It would be a bit of a stretch to claim that Barack Obama won the 2008 election because his website ran open source software while John McCain’s ran on proprietary software. But what is not a stretch at all is that Barack Obama’s campaign built a powerful synergy between grass-roots politics and grass-roots technology, while presenting what many consider to be the most disciplined campaign of any candidate in modern history.

That combination of synergetic innovation and single-minded discipline produced this amazing commentary from conservative commentator Alex Castellanos on CNN’s election night coverage, captured here by YouTube:

For those who’d like to do their homework and understand Castellanos’s sources, the book he references is The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The connection between the failing industrial model practiced by companies like Microsoft compared with the organic open source development model is detailed in a whitepaper I published in 2006 titled Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020?. Who knew that we’d only have to wait two more years before the logic that paper presents would become a mainstream explanation of a mainstream shift in American culture, identity, politics, and economic potential?

Congratulations to President-elect, Barack Obama!

But Open Source has much more to deliver to this President and to the nation, in terms of reforming Washington and our Federal government. One of the strongest criticisms made against Barack Obama during his campaign is that he consistently said that he would go through the Federal budget “line-by-line” and cut wasteful spending, but he never gave any specifics. The open source-based application http://USAspending.gov was implemented after Congress passed a law in 2006 saying that by the start of 2008, every government contract for every government agency (except those that are classified) had to be online, with information disclosing costs, sponsors, contractors, etc. By using open source software and an open source-friendly governance model, the program was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget. And everybody in the world can now inspect the Federal budget on a line-by-line basis.

Since we have been encouraged to participate in this great new democratic experiment, with a President who welcomes our participation, I suggest that we use this great application to help our incoming President identify some of the spending that might best be cut. It’s something we can all do, and it’s something that we should all do. With many eyes, all (budget) bugs are shallow…

Source : http://opensource.org/node/372

Ruboto (JRuby on Android) is a platform for developing full stand-alone apps for Android using the Ruby language and libraries. It includes support libraries and generators for creating projects, classes, tests, and more. The complete APIs of Android, Java, and Ruby is available to you using the Ruby language.

New in version 0.9.0:

This release introduces the ability for Ruby classes to directly subclass Java classes.

You need JRuby 1.7.0 or later included in your project. Generate your project with the --with-jruby option, or include JRuby in an existing Ruboto project with the ruboto gen jruby command.

An updated RubotoCore package based on JRuby 1.7 will be released later this year.

Features:

• Issue #250 Allow Ruby classes to subclass Java classes
• Issue #255 Remove “ruboto_generate” in favor of direct subclassing of Java classes.
• Issue #257 Stop support for updating projects with Android SDK 13 and older directly
• Issue #272 Add –force option to “ruboto gen app”
• Issue #274 * app name must be capitalized, so force it.

Bugfixes:

• Issue #251 Fails to load app named like org.ruboto.examples.app1
• Issue #265 Stored test app fixture must handle different bundles

Internal:

• Issue #171 Update test project using the –subprojects parameter

Support:

• Issue #152 ANT fails on Windows
• Issue #267 Avoid Users having to install Ruboto-Core apk
• Issue #269 No documentation on how to create a notification in Ruboto

Pull requests:

• Issue #263 Edited ruboto.rake to check for Window host_os
• Issue #270 Fail to compile when Jruby JARs are included
• Issue #271 ‘net/http’ is missing
• Issue #275 * app name must be capitalized, so force it.

You can find a complete list of issues here:

• https://github.com/ruboto/ruboto/issues?state=closed&milestone=15

Installation:

To use Ruboto, you need to install a Java JDK, the Android SDK, Apache ANT, and a Ruby implementation. Then do (possibly as root)

gem install ruboto 

To create a project do

ruboto gen app --package <your.package.name> 

You can find an introductory tutorial at https://github.com/ruboto/ruboto/wiki/Getting-started-with-Ruboto

If you have any problems or questions, come see us at http://ruboto.org/

Enjoy!

The Ruboto Team http://ruboto.org/

Courtesy : https://github.com/ruboto/ruboto/wiki/Ruboto-0.9.0-release-doc