Open Sauce Software

Even Facebook addicts sometimes get scared that the giant they are contributing to could turn nasty. Is it really taking care of your personal data? Now there's another question - how serious are its open source aims?

The privacy question came up in Canada, where Facebook was charged with violating privacy laws.

Meanwhile, the social networking site was accused of being the "Microsoft of Social Networking" when it open sourced part of its platform. fbOpen will potentially let people with Facebook apps run them on other social networking sites, but there's lots of caveats to it.

Facebook Platform - the bit of Facebook that supports third party apps - has been partly open sourced in the fbOpen program, which includes software to download, and APIs.

Potentially, if another social network wants, it can implement a compatible platform, and developers who have made Facebook apps can move them across. That would make this a response to the OpenSocial move by Google, Yahoo and Myspace.

But the devil - as always - will be in the detail. ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear says fbOpen appears to be much more inward looking, focussing on allowing developers to improve the Facebook Platform itself, not on spreading it to other networks.

And others objected to its choice of the controversial CPAL open source licence, sometimes called a "badgeware" licence, which requires anyone implementing it to include a logo and possibly a splash screen publicising the original creator.

That's unpopular in some quarters, but CPAL backer Ross Mayfield argues that ordinary distribution licences don't handle the situation where code is run from a site not "distributed".

A day on from the announcement, opinion seems to have settled from some of the first criticism. Let's keep an eye on this one.

People have criticised Novell for relying on Microsoft to bring in Linux business, which is a bit like a blood bank relying on supplies from Dracula.

But its latest results show Novell is starting to thrive in Linux and - commentators say - getting less dependent on the controversial Microsoft partnership.

Novell's quarterly results show a 31 percent growth year on year, and "our non-Microsoft- related Linux business is growing," according to a comment CNet blogger Matt Asay got from Novell's head of Linux marketing Justin Stienman.

"This is very, very good news, even if Novell refuses to wholly disown its Redmond uncle," says Asay. "Increasing independence from Microsoft is good for Novell's long-term health and it's good for true competition in the Linux market."

Fursty Ferret, Pickled Partridge, Hopping Hare... could this be a forked series of Ubuntu distributions? No, it's something much more constructive than that.

The names are seasonal beers, from a 200-year old brewery in the West of England - Hall and Woodhouse, best known for its Badger beer.

ZDnet likes seasonal beer, but our local serves Shepherd Neame, so I only heard of the Badger's seasonal relatives at the Lulworth Cove Inn in Dorset at the weekend.

Is it just a minor coincidence, or is Hall and Woodhouse an open source user? Linux and beer have a long standing connection, explored in the nine-year series of Linuxbierwanderungen where the stability and richness of Fursty, Hopping and Pickled have probably been discussed already.



Ubuntu has already used Feisty Fawn and Hardy Heron in its alphabetical release sequence, so we won't see versions called Fursty Ferret or Hopping Hare. But Pickled Partridge could be a possibility in 2012...