvements to Linux operating systems as a whole due to Google’s code contributions, but additionally it will bring Linux and, more generally, open source software into the light.

The concepts of Linux and open source software are by no means yet the household names of Microsoft, Windows and Apple. Dependant on how Google Chrome OS is marketed by Google, this release could be a great boom for the promotion of Linux as a whole.

Zero Price Operating System

Since Google intends to release the operating system for free (zero price), it will likely also reduce the apparent worth of paid operating systems, such as the paid offerings by Microsoft (Windows) or Apple (Mac OS X). The increased use of web applications and the Internet to do many daily tasks makes Google Chrome OS perfect for the most common uses of computers today. For these tasks, alternative operating systems hold no significant advantages, whilst the advantages for Microsoft and Apple operating systems now lie specifically in the domain of platform restricted software packages, either in the desktop realm, such as Microsoft Office / Apple iWork or the server realm, such as Microsoft Exchange / Mac OS X server software packages.

Even then, with the growth of multi-platform, online productivity and collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mail, these platform restricted ‘offline’ software packages may become redundant as more and more businesses and enterprises rely upon the Internet and cloud based applications and storage.

What do you think? Will Google Chrome OS be a boom for Linux, and will its competitors’ offerings be hurt significantly by its release?

So, what is Contacular?

Contacular is an open source contact form generator and processor written in PHP. It is designed to be used as either a complete PHP contact form solution, with full validation and e-mailing, or as an initial code base for web development to build upon. I’ve designed Contacular to be really simple to get up and running with and yet still be very expandable. The entire system is object-orientated and open source licensed.

A quick overview of the features of Contacular:

1. Fully integrated contact form solution
2. Simple generation of contact forms
3. Many built-in Contacular contact form types
4. Integrated reCAPTCHA human check / spam protection support
5. Adoption of existing website styling (CSS) wherever possible
6. Form field validation in all forms
7. Automatic validation error reporting
8. Advanced validation – e.g. checking submitted e-mail addresses are from real domains
9. E-mailing form results to one or more recipients
10. GPL licensed, open source, object orientated code base
11. Tested in multiple browsers on multiple platforms
12. Seamless upgrading to new versions – just download and replace the files
13. Easily expandable
14. More on the way…

Take a look at the how to use Contacular guide, and if you’re interested, go ahead and download Contacular. The latest version is always at the top, with that download page also containing the Contacular change log.

Douglas Crockford selected the MIT license for his JSMin program to reduce JavaScript code syntax in such a way to make it still functionally identical but smaller in size to enable bandwidth savings when these JavaScript files are downloaded by end-users’ web browsers. Ryan Grove continued to utilise this license for his variation of JSMin called JSMin-PHP, appropriately rewritten in the PHP language. This specific license however, contains a variation from the original MIT open-source license, as it includes the following line of text, originally inserted into the license for assumed comical value.

“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.”

Since Google’s code hosting solution, imaginatively called ‘Google Code’ only allows hosting of code licensed under very specific open-source licenses, this single modification acts an additional condition which Google is not willing to accept. This means JSMin-PHP can not be hosted at Google Code simply due to this licensing issue.

The developer of JSMin-PHP, Ryan Groove has the following to say about this, on his blog.

“As Google (and some others) interpret it, this additional requirement constitutes a vague use restriction and thus makes the license non-free. Chris [DiBona] explained that if I were to remove that line from the license and ‘return to a proper open source license that we support,’ then jsmin-php could stay on Google Code. Otherwise, he said, ‘we can’t host you,’

… Of course, I can’t change the license, because it’s not my license. It’s Douglas’s license… All derivative works and copies of jsmin.c either include this license or are in violation of it.”

If you are using Google Code to host your project, be warned, Google are very tight on their licensing restrictions. What do you think? Valid reasoning or over the top enforcement of open-source licensing terms?

Google Chrome OS is a basic operating system built upon the Linux kernel. It uses a custom graphical user interface which is based around Google’s very fast web browser, Google Chrome. It does away with most of the regular operating system and application usage paradigms and focuses primarily on the web browser and therefore Google’s primary domains in the computer software marketplace, search and web applications.

This new operating system is initially designed to run on net book style hardware. Google have been in talks with a large variety of hardware companies and aim to have Google Chrome OS powered computers released to consumers before the end of 2010.

As emphasised in the video, Google Chrome OS is designed to almost exclusively utilise web applications and thus almost all data, excluding locally stored caches, is held on the Internet, thus promoting the use of cloud computing for data storage. With Google Mail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, Google already has a formidable cloud based productivity suite in the form of  web applications.

It will be very interesting to see how well the open-source Google Chrome OS does and how it helps in the general promotion of alternative open-source operating systems as a whole.

What do you think? Is Google Chrome OS good for Linux?

The Open Source Initiative, which works to promote open-source software and ideals

What is open-source software?

Open-source software is software which is under a special type of license in which the source code, which is usually copyrighted, is instead open to all. Specifically, this refers to code which meets the Open Source Definition for code licensing or is released to the public domain, and thus available without any licensing terms.

Why is this good?

Since the source code of open source software is available to all, this allows anyone to modify and adapt software to their needs. It also promotes innovation and reduces the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ which is present in most proprietary software solutions simply due to the licensing and copyright issues involved.

It is good for businesses, enterprises and consumers as well. A report by the Standish Group states that the adoption of open source software models worldwide  has resulted in general savings of approximately $60 billion USD annually to consumers.

How does open source make money?

Since the source code of open source software is available for anyone to modify, people often wonder how businesses that utilise open source ideals can make money, since any theoretically distributed software could be legally copied based on the terms of most open source licenses.

For these reasons, a lot of companies which produce open source software offer priced high-level or enterprise level support for their open-source software. This enables them to charge for a service which keeping the software product free, open and able to adapt and innovate along with other open source software. Another example is consumer services, of which is good example is Ubuntu One, a new consumer level service, which allows Ubuntu users to share and synchronise files, contacts and notes using built into the Ubuntu operating system. This service is seamless and the file synchronisation, although only a small part of Ubuntu One, acts in a very similar manner to Dropbox.