Blog.Lejer.Ro – Bloggers Heaven

The GPL discussion at the joomla.org forums is still raging on, the thread has now become the most posted to thread in existence and its only a month and a half old!

The debate has expanded from the license into the business models of the the 3rd party developer community.

“Due to the uncertainty of their futures many developers have paused further development of software for Joomla 1.5″ www.jcd-a.org

What does this mean for 1.5?

“Can Joomla! extensions be released under non-GPL compatible licenses?”
GPL what, eh?

Most component/extension developers whose are full time Joomla developers use a non-GPL license. You have probably purchased one of their extensions at some point. Usually $20-50 and the non-GPL license asks that you use the component on a single website.
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The founder of the Ubuntu Project, Mark Shuttleworth, has made it clear that Ubuntu isn’t interested in forming a deal with Microsoft along the lines of those recently reached by Linspire, Xandros and Novell.

“We have declined to discuss any agreement with Microsoft under the threat of unspecified patent infringements,” Shuttleworth said in a blog post.

His remarks follow speculation in the press that, following Linspire’s agreement with Microsoft last week, Linspire partner Ubuntu might follow suit.

As part of the agreement between Linspire and Microsoft, the companies have agreed to cooperate in several areas. Linspire will work with Novell and Microsoft to develop open-source ‘translators’ that allow OpenOffice and Microsoft Office users to share documents more easily. The company has also licensed Microsoft’s RT audio codec to make its Pidgin IM client interoperable with Windows Live Messenger and other Microsoft products.

As part of the deal, Linspire also pledged to add support for Windows Media 10 in future releases of its Linux OS distribution. The company also agreed to make Windows Live Search the default search engine in Linspire 5.0.

Read full article at PCAdvisor

BOSTON — When Pierre Omidyar founded eBay 12 years ago, he wanted to build the world’s most efficient marketplace. At the very least, he launched the most comprehensive one. Today eBay is a conglomeration of websites where people sell everything from car parts to carp arts. (What den couldn’t use a watercolor of a fish?)

But with $60 billion worth of goods changing hands on eBay’s worldwide sites this year, all that stuff has a downside: It can be a drag to pick something to buy. If you were browsing for a video game system, how would you begin to choose among the 1,342 Nintendo Wiis listed on eBay one day this week?

And so with eBay entering something resembling middle age, with growth slowing and the stock price in a funk, the company is undertaking a crucial overhaul. The goal is to make buying things easier, more entertaining and more like shopping in the physical world — three counts on which the company has fallen behind.

Read full article and commentaries from USAToday

YouTube has officially launched YouTube Remixer, a new service that allows users to edit their videos from within YouTube itself.

The new feature is powered by Adobe Premiere Express and supports insertion of graphics, text and audio as well as overlays and in-video transitions. YouTube Remixer is nearly identical to Photobucket’s Remix tool; both are powered by Adobe.
Duncan Riley wrote a good article, with photos also, on techCrounch.

A great article by Nick Gonzalez related to the new web desktop (web top) for windows, called AjaxWindows.

The site and service is allegedly from the creators of Linspire and is a lot like DesktopTwo, which mimics a desktop environment within your browser, taskbar and all. AjaxWindows even comes with a syncing client to help mirror all your desktop data to their servers. The major value proposition for these sites is to let you access your desktop anywhere, but I think they’ve gotten the user interface metaphor all wrong.

Desktops function as ways to organize and manage applications on our operating system. Browsers serve this function for web applications. If I want to check my email, I go to Gmail. If I want to check my finances, I check out my bank’s web page. Managing these applications is best done within the tabs of my browser, not a processor intensive ajax webtop. Ironically it also has a web browser.

There’s no value added by being able to overlay my web applications in ajax windows. Moreover, any platform’s utility is linked to the quality and number of applications developed on it. In the best case scenario, AjaxWindows has to mimic the best web applications on the net within their own service. In the worst case, it simply becomes an elaborate ajax wrapper for those applications.

There have been several other takes on bringing desktop functionality to the web. EyeOS takes an open source approach, YouOS is in alpha, and DesktopTwo is aiming at enterprise clients. Other variants of interfaces for accessing your online life anywhere include start pages like Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Goowy. Further blending the line between the web and your desktop are Adobe AIR, Silverlight, Dekoh, and Mozilla’s yet-to-be-released Parakey.