02.12.09
Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Fraud, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer at 1:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
THIS SUBJECT is not particularly new to us, but for those who are new to it, Microsoft is quickly approaching debt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and those who studied the company’s finances have already accused it of creating a giant pyramid scheme. We too have gathered a lot of compelling evidence over the years.
What’s rather interesting today in the news is this report from an accumulation of pro-Microsoft figures in IDG, which is biased in favour of Microsoft for obvious reasons [1, 2]. It states in a reputable news site:
We’ll give you a sneak peek of the third post in the series, a candid interview with an outspoken shareholder who likens Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates to fraudster Bernard Madoff.
They don’t name the person, but the answer ought to arrive pretty soon. The article is mainly a reference to a group of Microsoft shareholders who are calling for Steve Ballmer to be sacked. This is far from the first such call and here is a direct reference to the latest.
If you are a Microsoft shareholder and are frustrated with Mr. Ballmer and Microsoft’s poor performance, we are seeking your support. Shareholders through activism have the ability to effect change. Now is the time to effect change at Microsoft.
Given the earlier exit of yet another Vice President from Microsoft, what might we see next? Ballmer is almost the last man standing among the old chiefs, many of whom left, specially quite recently [1, 2] as the economy — not just Microsoft — declines due to greed and fraud. █
Related accumulations:
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Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Should the only one allowed to collaborate with Intel, the world’s top supreme chip maker, be Microsoft?
Bill Gates Deposition Transcript
FOR a brief moment back in 2007, it was possible to grab a copy of highly confidential E-mails from Microsoft. Having taken a look at those which relate to Intel, we have already published:
From the posts above we are able reach several conclusions:
- Microsoft is actively trying to derail simple Linux support (mostly drivers) at Intel
- Microsoft insists that Intel should not use GNU/Linux even if it’s suited to the task (Intel chooses productivity over faithfulness to only one vendor, i.e. practicality over exclusivity)
- Intel has had bad experiences with Windows and its clients likewise (Intel’s own clients also had bad experiences with Windows). A quote that comes to mind is: ‘The Linux kernel has reached a level of maturity where it mostly goes unnoticed and acts like an “invisible magician in the background”, according to Linus Torvalds.’
Today we take a look at Exhibit px06632 (1999) [PDF]. It is particularly interesting because it shows the inherent anti-competitive attitude of Microsoft’s chairman.
This conversation starts with Microsoft’s Jim Allchin mailing Intel’s Albert Yu. Steve Stanzel responds to Allchin regarding a “joint release/announcement” from the two companies. Allchin wants the Intel affair with Microsoft to be seen publicly. He writes back:
I didn’t really discuss the marketing per se at this level, I would like a joint release if possible.
Steve Stanzel about the not-so-(practically)-platform-agnostic position at Intel:
1 FIRST TO BOOT or FIRST PUBLIC DEMO
It is our understanding, you want us to demonstrate technical leadership by staking the claim ‘first OS to boot on Merced’. Regardless of who is first, the Intel people we work with are under very clear direction to OS-agnostic, it’s almost their mantra. Although they will be the first to admit that ‘others don’t come close the work we have done with Microsoft’ they are unwilling to support any first claims. From a PR perspective, we feel we have good news by being the only OS used in the first public demonstration of Merced silicon.
ACTION REQUESTED If you want us to promote first boot rather than first public demo claims, we need your help at a higher level inside Intel
They are agreeing on a press release and Stanzel writes:
ACTION REQUESTED Will you approve announce 1H00 availability of the beta? Separately in your quote would you approve the following statement? “Microsoft is committed to delivering Windows 2000 64-bit, developer tools and associated Back Office applications concurrent with Merced system availability.” We intend to wrap this up with Intel today. This draft of the release still has first to boot claims in place.
There’s hesitation from Allchin who cannot so easily commit, so then he involves Brian Valentine too.
Craig Beilinson points out:
Jim – Just to clarify where we need some help:
If you feel strongly that we need to get the “first to boot” message in this release, then we will need your help talking to the right people at Intel.
Currently, Intel is pushing back very hard on publically saying that we were “first to boot” on Merced, giving us lots of lip service about being OS-agnostic. They have, however, bought off on publically saying that we will be the “first public demo” of Merced at the upcoming IDF.
This means that Intel unfairly prioritises Windows but it publicly denies this. It’s then that Jim Allchin approaches Bill Gates for his opinion and Gates replies thusly, by ultimately saying:
In any case Intel should not just treat us as one of many. I feel strongly about that.
In other words, Gates believes that Intel should treat Windows specially, despite Intel’s policies (lip service at least).
It’s one thing for Intel to collaborate with a software company but totally another to collaborate with criminal companies. One just needs to look at what Microsoft staff and its decision-makers did (the lesser known truths). █
Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft – exhibit px06632, as text
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Novell at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
BEFORE Volker Smid left Novell [1, 2, 3], he had been trying to downplay severity of layoffs, which will soon turn out to be pretty serious. Smid was one of the top seniors at Novell, so the way he left bodes poorly as a reflectant upon Novell’s situation. Smid just ran away and we realise that “at the moment, things are going out of hand,” according to sources.
Smid left to join H-P and it was very odd. It was also unplanned. When a question arose about “big bumps” there was deafening silence because Novell prefers not to talk about it. Smid went on his Christmas holidays and never returned. He just disappeared and this only became evident when popular news avenues covered his departure more officially. It’s the usual routine of hiding layoffs or high-profile departures. It’s all about controlling customers’ perceptions and it was the same just weeks ago when Novell’s UK leadership left as well [1, 2].
