As of today I’m stepping down from TheOpenCD development, of which for the last eighteen months I’ve been the sole developer and general caretaker for the project. It’s not all bad news though - I’m leaving the project to pursue my own open source disc, which I believe will resolve the issues I’ve experienced in my time at the helm1.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers.

s expected, Yesterday afternoon OpenIndiana project was publicly announced.openindiana
"OpenIndiana “is a brand new distribution of OpenSolaris, constructed by the community, for the community. The primary goal is to be a binary and package compatible drop in replacement for the official OpenSolaris and forthcoming Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express releases.”

We are very pleased to announce that source code is now available for Project SocialSite (under a CDDL/GPL license) and the project is now operating as an open source project following the Glassfish governance policy. We're working in the open and welcome contributors of all stripes.

Software is only as good as the people that work on it. All of the great open source projects had great project teams. If you want to be the next big thing in open source a good team is essential. Here's the low down on getting a gang together as well as the non-coding roles you'll want.

"We've just launched the splash page for the new Email Standards Project website at email-standards.org, which is the future location of a lot of news and resources relating to our push for consistent, reliable web standards support for email..."

Most free software projects encourage contributors—it is the rare project that has an overabundance—but contributions vary greatly in quality. Encouraging good submissions, or those likely to lead to useful contributions down the road, is an important part of any project. But it is a delicate balance.

The author, Gabor Horvath, states some interesting reasons for freeing the whole thing; personally think the "family" argument is the strongest one, and it’s important to spend time with your (small) kids. Of course, at 10 months you can still code with the baby on your tummy.

Songbird is an opensource project focused on building a cross-platform audio station. Linux was at the heart of the project, but as you may know, the company behind the project recently decided to drop its support. The good news is that there are several very good audio players available for Linux.