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Open Core: The worst of both worlds

by Sander Marechal

A lot has been written recently about so called “Open Core” software ever since Andrew Lampitt coined the term back in August of 2008. Many analysts have been critical about it, such as Richard Hillesley from The H Open in his recent article “Open core, closed heart?”. Many are also very positive about it such as Matt Aslett from The 451 Group. However, I think that most them are missing the elephant in the room: Open core is not sustainable in the long term because it represents the worst of both worlds. Open core tries to find a middle ground between proprietary software and free software, but it reaps the benefits of neither and inherits the problems of both.

Let me show you by example. SugarCRM is one of the more popular open core software products available. The company offers the Community Edition for free under a GPLv3 license but also offers a Professional and Enterprise edition under a proprietary license. SugarCRM has been around since 2004 but it is already showing many signs of not being sustainable.

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Gnome Hearts 0.3 Release Announcement

by Sander Marechal

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.3. Thanks to the contributions of some very smart folk, gnome-hearts 0.3 has vastly superior AI opponents than ever before. Three new AI opponents have been added (Jake, Ling and Peter) and all the other opponents have been improved. Besides that there are a few minor new features and improvements for both players and AI developers, alongside the obligatory bugfixes and translation updates.

You can download gnome-hearts 0.3 from our download page.

About Gnome Hearts

Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop or has the GNOME libraries installed.

Enjoy!

Gnome Hearts 0.2.1 Release Announcement

by Sander Marechal

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.2.1. This release fixes a number of bugs in the AI code that could cause a crash the game under rare circumstances. Also, a number of improvements to the build system have been backported from Debian Lenny. Finally, two new translations for the game (German and Spanish) and three new translations for the documentation (Greek, Slovak and Simplified Chinese) have been added.

You can download gnome-hearts 0.2.1 from our download page.

About Gnome Hearts

Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop or has the GNOME libraries installed.

Enjoy!

Gnome Hearts 0.2 Release Announcement

by Sander Marechal

We are happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.2. In this release the AI engines have been ported from Lua to Python and the C code has been significantly cleaned up. It also adds many new translations (British English, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Malayalam, Russian and Tagalog) and updates all the other languages. The most user-visible change is the addition of the "shooting the sun" rule to the game.

You can download gnome-hearts 0.2 from our download page. The online user documentation and developer guidelines (for those who wish to write new computer opponents) has been updated as well.

About Gnome Hearts

Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop or has the GNOME libraries installed.

Enjoy!

It's official: ATI Radeon drivers to be open sourced

It's tuning out to be a great week. First OOXML defeated (for a few months) and now this:

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10.

On the issue of maintainership, Schlaeger says, "We want to enable the open source community to carry the development forward. We won't let them alone. It's not something that we dump a bit of code, a bit of spec, and say, 'This is it. You asked for it, you have it. Feel free, and have fun.'" He noted that the company took a similar approach on the Linux port of Opteron.

Gnome Hearts 0.1.3 Release Announcement

by Sander Marechal

We are happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.1.3. This release fixes some crashing behavior related to card styles on Debian and Debian-based systems [1][2][3][4] and fixes a similar potential crash regarding background images on any system. It also adds Polish documentation and updates all other in-game translations. You can download the latest version from our downloads page [5] or our APT repository [6].

[1]http://bugzilla.jejik.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11
[2]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=395551
[3]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=396043
[4]https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-hearts/+bug/65274
[5]http://www.gnome-hearts.org/download/
[6]http://www.jejik.com/pages/repositories/

About Gnome Hearts

Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop.

Enjoy,

Google launches search service for computer code

Google is introducing a new search service — strictly for computer programmers only. The Web search leader said late on Wednesday it is introducing Google Code Search, a site that simplifies how software developers search for programming code to improve existing software or create new programs.

Searchers can seek out specific programming terms or computer languages and dive deep into compressed code to locate specific features. Users also can narrow a search to find software code based on specific licensing requirements, which is a big deal in warding off future patent litigation.

Several software programmers say Google Code Search appears to answer some of the basic nightmares of building software by creating a single place where one can trawl through all the publicly available computer code in the world.

From: Reuters

Gnome Hearts 0.1.2 Release Announcement

by Sander Marechal

Gnome Hearts 0.1.2 is now available from our download section. This release fixes a crash caused by the Luis AI. It also adds Danish, Basque, Polish, Swedish and Chinese translations. The other translations have been updated as well.