The Blue Obelisk mailing list has seen an interesting discussion on ambiguity in the term ‘open source’, triggered by a study by Beth Ritter Guth. For example, Jean-Claude Bradley performs ‘open source’ science (see his Useful Chemistry blog) who is not opposed to using closed source software, while the Blue Obelisk is about ‘open source’ software.

OpenSource, OpenData and OpenStandards are not as strong in chemoinformatics as they are in bioinformatcs, where it is common knowledge that sharing is a good. Today, the JCIM published on the web an article about the Blue Obelisk movement, which promotes these three idealogies. Several open source projects participate, amongst which the CDK, Jmol, JOELib, OpenBabel, Chemical Markup Language, Bioclipse and Kalzium.

I was very pleased to read today that Kalzium, one of the projects that participate in the Blue Obelisk, got awarded! Cheers, Carsten!

Tobias commited Jumbo 5.0 to CDK CVS, so that the CDK is now again up to date with the latest CML library. Note that Jumbo 5.0 requires Java 5.0. At first all JUnit tests seems to work, but apparently the CML2Writer tests were skipped because they were only run when Java 1.4 was found. I updated the test for the a appropriate Java version, and then it turned out that most tests fail.

After requests I added yesterday more visible the RSS and Atom feeds for the Planet Blue Obelisk. They are linked in the menu on the right, and as alternative links to the document. These should show up in most recent webbrowsers as feed icon in the lower right corner of the browser window. It is often an orange icon. I also added a ‘Leave a comment’ link to encourage people to leave comments on items.

Today I setup a blog planet for Blue Obelisk members. First I tried Chumpologica but it did not read Atom feeds. Next in line was Planet , which turned out to be used by many big planet sites, like Planet Debian . It also works with Atom feeds in general, but not well with Atom 1.0 feeds, like that of Carsten. After some googling I found a patched version which did the job.

I have just enabled CIA statistics for the Blue Obelisk SVN : /stats/project/cdk/blueobelisk . It’s done by using the ciabot_svn.py client script and hooked into the $REPOS/hooks/post-commit hook on the SVN server. The client script is slightly hacked to hard code the module name, which otherwise did not show up on the chat channel.