Day: April 5, 2013

Apache has released an Open Source meeting platform ties into Asterisk PBX.

Apache OpenMeetings hits first Open Source Top Level Project Release

“There is alot of excitement in the open source community about the emerging WebRTC standard that will enable browsers to become full real-time communications tools.

It’s important to remember though that there are other open source tools and efforts that are already somewhat mature to enable open source real time communications via a browser. Though OpenMeetings (unlike WebRTC which is plug-in free) can and does benefit from the use of plugins (esp SWF/Flash).

This week the Apache OpenMeetings project released version 2.1 of its open source web conferencing platform. The OpenMeetings 2.1 release is the first release of the project since it graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project, in December of 2012.

The new OpenMeetings 2.1.0 release provides improved integration with the open source Asterisk 11 PBX, which is required on the back-end to fully enable some of the web conferencing capabilities. The improved integration deliver enhanced sound and video.

As a full web conferencing solution, OpenMeetings also has chat capabilities. With the 2.1.0 release private chat amongst web conference users is now supported.”

Two Lucasarts games by Raven have been released to Open Source!

After LucasArts closure, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source

Reported on Ars Technica:
“We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995’s Dark Forces.

‘We loved and appreciated the experience of getting to make Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy for LucasArts,’ noted Raven in a statement. ‘As a gift to the persistently loyal fanbase for our Jedi games and in memory of LucasArts, we are releasing the source code for both games for people to enjoy and play with.’

The two titles were very popular at release, with Jedi Outcast featuring one of the first deathmatch multiplayer experiences set in the Star Wars universe. According to Kotaku Australia, the code released this morning is only for the single-player portion of both games. This is typical of source code releases for major titles, as the networking code used in multiplayer often uses licensed or proprietary chunks of code that cannot be licensed as open source. Both games are available under the GPLv2 license.

We’re working on our own ‘Ars remembers LucasArts’ tribute post, which should be up later today.”