Three new resources for Free and Open Source Software project governance were released into beta today (and they are all free, as in beer). The first is a library of links covering everything from process development through to politics.

With an open source project like OI, contributors come and go all the time, but Alasdair’s reasons for quitting paint a very dark picture for the future of the project, certainly not a good advertisement for OI. From his email of resignation Alasdair sees the project as worthless and as good as dead, writing that:

The open-source development model can can be powerful and incredibly beneficial for any software development project. Yet, even most open-source projects do not follow this style of development. Today, I want to talk a bit about why this is the case, and what can be done to set your project on the right path to enjoy the advantages of the open-source development process.

As you may know I was quite keen on the ideas and potential of Google’s Wave project and like many thought it a bit of a shame when they closed the project. ... Google said the project would live on but details were scratchy.

«For the next Decoding Digital Humanities meeting, I’d like to propose reading two fundamental documents of the free software movement, Richard Stallman’s Gnu Project and the Gnu GPL (General Public License)...» — via Two Gnus: The Gnu Project and the Gnu GPL —

For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption.

Songbird is an opensource project focused on building a cross-platform audio station. Linux was at the heart of the project, but as you may know, the company behind the project recently decided to drop its support. The good news is that there are several very good audio players available for Linux.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers.