| The 12 News Days of Xmas 07 - July |
| Friday, 28 December 2018 | |||
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July is the month when holidays get into full swing - it makes you wonder when we ever get any work done? But some of us were clearly doing things. Google is a mystery but you can count on it backing more than one horse in any given race and so it is with mobile operating systems. Not content with Android, ChromeOS and its new Fuchsia, it has now invested in a fork of the now dead Firefox OS. I thought Firefox OS was a great idea that was mishandled and had performance issues. I'm glad that KaiOS is making use of the code base, but after this announcement nothing more has been heard - perhaps next year? Google is backing another phone operating system, as if Android, Fuchsia and ChromeOS weren't enough. But there is good reason for this move. KaiOS is different. In 2018 someone started to give money to open source. The first donation was to the Gnome foundation, but later in the year there were more. Who is this anonymous donor and will money make the projects better? Tuesday 10 July Thanks to a donation of up to $1,000,000 over the next two years the GNOME Foundation is recruiting for four positions including one for a core developer of the GTK+ toolkit and another for a DevOps Engineer/SysAdmin. July saw the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Apple App store. A time for celebration for some, but for others it was the day the freedom of coding died. Ten years of the App Store - is it time to celebrate? Or is it time to reflect back on what we have lost and what has been gained?
Trouble at the Python mill. It all started innocently enough with PEP 527 and some lively to-and-fro. I hadn't seen the Python community argue quite as much in a while, but a day later the news of Guido van Rossum's departure from the role as Benevolent Dictator For Life still came as a shock. It took until the end of the year for the Python community to figure out what to do without him and it clearly isn't going to be as good as having Guido as BDFL. Watch what happens next year. Wednesday 11 July You would think with a language as old as Python there wouldn't be much left to get excited about, but over the past few months PEP-572, a proposal to add a new feature, has been raising the blood pressure of the Python community. Soon after the news of PEP 572 and the turmoil it caused, we now have the announcement that Python's BDFL is taking a permanent vacation from the job. Where now Python? Google's Map API sent many a small project looking for an alternative. The fact of the matter is that if you want all of the bells-and-whistles that Maps has you are out of luck. This isn't a monopoly but it isn't far from one. Google has changed the pricing and access model for its Google Maps Platform APIs. From July 16, users will have to pay more for map accesses, and all projects will have to have an official API key linked to a credit card.
Google seems to be preparing all sorts of exit plans for its involvement in Android and mostly we tend to think that this is all due to Oracle and its lawsuit, but in July the EU managed to strike another blow by applying a large fine for antitrust contravention. A little later in the year we discovered how Google would respond - by charging for Play services.
We were already concerned about the impact on the future of Android of the still ongoing Oracle v Google lawsuit. Now Google has been fined €4.3 billion ($5 billion) by the European Commission for breaking its antitrust regulation and If it doesn't comply with the EU's strictures within 90 days, it will face a daily fine of $15 million. Can Android emerge unscathed? And on the 25th Google made HTTP unattractive to everyone by flagging it as "not secure". As I said before - who elected Google boss of the Internet? A milestone ... but not the one you might think. Today someone took control of the web in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. TypeScript was updated a few times over the course of the year, but version 3.0 was a full increment. Although many are of the opinion that it is indeed a better JavaScript, the new year brings the prospect of Web Assembly and this changes everything. The latest release of TypeScript has been released. Version 3.0 has improved project reference support, a new 'unknown' type, and the ability to use tuples in parameter lists.
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 04 January 2019 ) |
