Despite being a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license.

Snow Leopard’s new Grand Central Dispatch feature, which serves as a system-wide mechanism for managing parallel task execution across multiple processor cores for developers, involves multiple components in the operating system.

The user-space implementation of the Grand Central Dispatch services API, called libdispatch, has been delivered as its own open source project, joining with other components that are part of projects Apple has already designated as open, including the kernel components in the Darwin OS XNU kernel and the blocks runtime that is part of the LLVM project.

Apple’s code giveaway was “something of a surprise,” according to MacResearch, a website covering the use of Apple technologies in the scientific research community, because the new feature of Snow Leopard “could be seen to give Apple a competitive edge in the new world of multi-core.” (Source: Apple Insider)

He got pissed off with Linus Travolds.

I’ve been working on fixing it. I have spent a huge amount of time
working on the tty stuff trying to gradually get it sane without breaking
anything and fixing security holes along the way as they came up. I spent
the past two evenings working on the tty regressions.

However I’ve had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix
it.

Have fun.

I’ve zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer
can send them to the new maintainer.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/375

July 30, 2009 04:39 UTC

This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers

It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting to resolve these problems:

You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable.

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared.

You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper.

You have, it seems, sole ‘Founders’ rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.

When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept ‘Lines are temporarily busy’ for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply. Karanbir also reports calling and leaving messages without your reply.

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.

Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away.

Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the ‘centos.org’ domain.

Sincerely,

Russ Herrold
Ralph Angenendt
Karanbir Singh
Jim Perrin
Donavan Nelson
Tim Verhoeven
Tru Huynh
Johnny Hughes

Open letter republished from centos.org.

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license.

“Obviously we are tickled about it,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Hell has frozen over, the seas have parted,” he said with a chuckle.

Microsoft made the announcement at the annual OSCON open source conference that opened Monday in San Jose.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux driver project lead and a Novell fellow, said he accepted 22,000 lines of Microsoft’s code at 9 a.m.PST Monday. Kroah-Hartman said the Microsoft code will be available as part of the next Linux public tree release in the next 24 hours. The code will become part of the 2.6.30.1 stable release.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/072009-microsoft-linux-source-code.html

All I can say is that this is a good sign.

SkypeMate.exe crashes immediately after picking up the phone.

I am so fed up with work-arounds for stupid errors on Yealink’s part, I decided to patch the problem myself. The problem resides at SkypeMate.dll+0×4525 where the program de-references a pointer returned by SkypeMate.dll+0×4450 (aka “GetAudioNameByID”) which is passed an invalid ID, -1, for whatever reason. The function then returns a null pointer which crashes the program.

By inserting a null reference check before the pointer is de-referenced, the program now runs great. If you also experience the problem with the program crashing right after you pick up the phone, I have attached the cracked dll.

From Skype Forums

Another reason for open source?

1. Apache
2. Prototype JavaScript Framework
3. Flex
4. Bzip2
5. Openssl
6. Curl
7. SSLeay
8. Libpcap
9. Fontconfig
10. libxml2
11. Bitstream Vera Fonts
12. Uriparser
13. Giflib
14. Ksoap
15. Poly9’s polyvalent URLParser class
16. Wbxml.java , Wbxmlparser.java , and WbxmlSerializer.java
17. Liboil
18. stlport
19. Sudo
20. lcu
21. Dhcp-client
22. NTP
23. PPP
24. libxslt except libexslt
25. jpeg-6b
26. Expat
27. c-ares
28. Freetype
29. Putty
30. Dropbear
31. Ncurses
32. Md5
33. Libpng
34. Strace
35. zlib
36. Datejs
37. libspeex
38. speex
39. Cairo
40. libunwind
41. Wpa_supplicant
42. Pmipclib
43. tiff
44. JSON-C
45. JSON
46. AGG
47. The Legion Of The Bouncy Castle
48. script.aculo.us
49. Jemalloc
50. Npruntime.h
51. The wxWindows Library Licence
52. dbus
53. Host AP
54. File-backed USB Storage Gadget
55. SQLiteJDBC
56. libvorbis
57. libogg
58. VLGothic Proportional Japanese Font
59. Minifier
60. CJK Unicode TrueType Fonts
61. JArgs command line option parsing suite for Java