Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59786,00.html

From this morning’s Wired News:

Baghdad resident Usama Kamil Al-Sharqi paid a taxi driver $50 in 2001 to smuggle him a copy of Yahoo Instant Messenger on a CD-ROM from a friend in Jordan.

It was a high price to pay for a program that has been downloaded for free by millions of people around the world. But Al-Sharqi says he would have paid an even steeper price had the regime of Saddam Hussein, which banned the use of instant messaging software, found out about it.

“If the government knew what I was doing, I am sure they would kill me, because they would think I was a spy,” says Al-Sharqi.

Today, with Saddam toppled, Iraq’s State Company for Internet Services has lifted its prohibition on IM. At Internet cafes around Baghdad run by SCIS and its newly launched competitors, IM has become — figuratively rather than literally — a “killer app.”

I wonder what my encrypted email, once picked up by gov’t spookware, would think I was?

Related link: http://rubyforge.org

Ruby Watch: The Ruby community has put up their own installation of GForge, the embraced and extended software that runs sourceforge to start hosting ruby projects: RubyForge.

Be gentle, they just started ‘er up.

Related link: http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-foundation.html

“Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open source development, today announced the launch of a new foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine.  The Mozilla Foundation will continue and expand on the efforts of mozilla.org, the group managing the daily operations of the Mozilla project since its inception.

“It has been a long-standing objective of the Mozilla team to create an independent organization so we can continue to lead and innovate,” said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at mozilla.org, who will become President of The Mozilla Foundation.  “We’re grateful for the past and ongoing support of America Online, and we look forward to continuing to work with AOL over coming years.  Mozilla was developed in an open source environment and built by harnessing the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet.  Going forward, we will continue to partner with developers and industry leaders to keep content on the Web open,” continued Baker.

…To help launch the new organization, America Online has pledged $2 million in cash to the Mozilla Foundation over the next two years.  AOL will also contribute additional resources through equipment, domain names and trademarks, and related intellectual property, as well as providing some transitional assistance for key personnel as they move into the new organization.

Other industry leaders also offered their support to the new organization: Mitch Kapor, the new Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, is making a personal contribution of $300,000, and Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are among the companies planning to continue their contributions to the Mozilla project.”

This sounds like a great idea all around. Moz, AOL, & users.

I think this sounds great. Moz funding itself is healthy, AOL getting away from something it doesn’t have any great interest in anymore, users having a healthier Moz organization. What do you think?

Put Ruby on your radars, folks. It’s on the minds of the developers here at OSCON. While OSCON is normally dominated by PERL & Python Hackers this has been like an unofficial Ruby conference.

Ruby wasn’t a confernece track at last year’s OSCON, so this year’s was a bit of guesswork. Would people come? You might say they did. Every Ruby session was packed with standing, and sitting room only. There were perl hackers who admitted they we going to switch to Ruby. “What?” Yeah, I was equally blown away.

Matz, the founder and developer of Ruby, had said in his session that a good name for a project will take care of 80% of your design work for that project. Afterward we mused that a good leader will take care of building a community around a project and that it was equally if not more important than the project itself. Those in the session felt that Ruby had these thing going for it. Aside from being based on what I see as the best aspects of perl and python, and it being a great thing, we see that while Ruby has a great start, it has a great future.

Watch for the possibility of a State of the Gem address next year.

P.S. I started a Ruby Wiki (wikis being another big topic this year) this morning.

What do you think of Ruby?

One thing I get asked a lot as the webmaster for opensource.org is who to contact for many different kinds of tasks and skill sets, etc. Half the time I have an answer and for the other half often the answer is “Sorry, you’ll have to google it”.

I’ve tried “googling it” & let me tell you that often the results are less than helpful. I love Google, but this isn’t really it’s thing. Checking my email at OSCON I received the ole’ familiar question: “I’m looking for an open source expert in such and such in the San Francisco area. Who should I contact?”

My answer this time unfortunately was “Google it”, but I added an extra piece of info this time. “When you find the person you’re looking for ask them to add themselves to the Who’s Who? wiki at OSPedia.”

If you’re a F/OSS developer, JOPH, consultant, Python teacher, Apache guru, etc etc please feel free to add yourself and a bit about what your gigs are. Heck, add your resume. Plus, it just nice to know who is who. You can only fit so much on conference badges. OSCON or otherwise.