ONOS project updates open source SDN progress on 1-year anniversary

Plerd: A Dropbox-friendly Markdown blog platform

Jason McIntosh had a problem: He'd gotten out of the habit of writing long-form blog posts. A decade before, he'd been a regular on LiveJournal, but that platform is getting a little long in the tooth, and he wanted something that was more in line with his current writing habits. As a fan of Markdown, he wanted something where he could just drop Markdown files in a spot, and the blog would be built from those.

Former Mozilla CEO reveals Brave, a browser that speeds up the Web by blocking all ads

Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and for an 11-day stint, its CEO, yesterday announced a new browser called “Brave,” that blocks outside online ads and ad tracking.

Brave, which was at version 0.7—denoting its under-construction and fit-for-developers-and-other-strong-hearts-only status—is for Windows and OS X on the desktop, iOS and Android on mobile. The browser does not have a final code launch date or one for a public preview. Users may sign up for notification when betas become available.

In a post to the browser’s website, Eich, Brave’s CEO and president, touted the new browser’s model, which rests on blocking ads and all other tracking techniques used by websites to pinpoint their visitors and show them online advertisements.

WebGL Can Be Moved Off The Main Thread With Latest Firefox

With Firefox 44 and newer it will be possible to move the WebGL rendering work off the main processing thread.

With Firefox 44 when setting the gfx.offscreencanvas.enabled option, it's possible to move the WebGL rendering work off the main thread and to allow for the alternative thread(s) to change what is displayed to the user. "This API is the first that allows a thread other than the main thread to change what is displayed to the user. This allows rendering to progress no matter what is going on in the main thread...Developers will now be able to render to the screen without blocking on the main thread, thanks to the new OffscreenCanvas API. There’s still more work to do with getting requestAnimationFrame on Workers. I was able to port existing WebGL code to run in a worker in a few minutes. For comparison, see animation.html vs. animation-worker.html and worker.js."

Emacs 25.1 Will Have X Widgets Support

No single license to success

OSI (Open Source Initiative) has tracked many licenses and approved some as well, maintaining a list of the nine most widely used and popular. Each license has its unique requirements and benefits from the reciprocity of GPL (GNU General Public License) to the permissive MIT. Each has its strong proponents and opponents. Some feel that without GPL’s compulsion human greed will end open source as we know it. Others feel that freedom is the key to success and such compulsion hinders creative use.

The reality is that the strength of open source is in its diversity, including a diversity of licenses. No single license has been nor will be the pivotal point to open source success. License diversity is very evident from the data gathered by the Black Duck Knowledgebase. A quick view of the top 20 licenses used in open source projects today shows an even spread.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz And The Rise Of Free Culture On The Internet

Two weeks ago, our book of choice was a collection of Aaron Swartz's writings. And this week, it's a new book by Justin Peters not only about Swartz, but also about the rise of free culture online, putting Swartz's ideas and actions into context, called The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet. I have to admit that I had no idea this book had even come out until I heard a wonderful interview with Peters over on On the Media (and, for what it's worth, in a separate podcast, OTM's Brooke Gladstone said that the interview was so good that they struggled to figure out how to edit it down -- so I wonder if they'll release an even longer version as a "podcast extra.")