Posts Tagged ‘open source’

Spark is now OpenSpark. And open source

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

As I hinted would happen several times, Spark has gone Open Source. OpenSpark is the Open and Free reincarnation of Spark; now hosted at SourceForge, and licensed under the GPL.

Other than supporting Open Source and Android, there are several goals behind this:

  • There are various errors that only those that experience them can fix (they seem to be limited to specific accounts)
  • Critical issues noted in the README file (please read it if you’d like to contribute) require attention that I simply cannot currently provide
  • OpenSpark could always use more translations to new languages
  • The constant conspiracy theories about Spark stealing credit card numbers, and other nonsense are getting annoying and need to end

Again, if you’d like to contribute, please see the README file; first and foremost. You can also contact me at openspark-devel AT lists DOT sourceforge DOT net (un-mangle the email address above).

The current stable release is still 1.1 – same version as the one on Android Market. Most of the critical fixes noted in the README apply to this version as well, so if we can get them fixed, there will be another pre-2.0 release (2.0 will include the newer features, such as services, and AppWidgets, when they are completed).

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Posted in OpenSpark, Update | Comments Off

Pandora and the state of PSP development

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

There’s a new strangely sycophantic article on Slashdot, regarding the start of pre-orders for Pandora, a new open-source handheld console that a number of gaming sites have already mentioned. The article spawned a number of comments regarding the other handhelds currently available (such as the PSP and the GP2X), and the “openness” of those systems to “homebrew” development. I left the following comment, which I feel fairly well summarizes the state of development on the PSP:

I’m a PSP developer, and I must admit that while getting documentation for the SDK is tough, there are more than enough examples around for anyone with common sense to pick up on the API fairly quickly. Plus, the folks at the ps2dev.org forum are exceptionally helpful (as long as your question isn’t along the lines of ‘what’s a for loop?’)

PSP development at this point (and probably forever) is very much an exercise in reverse engineering, even for the client C/C++ developer (as opposed to the brilliant minds who reverse-engineered the SDK). This explains the handful of applications/emulators that actually make use of WiFi and/or the ME processor. That said, PSP development is highly rewarding, if only in a personal sense.

That said, I wish the Pandora folks good luck. I’m a huge proponent of open-source software, and if Pandora succeeds, perhaps Sony will be persuaded to make the PSP more open to development, and maybe release an SDK.

Comments are welcome.

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Posted in Development, Rant | Comments Off

Open-source emulator ports

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

While porting an emulator, often times it’s helpful to see how authors of other ports handle certain challenges. Over time, a number of small issues have prompted me to look for possible answers in other applications.

Quite often, source code for a similar port is freely available. Too often, however, it’s not. The surprising thing is that the people who hide the source code aren’t the authors of the emulator – it’s the authors of the port.

As someone who works off of open-source (not necessarily by any official definition) projects, I welcome all private developers to use my code and learn from it–my only request is that copied code is given proper credit.

I would like to see all authors that port open-source software release their code. This is especially relevant to the PSP subculture, as the availability of documentation is relatively scarce. Your work will help others, and will gain your port more popularity, as others will acknowledge your contribution.

Hiding code for a pending “cleanup” (which frequently, never happens) shouldn’t be reason enough to hide it. Even kludgy code is better than no code.

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Posted in Rant | 2 Comments »