PHP Zone just release an article about Symfony, a new MVC framework. I have been an avid fan of Mojavi, but in light of it’s somewhat disorganized development and poor documentation, I’v been looking for a new framework to use. Symfony looks like it takes many of the best features of Mojavi and ties them into some of the best features of Ruby on Rails. This looks like a really cool new framework, the only downside is that it has no PHP 4 support, and many of the projects I work on are written in PHP 4.
Recently, Novell opened the source to their XGL desktop, a OpenGL layer and desktop manager for X windowing system. From the demo video released, this looks slicker than the effects found in Mac OSX or Windows Vista. I imagine this will grow and take off real fast giving Microsoft a real run for their money. Linux is already known for its security and stability, the only thing the MS and Mac have consitantly beat Linux in is graphics and media. This may give Linux the edge in graphics for the first time, and give media companies an insentive to play nice with Linux.
ZDnet had an article about Microsoft recently launching their Office Live product. Though it looks very slick, I don’t see it replacing more traditional office software soon. If for no other reason than the fact that people will not want to upload data too, and download data from, a web service all the time. Further more, Office Live has several features that require Microsoft Office to be installed on the user’s machine. If they have Office, why use Office Live? Also, it won’t serve as a route for Microsoft to expand into office software on other platforms as Office Live requires IE. It might be a convenient companion service to Microsoft Office, but I doubt it will become much more.
In news today, Oracle bought Berkeley DB maker Sleepycat. This news comes a few months after their announcement that they purchased Innobase, makers of the MySQL innodb engine. Though, it hasn’t announced plans to discontinue, irreversibly incorporate, or otherwise dissrupt their open use, it does raise questions about what Oracle plans to do with them.
As an avid user and supporter of opensource software, my worst nightmare would be that the tools I use everyday would be licensed in such away I can no longer use them. I highly doubt Oracle could close these projects up with out a huge outcry from the OSS community. It just leaves us all guessing about what will happen.