It’s been in development for 34 months, contains somewhere in the region of 15,000 changes, and it is 100% organic software: these are just a few of the reasons expectations were high for the release of the new version of Firefox. To celebrate the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 the Opensource Application Knowledge Association (OAKA) in Hong Kong threw the new web browser a party on June 28, 2008, at the City University of Hong Kong.

The FON Hong Kong team was in attendance, not just because it’s a cool company full of cool people, but also because FON provided the WiFi access for this event. FON, for those not in the know, is a global community of hundreds of thousands of users (and growing) who share WiFi access among each other using FON’s secure and inexpensive router, called La Fonera. In this image you can see FON Hong Kong manager Terrence Leung enthusiastically explaining La Fonera to some revellers. All reports indicate that the cake was very good. Material for this entry was taken from the FON HK blog.

With no good standard ways of plugging input methods into Linux desktops, trying to develop an input method used to be difficult. But now there is an actual standard to address this small but important part of Linux, especially for East Asian users.

Last week, I was at the Chinese Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI) in Beijing to chair the Input Method Sub-Working Group meeting for the 13th time over the past three years. The IMSWG is part of the larger Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum (NEAOSS), formed by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments for pushing open source software.

Over the past few years, literally every detail of how input methods should work were discussed and debated among participants from the three countries. All had strong opinions on the architecture of the system, and at times it seemed impossible for them to agree on the specification.

We solved that by getting them to write software code instead - being programmers, they understood each other better in computer languages than in English.

Now, not only do we have an agreed specification, but we are also developing a reference implementation called IMBus, thanks to the hard work of all involved. We have both James Su of SCIM fame, and Hideki Hiura, the designer of XIM and IIIMF on board, so IMBus will no doubt be widely adopted. James gave a nice talk about IMBus at last year’s LF Desktop Architects Meeting.

I said “nearly” in the title of this blog post because the specification is not yet actually “published”. NEAOSS being a semi-governmental organisation, they are very keen on adhering to set procedures and there is still some paperwork to be done before the specification gets to the “approval” stage later this year. However, all technical issues have already been addressed. Hopefully this specification will work its way up to ISO and be published as an ISO standard in the future. ISO being ISO, this won’t happen anytime soon - I’ll talk more about that next time.

On November 24 I attended the Creative Commons Workshop organized by University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Development and Resources for Students (CEDAR). The workshop provided a wealth of information on the increasingly popular Creative Commons licenses, which allow for sharing of work without the fears and concerns of infringing on copyright. You can see a Creative Commons license on our blog, just glance to the right and look down.

This event was highly informative and I hope Creative Commons becomes the preferred system for the participatory Web community. CC strikes a balance between copyright and public domain, it is a license that helps to preserve copyright on your work while also inviting certain uses of that work - something that is much more difficult to do with a traditional copyright. CC is ideal for the blogosphere and beyond. I am thus very happy to provide the following videos and podcasts for those who were not able to attend the event. (more…)

Open Source: live it and love it, as we’ve said since 1998. Outblaze CEO and Founder Yat Siu was interviewed by CIO Asia magazine on the region’s growing use of open source. Read the article here (October 2007 issue).

Extract:

Outblaze has a strong in-house programming capability and focuses on web technology, which is why it has profited from open source software ahead of most Asian enterprises. But the company’s success with open source may point to the future of Asian IT.