flock
Spotted this on the Freenode #microformats channel:
[22:46] factoryjoe: hey all
[22:46] factoryjoe: flock is live
[22:46] factoryjoe: go get it
and at the time I didn't pay any attention to it as I was reading some information on Maven 2 (more on that later). Later on tho, I spotted some chatter about it on #divmod (also Freenode) and they were talking about it, so I figured what the heck.
The particulars of what flock is can be found on their site. It already comes in all the usual flavours: OS X, Linux and Windows and the OS X installer was a drag-n-drop dmg file - pretty simple.
Doing some basic google work revealed that they are using Mozilla code as their base with all of their additional code (to date) released GPL - yea Open Source! If you want to read about the details of why, one of the founders has a blog entry about it:
Forking
Flock is not interested in forking the Mozilla code-base. I have worked for the Mozilla project and know first-hand that the project has attracted some serious hacker talent. One of the most appealing aspects of building on the Mozilla platform is that we can build on top of a platform that is designed, developed, and maintained by top engineering talent at Mozilla, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Google and hundreds of community volunteers. Flock is a small startup, and our business model is premised on being able to build on top of all that work. In architecting our software, build systems and engineering processes, we have given considerable thought to how our code will be able to evolve alongside the Mozilla code, without forking it. We are trying to pay particular attention to this in areas where we are doing things slightly different from Firefox. For example, in the area of bookmarks, we implemented on top of the Firefox bookmarks architecture, while integrating social bookmarks.
It's cool to see that people are starting to realize that there is a lot of stable and mature code in the Open Source realm and it makes sense to build on top of it.
Anywho, I plan on messing around with Flock soon enough, but you will probably find plenty of reviews and other deeper looks into it by people with more free time than myself right now :)
Myself, it's back to figuring out how to migrate our java projects to Maven 2 and I really need to find out who to complain to in the Apache world about some of the breakage and just plain mis-leading information I've been finding in the Maven web-space.