Google has released a server for the NX remote desktop protocol, called Neatx, under a GPL license:

There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine’s libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

“FreeNX’s primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain,” according to Google.

“Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries.”

Neatx is written in Python with a time-critical process written in C and some wrappers in bash script.

Good to see Google contributing some code again.

• Neatx’s Google Code page
• TechWorld article

Red Hat employee, Kristian Høgsber, has created Wayland, a new, light-weight X server. The project is still in its infancy but it aims to be much more relevant to current hardware/software.

It’s no secret that much of the code-base that makes up the modern-day X.Org Server is old and in some places bloated. The X.Org Server continues to evolve and has received a number of major additions in recent times, but wouldn’t a clean and lighter server that is designed around today’s needs be ideal? Red Hat’s Kristian Høgsberg has started a new project, which is currently known as Wayland, and is just that: a new lightweight X Server

. Wayland isn’t just a rewrite of the current X Server, but instead it’s a small server that is designed around some of the latest graphics technologies such as kernel mode-setting and the Graphics Execution Manager. Wayland also has its own built-in compositing manager.

The Wayland display server is very simple: everything is direct rendered and composited. There is no complicated APIs or objects to deal with like there is now with the X.Org Server. In an email to Phoronix, Kristian Høgsberg, creator of Wayland and also responsible for much of the DRI2 work in the current X.Org Server, describes this project as “a new display server that implements just the tiny fraction of X features that we actually use when running a composited desktop. Which is essentially buffer management (close to what DRI2 does in X.org), input handling and hooks to allow a compositor to composite the desktop. All rendering is done client side as direct rendering (how OpenGL works today, but pixman and thus cairo, for example, could learn how to do direct rendering too), and modesetting and other hardware setup is done in the kernel. This takes a lot of complexity out of the server.”

Great! When will this make it into Fedora?

• Phoronix
• Slashdot
• Wayland

Facebook - Credit: facebook.com

Facebook has released Scribe, its core code under a free license, Apache License version 2.

Here at Facebook, we’re constantly facing scaling challanges because of our enormous growth. One particular problem we encountered a couple of years ago was collection of data from our servers. We were collecting a few billion messages a day (which seemed like a lot at the time) for everything from access logs to performance statistics to actions that went to News Feed. We used a variety of different technologies for the different use cases, and all of them were bursting at the seams. We decided to build a unified system (called Scribe) to handle all of these cases, and do it in a way that would scale with Facebook’s growth. The system we built turned out to be enormously useful, handling over 100 use cases and tens of billions of messages a day. It has also been battle tested by just about anything that can go wrong, so I encourage you to take a look at the newly opened Scribe source and see if it might be useful for you. To give the code some context, I’m going to go through the major design decisions we made to allow the system to scale.

Yay for Facebook, sorta. It’d be nice if they did this before they felt the assurance of having people totally bought, but this is good regardless. I think this is a nice quote from the Open Enterprise Blog: “But in one other respect, there’s something big going on here. The fact that Facebook tosses out its code as open source without making a big ballyhoo about it, and without even bothering to justify the move shows just how mundane – in the best possible sense – free software has become for a modern software company. The benefits of opening up your main code are so obvious, they don’t even need to be enumerated anymore: it’s just the way the Facebook generation of coders does things.”

• Facebook
• Open Enterprise

It’s been buzzing around all day.  Microsoft has joined the Apache Foundation, giving them $100,000 anually for their platinum membership.

I spoke with Apache Software Foundation (ASF) president Justin Erenkrantz, who views Microsoft’s sponsorship of Apache as a step forward for interoperability. He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards. In particular, he points out an ASF project called Apache POI which offers native Java libraries for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats.

They have submitted LGPL licensed patches for PHP.  Yes, that’s right.  Microsoft used an FSF license.

• Ars Technica
• ZDNet