These Things Matter to Me
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Second big day for Opentape. Community + Policy.
- If you know anything about licensing, and would like to help a great free software project out, considering talking with Opentape. It looks like they need guidance choosing a license, and would prefer to package up some stuff made of disparate permissive licenses (MIT, GPL, etc) along with their own code.
- Opentape now has forums! This is great. People are submitting bugs, requesting features... all that good stuff.
Monday, August 25, 2008
New open source music software I'm excited about: Opentape, a muxtape-inspired tool.
An administrative view of rearranging songs:
How do you set it up?
Opentape is an extremely easy-to-install, open source implementation of Muxtape. You unzip it, upload songs, and you're done. No database to set up, no need to edit php files in vi. It looks like Muxtape, except with an unlimited number of songs.
(For those that don't know about about Muxtape, Muxtape is a web-based tool for sharing and listening to music. Like much social software, it benefits from a network effect, getting better and more useful the more people use it, and being hard to explain to people who don't. (Explaining social software to people who don't use it can be frustrating. "It plays music? With your friends?" That's it? Le sigh.)
Muxtape is also basically gone. It became unavailable last week. In their redirect they confirmed some issues with the RIAA. But since the day they went dark, they've made no more public statements about the situation, which is a bit confusing and unfortunate. I don't feel wronged, after all, they were giving us a great free service. But I wish they could communicate a bit more, especially when their software has so many non-infringing uses and passionate users.)
But let's get back to Opentape.
What an opentape looks like for the listener/ visitor (via screenshots from the Opentape live demo):
An administrative view of rearranging songs:How do you set it up?- Get the Opentape source code to your server, ideally in a place that's in your web's root/user's public area, often this will be "public_html."
- Unzip it.
- Browse to the Opentape directory on your server, probably something like, "http://yourdomain.com/opentape"
- You'll find a fully functioning website awaiting a password of your choosing.
- You're done! No database to set up!
Once additional cool thing about Opentape running on your server, rather than on a central service provider's, is that you can actually upload your songs via ftp/sftp, in addition to the normal web-based upload method.
There's also mention of a future ability to federate with other Opentape users across other servers' installations of Opentape.
Labels: music, muxtape, open source, open tape, opentape, web
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and *without* IBM)
Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven't been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.
But with the recent announcement that Magnolia will go open source, I'm interested not just as a consumer, but as an administrator/ service developer.
I don't really feel like I've had the ability to bring social bookmarking inside the enterprise as a service. For many organizations to feel comfortable going into "the cloud," the service needs to have hooks into SAML -> Active Directory/LDAP, a la Salesforce.com/Google Apps.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.
I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.
The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.
I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.
The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.
Labels: enterprise, Magnolia, open source, social bookmarking
