Randy joins OSAF as a Server Devleoper on the Cosmo team after working on Cosmo while at his previous employer. Read more about Randy on our people page.

Numerous activities has been keeping me busy on the Scooby project. The most recent news is the approval of the merge with the Cosmo project. Along with the merge, we’re currently referring to the Scooby project as Cosmo. Please be patient as we’re currently in the middle of moving all the Scooby content and documentation over to Cosmo for the next release. In addition, we are hosting a mini-Cosmo sprint/pow wow sessions next week, from August 15th-18th. Keep a watchful eye as the next release of Cosmo will be the most exciting one yet!

As of version 0.7 alpha3 of Chandler, OSAF is changing the license for the Chandler desktop product to the Apache 2.0 License (our Cosmo and Scooby codebases are already Apache Licensed). Previous versions of Chandler were licensed under the GNU GPL because we thought that we would pursue a MySQL style dual licensing scheme as part of the sustainability plans for the Foundation. We no longer plan to pursue this kind of scheme in order to acheive our sustainability goals, and we want to reduce the number of open source licenses in use at OSAF.
Those interested in the complete discussion on this topic can look at the archives of the OSAF ‘general’ mailing list: <http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/general/2006-May/000248.html>

Welcome to our Google Summer of Code students:

We’re looking forward to working with you. Thank you to all the students who applied — the application process was very competitive this year.

Today is the first day for students to register for projects via Google’s Summer of Code program. We have a number of ideas for student projects, so please check out our list. If you are interested in something that isn’t listed, you can send a note to any of the OSAF mailing lists.

John joins OSAF as a Development Manager on the Cosmo and Scooby projects. John joins OSAF after several years at Shutterfly. Read more about John on our people page.

I’m approaching my first year anniversary at OSAF and I’m still amazed at how the Open Source process works. I’m saying “process” here because there’s more to Open Source than just code: specs, ideas and sheer energy, all of these are part and parcel of Open Source.

This point was recently driven home (for me at least) last week when I received an email from Bill Bumgarner himself (the PyObjC maintainer) kindly pointing to some inaccuracies in a doc I wrote some months ago.

Now, it’s a pretty simple and very Chandler centric doc and I was quite surprised to see how much exposure it got. In any other company, such a doc would have been maintained privately in some obscure project and no one outside the project, not even other people at the company, would have commented on it but since I posted it publicly (as everything we do at OSAF), I regularly receive questions and comments from people who read it. Most of them are folks who, like us, are developing an application and are shopping around for a cross platform UI framework. Some of those emails are from people like Bill who are commenting the document and, in the process make it better while teaching me a couple of things I didn’t know.

So here you see the Open Source process in all of its glory: you post something you thought very narrow in scope, it gets picked, you get feedback and comments from people interested in the same subject, you learn something and everyone has a better doc as a result. Iterate often and you get something actually useful.

I’m telling you: I’m glad I joined OSAF last year, really, I haven’t learnt as much since college. Thanks to all for your comments.

P.S.:

• I posted an updated framework doc but remember that this is a very centric Chandler view of the problem
• David wrote a more interesting doc on how to evaluate application frameworks that you should read if you are in the business of shopping around for one.
• There are other people commenting on cross platform frameworks that might be more adequate for your project. Jon Hoyle has a very interesting one for instance, commenting on Qt and wxWidgets from a Mac perspective. There are certainly others.

OSAF is going to have a slightly larger than normal presence at PyCon this year. Three members of the OSAF staff are giving presentations

1. Grant Baiilie is talking about Zanshin, our CalDAV client library.
2. Jeffrey Harris is talking about VObject, a library for working with vCalendar, iCalendar, and vCard files.
3. Brian Kirsch is talking about how to internationalize a Python application, using Chandler as an example, and touching on the use of PyICU.

Please say hi if you are around!

We have just moved all the OSAF IRC channels, bots, channel logging and other services from irc.osafoundation.org to irc.freenode.net

The channels available on irc.freenode.net are:

• #chandler - The Chandler project
• #cosmo - The Cosmo project
• #scooby - The Scooby project
• #osaf-notices - This is an informal channel for socializing. It is also the destination for useful output from the soup IRC bot, including realtime notifications of changes to the OSAF wikis.

Please connect to this new server from this point on. Click here for instructions on how to join the OSAF IRC chats and how to access the transcript logs from previous sessions.

We have just moved all the OSAF irc channels, bots, channel logging and other services from irc.osafoundation.org to irc.freenode.net

The channels available on irc.freenode.net are: * #chandler - The Chandler project * #cosmo - The Cosmo project * #scooby - The Scooby project * #osaf-notices - This is an informal channel for socializing. It is also the destination for useful output from the soup IRC bot, including realtime notifications of changes to the OSAF wikis.

Please connect to this new server from this point on. Click here for instructions on how to join the OSAF irc chats and how to access the transcript logs from previous sessions.