News wrap-up: Google and OIN, new btrfs versions, Qt and licences

Recently Google joined the Open Innovation Network. Also, Btrfs saw two new development versions these days, and Qt’s licence terms were modified to allow linking to other licences as well.

Google and the OIN

Some days ago Chris DiBona announced that Google became a Open Innovation Network licensee.
Just like Orcale (which became a licensee in March) Google now promises to not use their (maybe Linux related) software patents against any of the other licensees. In return they don’t have to fear the patents of the other licensees. I wonder if Google has so many patents in this area – I never read anything about Google patent portfolios.

Nevertheless, with Google the list of licensees just got another important name. But some names I’m still missing are Yahoo, SAP and Amazon. Microsoft won’t join anytime soon as long as they follow their ridiculous patent strategy.

New Btrfs releases

Chris Mason has just released the versions 0.6 and 0.7 of his file system Btrfs.
The 0.6 release introduces an improved way of deleting old snapshots and a function to defrag the file system to improve the performance. The defrag code unveiled a performance bug which led to the release of 0.7 which is now much faster:

Time to create 1 million files, 512 bytes each:
v0.4: 3m17s
v0.7: 2m32s

Time to run find . on the directory:
v0.4: 21.60s
v0.7: 3.27s

Nice numbers indeed. But of course Btrfs is still in an Alpha state, and first stable versions are not expected before next year.

Qt 4.3.1 was released with GPL extensions

Qt 4.3.1 was released recently. As usual for these minor releases the changelog of this version contains bug fixes and performance improvements but no new technical features, except for the new Intel Compiler 10 support.

However, in political terms one feature was added: beginning with Qt 4.3.1 Qt can now be used together with other licences due to GPL exceptions. The additional rights granted by Trolltech are pretty handy for any Open Source developer:

The right to use Open Source Licenses not compatible with the GNU
General Public License: You may link software (hereafter referred to as “Your Software”) against the Licensed Software and/or distribute binaries of Your Software linked against the Licensed Software

There is no need now to release your software under the GPL, you can also use another licence if you have to/want to.

Interesting in this regard is however also that the GPL 3 is not included. This is already a bit of a problem for the KDE project since the next versions of Samba will be released under the terms of the GPL 3 while KDE is – due to Qt – GPL 2 only. But there are rumours that the next Open Source Qt version might already be released under the GPL 2 and GPL 3.
I do wonder however if KDE could switch to GPL 3 – several hundred developers contributed over the year, making such switches difficult.

OpenGL 3.0: Longs Peak in September

OpenGL Architecture Review Board has officially announced OpenGL 3 for the next month. This release will be the expected “Longs Peak” release, while “Mount Evans” is now scheduled for 4-5 months after “Longs Peak”.

The announcement by the Khronos Group was done early this month, however there is a approval period of 30 days which shifts the official release date to early September.

While this release was expected the version numbering is not: it was always pointed out that the version numbers are not fixed for the code names “Mount Evans” and “Longs Peak”, however “Longs Peak” was always described as a cleaned up version of 2.1, and therefore would be more close to a minor release than “Mount Evans”.

But besides the a bit surprising new numbers the plan looks like the old one: the autumn release will contain a cleaned up and more efficient API which will in return not fully downwards compatible. And another release following afterwards (it says 4-5 months now) will introduce newest features and will require newest hardware.

A last word about real world support of new hardware: if you use proprietary implementations of OpenGL, like the one from the binary NVIDIA or AMD drivers, it is likely that the features of the hardware are supported despite the fact that the official OpenGL API does not cover these new techniques. OpenGL extensions can take care of that, and it is likely that the hardware vendors do implement them to get the most out of their hardware.

New search and search-and-replace bars for kate

Kate was on of the first KDE applications that took over the search bar idea from Firefox. Now the developers sping outlined an idea how to create a search-and-replace bar as well.

The main problem with the usual search bar is that it does not offer search-and-replace functions. This is okay to “passive” applications like Web browsers, but editors like Kate definitely need such a feature.

Therefore sping thought about that problem and decided to work at. A couple of days later he showed mockups. The first mockup shows how the usual search bar could look like – it looks pretty similar to the Firefox one.

The second image shows a mockup for the search-and-replace function:

It looks like these two bars will have two different backends where the second one resembles the features and possibilities of the old search-and-replace dialog.

I hope that parts of these efforts will finally find their way into the kde libraries so that other apps can take over these techniques. Although someKDE applications also implement similar functions already there is hardly shared code between these solutions. This is because it takes some time to integrate it into the shared libraries because the bar is not a dialog (as the old dialog was) and because the search function itself also depends in parts on the specific application. But we might see a shared base in KDE 4.1 – there is a strong demand for it in the end.