You may or may not have heard that Microsoft recently sponsored the Apache Foundation, to the tune of $100,000 a year.

While I’d love to believe that Microsoft is finally changing its tune on the open source development model and actually honestly trying to promote interoperability, it seems I am not the only one with cynical and sceptical views on Microsoft’s real agenda.

Bruce Perens, creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative has written an interesting and insightful article discussing what he believes Microsoft’s ‘game’ to be this time around.

Just a few years ago, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin called open source “an intellectual-property destroyer, I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.” [...]

Now they just want to interoperate, right?

Wrong. You wouldn’t have to look too far to convince yourself that Microsoft still engages in hard-edged fighting against open source. The Office Open XML standard has recently been pushed through ISO with so many irregularities in process that four nations complained. There already was an ISO-accredited office document standard called OpenDocument, created by the OpenOffice team. It was one-tenth the size of Microsoft’s effort, and did the same work. But it would have put Microsoft and open source on an equal footing. Office Open XML, in contrast, is 6,000 pages long, so large that it’s not possible for a programmer to learn it in his or her useful lifetime. That’ll keep the open source folks from ever handling files quite the same way that Microsoft does.

He also touches on some of the wider issues that the open source development model faces today later on.

It is definitely an interesting read if you’re interested in these sort of issues.

And out of left field, it’s Nintendo! Never saw this one coming, did you?

The folks at OSNews have unearthed an interesting, not well-known discovery: Nintendo has released the “Nintendo ES” operating system, and not only that, but under an entirely free and open-source license.

The OS is written in C++, runs EMCAScript (JavaScript), uses Cairo for rendering, and as of recently, can run Squeak, a Smalltalk programming language implementation.

The official website includes screenshots, news, and some specifications, although it is all in Japanese. Google can come in handy.

The following screenshot is Squeak running on N-ES, virtualized with QEMU:

This project from Nintendo R&D is in very early development, but it could have a great amount of potential. No specifics are available as to what it can be used for or why it even exists, but we can only speculate. A Wii development kit? Unlikely, but possible.

“We propose an extensible component operating system architecture in which an operating system kernel uses reflection to process C++ pure virtual function based system calls and upcalls to provide a unified programming environment for application, server, and kernel development. We found that we could even develop file subsystems and a TCP/IP protocol stack on an existing operating system based on this architecture.”

While Sun’s Java platform is now almost completely open source, most distributions haven’t been updated to ship with the technology (and there is a small amount of code that still isn’t open source). Without Java, you could be missing out on running some applications and (less frequently now) Java applets on websites.

It is a little bit of a pain to install however, so in this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to install it from Sun’s website using the self-extracting installer.

So first of all, let’s head on over to the site and go to the Linux Java downloads page. Let’s jump there quickly however, so click on the following link - http://www.java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp?locale=en&host=www.java.com:80.

On that page, we want the self-extracting file (and for wide compatibility, I’m not doing the RPM version in this tutorial, so choose the one below that). Let that file download. Now we’ll need to head over to the terminal for a bit (I’ll assume that file you downloaded is on your desktop).

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