open-source

Changes at SourceForge

Somehow I missed that SourceForge and Slashdot were sold at the end of January.

New owners promised to stop monetization practices that undermined the developer's trust and caused prominent apps to leave the site. And they already started delivering on that:

Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that.

A move in the right direction, but it remains to be seen how much that would help to ensure SourceForge.com's future.

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice

Unpleasant, but true conclusion in Christian Schaller's open letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team:

So dear Apache developers, for the sake of open source and free software, please recommend people to go and download LibreOffice, the free office suite that is being actively maintained and developed and which has the best chance of giving them a great experience using free software. OpenOffice is an important part of open source history, but that is also what it is at this point in time.

At rollApp we provide access to both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Both suites get more or less the same placement on our site and in the app stores, where we make them available. With all that OpenOffice applications are used almost 3 times more often than LibreOffice – that's a huge power of the brand.

In our experience LibreOffice provides greater compatibility with Microsoft Office file format and we use it as a default for opening office files on rollMyFile

PS LibreOffice development is indeed wa-a-ay more active than OpenOffice:

Open-source clone of MineCraft

TrueCraft – clean-room implementation of Minecraft with a nostalgic sentiment:

I miss the old days of Minecraft, when it was a simple game. It was nearly perfect. Most of what Mojang has added since beta 1.7.3 is fluff, life support for a game that was “done” years ago. This is my attempt to get back to the original spirit of Minecraft, before there were things like the End, or all-in-one redstone devices, or village gift shops. A simple sandbox where you can build and explore and fight with your friends. I miss that.

Looks like it is not uncommon these days to create new applications as clones of some older apps, but with less features.