Open Source You Can Use, June 2009 EditionOpen Source You Can Use, June 2009 Edition

This month's catch: the cutting- (bleeding?-) -edge editions of Chrome and VirtualBox, and an HTML editor comes back from the dead.

If you're curious about Google's Chrome, odds are you've installed it side-by-side with your existing browser of choice rather than replaced it outright. To that end, you might be interested in giving the current Chrome 3 beta a test-drive. The download link and package comes courtesy of LiberKey.com; you can try out this edition without actually installing it. Handy if you already have an existing Chrome install and you don't want to disturb that either.

[UPDATE: I've been informed that LiberKey.com is a known open source violator, thanks to John T. Haller, the fellow behind the excellent PortableApps open source software collection. His words: "[they are] definitely not open source and don't appear to have permission to repackage many of those applications. Even the Chromium build you linked to has multiple closed source EXEs within it as well as encrypted configuration files." I've left in the download links for reference, but at this point I strongly advise against using anything from that collection for these and other reasons.]

Virtual computing becomes all the more useful as more cores and more memory become available to everyone, and the free-'n-open VirtualBox is doing its best to stay on top of all that. Version 3 is now in a public beta 1 edition for those who want to test out the hot new features, like SMP support for guests. Despite Sun's shaky status lately, it's thrilling to see this project moving forward as aggressively as it does.

Another project that I thought had withered on the vine a while back but which seems to be getting a rejuvenative shot in the arm is the open source web editor KompoZer. It's now in its 0.8 branch thanks to what appears to be a newly-active developer. Here's hoping there will be a 1.0 at last before too much longer.

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