FOSSwire

Ever wonder what the occasional “stay tuned, we’re working on something” messages have been at the bottom of posts? It’s been a few months in the making, but it’s finally here: the third update to FOSSwire.

Our focus this time was not new buttons and knobs, but interaction. See that login box on the right? Give it a try: type in your OpenID or click one of the providers below it to sign in in a few clicks. You’ll be able to manage your comments and take advantage of tons of other features described below.

Discussion

Comments are now easier than ever to use: we’re taking advantage of Markdown formatting, meaning you can use emphasis, links and even images to style up your comments. When you see a Quote button next to a comment you want to address, click it to refer to it and include it in your post.

If you’re signed in, all you need to do is type in a comment and hit Reply. If not, just input your name and E-mail address and do the same.

Talk

Comments aren’t an end-all solution. Sometimes you just want to start a discussion about something unrelated or get support for a problem. Say hello to FOSSwire Talk. Talk is a unique yet simple discussion platform that works as a hybrid of comments and a forum. Discussions can be tagged and categorized. If you’ve got something on your mind, want to discuss code, or just want to have a good old vim vs. emacs war, pop open Talk and fire away.

Talk works much like comments: you can use Markdown formatting to write your posts and replies, and can quote others’ posts. However, while Talk is accessible to the general public, you must be signed-in to post.

We’re looking to expand on Talk in the future. If you have anything in particular you’d like to see, post it in the Feedback section.

Submissions

Here’s something everyone can enjoy: submissions. We’ve received a number of requests over the years from people wanting to write articles for FOSSwire. Now you can, and it’s easier than ever to do so. You can submit a full-blown article to the submissions queue where it can be voted on by other members. We’ll periodically take the best-rated submissions and put them on the front page for all to see.

Editors will even help you out with your content using the post whiteboard, a private workspace to dump your thoughts or communicate with an editor. We’ll help you make sure your article is the best it can be.

Submitted articles can be of any type: news, editorials, tutorials, rants, raves, and whatever else works out for you. If you want to be that person to review an Ubuntu release, there’s nothing stopping you.

What’s more: you get full credit for your submission. Under published posts is a generously-sized box with your avatar/picture that links back to your profile and website.

Be Social

Perhaps we’re a bit late on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, but we’re offering even more ways to communicate and interact with FOSSwire.

First, as mentioned earlier, is OpenID support. You can sign in with one click and begin posting. If you want to have more than one OpenID linked to your account, go right ahead.

As stated in the section above, you can have a profile box displayed below your articles. To use it, just open the profile editor: click My Profile and then Edit to fill out all of the information that you want. We’ll be adding more fields in the future so you can add all of the social networks that you want.

Speaking of social networks, take a look at the right sidebar. You may already know, but FOSSwire is available on Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter. Follow us to stick with the latest updates.

Backend

So how does this all work? You may have known that we were using WordPress on the old site, but now we’re fully up-and-running on custom software using the Django web framework. All of the posts, content, and comments have been imported from WordPress into this platform.

Having a custom-built site means that we’re not restricted to traditional publishing methods; if there’s something that we think should work differently then it’s just a few lines of code away. In the end it makes the site a lot more manageable and ultimately enjoyable for everyone.

After years of perpetual beta (it's vogue these days), Celtx, the open source media pre-production and screenwriting application, finally earned its 1.0 status this past June. So it might seem a little odd that only eight months later, Celtx is making the jump to 2.0 (and it does seem a little sudden) so let's take a look and see if this new version worth its version number.

A new codebase

Celtx is a XUL application, and repurposes the underpinnings of Firefox for its evil machinations. In 2.0, Celtx finally makes the leap to the Firefox 3.0 codebase, bringing with it some awesome new stability updates, speed increases, and more. It's still missing movable tabs, but hopefully the next feature can help solve that...

Toolbox

As a user of Celtx myself (and a longtime writer and reviewer of it here and at YouMakeMedia, our sister site), I've always had a few feature requests and complaints. The ability to use add-ons and modifications is one that I've actually had since 2005, when I first used Celtx! I'm thrilled it's finally made it in the application. To be an "official" toolbox application, e.g. to use specific functions of the Celtx collaboration servers and to be listed on the Celtx website, your plugin has to be approved by Celtx, however I've been assured that you are still allowed to make and distribute your own plugins as long as they don't use functions that plug into the Celtx server (the proprietary aspect of the Celtx ecosystem). That brings me to the next big new thing:

Celtx Studio

Until now, Celtx has used Project Central, an online site, to facilitate collaboration between writers. Project Central is great, but it doesn't offer a lot of granular control, and is mainly designed for showcasing your work to others.

Celtx Studio is designed to augment Project Central, allowing folks to upload their projects and set sharing permissions and other necessary settings for managing a project. It's different from Project Central because a project isn't inherently public if you upload it. In fact, the only way to make it public is through the "preview" function or by uploading it separately to Project Central. They've also added a long-requested backup feature, which will let you go back to any save point in your project history. Never worry about accidentally deleting that great line again - you'll always be able to go to your archives and recover safely!

Celtx Studio, being proprietary, is where Celtx has revealed they plan to make money. It's currently free during the beta period, but after the kinks are ironed out they plan to charge $50/year. Interestingly, they haven't specified whether that's Canadian or American dollars - Celtx is based in Canada but the majority of professional users are likely to be in America (Hollywood and all) so that's a decision that will be important.

Problems

Of course, moving Celtx Studio and the collaboration features to a paid model is ideal for Celtx - it's finally a business model, and shows that Open Source can find ways of making money. However, the move diminishes one of Celtx's core functions; Celtx has always diversified itself from the pack based on its all-in-one convenience and its collaboration. With the collaboration stripped unless you're willing to pay, does Celtx's all-in-one convenience make it worth using?

I'd suspect the desktop client won't disappear anytime soon, primarily because there are very few free applications for managing the pre-production of a media project, or writing a screenplay. However I do bet that Studio won't catch on as quickly as they hope. It's not too polished, and it seems very narrow in scope. Perhaps I'd be looking at this differently if I hadn't been using Celtx with collaboration easily for the past four years for free, however it seems that taking away features from users is not ideal - adding features is the way to go. Admittedly the new archives feature is pretty awesome, but I'm not sure if it's enough to justify Studio to existing users.

Maybe we'll be seeing some alternative collaboration options from add-on developers in the near future. Perhaps an app that allows FTP-syncing of scripts (another long requested feature, and one that was in early versions of Celtx) or one that automatically emails scripts to the other collaborators when they are saved.

Either way, I know there will be a lot of users (myself included) who won't find enough value in the $50/year fee to begin paying. I hope I'm wrong for their sake - the Celtx team is comprised of some awesome people who I've supported strongly over the past four years - but ultimately I'm not convinced that Studio (at least in its current form) will be the sole monetisation solution for Celtx.

The web works because of open standards. It doesn't matter whether you're reading this on a Firefox on Linux, Opera Mini on a BlackBerry, IE on Windows, or even (possibly with a few issues) WorldWideWeb on NEXTSTEP. You can still read this content, because all of the protocols and languages used to encode and deliver this content to you are open standards.

For text and images, this pretty much works. Video, on the other hand, is a much more challenging issue. There are lots of competing ways to encode and deliver video on the web, some of which are available under open licences (say, Ogg Theora) and some of which are not (Flash video). And, unfortunately, the open ways to do it aren't the most popular right now and don't have much out-of-the-box support beyond open source operating systems.

Mozilla recently announced that they are putting $100,000 behind the Wikimedia Foundation to push the Theora video codec, which is free and open. Support for the Theora codec will also be built right into Firefox 3.1, which should make it easier to distribute content encoded with it, without users having to install special software.

That's great. But are we already too late to push for open video standards, with proprietary platforms and FOSS-incompatible standards already reaching ubiquity?

Companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are unlikely to want to standardise on something else, when they already have made investments elsewhere. Apple, for example, has put huge weight behind the MPEG-4 platform, particularly the H.264 video and AAC audio codecs and it would seem very unlikely that they would then invest in any other platform.

Now this MPEG-4 stuff is an ISO standard; we are even reaching a certain degree of convergence across traditional tech companies. I can take an H.264/AAC movie and play it on an Xbox 360 or an Apple TV and it all works exactly the same.

So why can't free software play nice with this MPEG-4 stuff? It's an ISO standard, right? The problem is that the codecs that make up MPEG-4 are often subject to patents and other intellectual property restrictions that leave open source and free software out in the cold. The potential threat of legal action means that while support might exist, it is challenging to bundle and a bit of a grey area.

The free software community aren't able to participate in any standard video and audio formats unless these standards are actually going to work within their licensing frameworks and not be embroiled in IP soup.

So, free software becomes less of a viable platform if it simply can't do this out of the box. This means that it either won't grow very much and spread the greater good (if you will), or we have to make sacrifices about the 'purity' of our software, which is more palatable to some than others.

Does it then make sense for us to make our own formats, Theora, for example, and try to push them to compete with the existing ones? Or, does this just make the whole codec mess more, well, messy? The pragmatist in me doesn't think this competition approach makes an awful lot of sense. I'd be perfectly happy to compromise and just run with the MPEG formats, however imperfect.

Don't get me wrong, though - I think having a video format suitable for the FOSS world which works on FOSS out-of-the-box is vitally important. It's just that this makes it a real challenge for content providers actually support both free software users and, well, everyone else that doesn't ship that stuff. Two versions of the same content? It's too difficult unless a big part of your audience are using pure FOSS, so it's not considered worth doing.

We're in a bit of a deadlock situation. Maybe I'm cynical, but it feels like the goal of having a truly open web, for all the content available on it, is an impossible one. At least, that is, until some major change comes around and our community get to have a share of the influence on the next big standard.

Oh, and when US intellectual property law gets a bit more sensible.

What do you think about open standards on the web? Is this goal of everything being in an open format achievable, now or in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Film strip image at top of post is by dpade1337 on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA. The Xiph Fish Logo and its theora.org variant are trademarks of Xiph.Org.