Novell’s PR Director is using journalists to deny further layoffs right now. Microsoft did the same thing a few months before its layoffs broke out. Microsoft lied to the press. Novell might too because they behave alike. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft, Patents, Steve Ballmer at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
MICROSOFT HAS been losing top staff for quite some time now with some key examples of vice presidents leaving about a month ago. They leave very, very quietly, but we’ve just spotted the departure of yet another vice president. It is, as usual, announced only as an appointment of a replacement.
Microsoft said Tuesday it had appointed Simon Sproule as the company’s new corporate vice president of corporate communications.
[...]
Sproule replaces Larry Cohen, who left Microsoft to work as Bill Gates’ chief of staff.
So who was Larry Cohen?
Here is his involvement (as recipient) in planting positive Vista coverage a few years back and also in spinning anti-GNU/Linux programmes. More recently we showed how he handed over "talking points" to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. According to the above report, he will be serving as “Bill Gates’ chief of staff.” What does that mean? Is Bill Gates a company now? Jeff Raikes recently left his top position at Microsoft to serve another division of the Gates movement. It’s not really about help (as he himself admitted), but it’s disguised as just that.
Is there more of a political movement growing outside Microsoft Corporation? We are aware of other offshoots of the Microsoft ecosystem, such as the division dedicated to patent extortion, headed by Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold. Gates is still there with him. █
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Posted in Africa, Apple, Europe, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“My message to the patent world is: Either get back to the doctrines of forces of nature or face the elimination of your system.” —Hartmut Pilch, Paraflows 06
Linux
A LOT OF things have been happening recently in the patent scene and they directly affect GNU/Linux too. We’ll go through them very quickly because there is more to cover than time permits.
The notion of making money from products you do not even make is ludicrous enough, but when this money is extracted from GNU/Linux, then it becomes even outrageous.
Call me pessimistic if you wish: Bad habits take a long time to die. Sometimes, they don’t even disappear at all. They keep on surviving. This time, it seems that Microsoft has decided to roam around and privateer against anything that looks even remotely like a company that could use patents on software. This is how Microsoft announced an agreement on “Intellectual Property” with Brother, focused on printing technology. Now, as Matt Asay has rightfully pointed out, Microsoft does not manufacture nor design printers, but the hell with it! Printers are like the rest, a whole bunch of patentable paraphenalia anyone with capital should invest into. Note: The point is not to invest in printers themselves, it is to patent everything you can imagine is patentable.
This has already been covered and/or discussed in:
- Microsoft Distorts the Linux and Virtualisation Markets
- Boycott Brother Industries
- Microsoft: Deal with Brother Similar to Novell’s
- Patents Roundup: Apple, Microsoft Trolls, and Linux
- Microsoft & Acacia’s Extortions Roadshow
There are some newer articles about it:
- Microsoft and Brother Sign Cross-Licensing Deal
- Microsoft, Brother sign patent-sharing deal
- Brother forges patent deal with Microsoft
The deal is the latest in a growing list of diverse, and occasionally controversial, patent-sharing agreements that Microsoft has secured in recent years. These include deals with Kyocera, Nikon and Novell.
Here is another little nugget about “Linux Defenders” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and a new article about Peer-to-Patent, which resembles it.
Patenting used to be a lonely pursuit. Patent applicants would work in isolation, secrecy being their only protection before the patent application was filed. The patent would be granted or rejected in a pas de deux involving just applicant and examiner. Once a patent was granted, licensing battles were also fought mano a mano while other potential infringers watched anxiously from the sidelines.
Patent Deform
There is some alarming news from Europe where it can now be pretty much confirmed that the Community patent is to serve as a back door to software patenting in the EU. Benjamin has all the detailed reasoning/proof.
The Council seeks to legalise software patents with the Community Patent, says Mr Pellegrini, ex-advisor of Michel Rocard, former MEP and rapporteur on the rejected software patent directive. The ultimate goal of this move is to create central caselaw on software patents by a specialized patent court.
Over in South Africa, the pro-software patent lobby is trying to find new creative ways to achieve something similar. [via Digital Majority]
Burrell further suggests the Copyright Act and Patents Act do not provide adequate protection for computer programs and that South African courts should adopt the approach outlined in the “Guidelines for Examiners in the European Patent Office”.
Fortunately, as will be seen later, there have been many cases on this subject matter in the US and Europe, in particular, and substantial progress has been made in clarifying what similar or identical wording to that found in these sections means. Recent cases and patent office practice notes in the UK have also clarified the position there. The net result is that computer software is largely patentable in foreign jurisdictions, and we can extrapolate to some extent from such jurisdictions to SA.
Microsoft
Microsoft has chosen CNET for its latest propaganda, yet again [1, 2]. It’s seeding the “innovation” deception via the Ina Fried talking head and smears it around ZDNet for good measure. The Microsoft ‘yes men’ follow, as expected. Having put the promotional message in place (e.g. patents against Linux), the pro-Microsoft crowd is intended to fuel what what had been planted, so after a while, not just ‘yes men’ cover the unimportant story, not truly realising that it’s an investor relations stunt.
Microsoft gets its 10,000th U.S. patent
[...]
The company in 2003 began a commitment to broaden IP licensing efforts and has since signed more than 500 licensing agreements with companies of all sizes and types, Microsoft said. The company’s 2006 IP agreement with Novell, though, has been a controversial one, raising ire in the Linux community over whether Novell made too big a concession to Microsoft over Linux IP issues.
The only prominent coverage that contains some sobering morsels of sanity is this one.
Microsoft: Not much to show for 10,000 patents
[...]
[I]nnovation is what hasn’t actually done Microsoft much good, at least as measured in terms of new product lines that generate material amounts of revenue for the company. It still gathers the vast majority of its revenue from Windows and Office, two product lines that have only incrementally improved (or, in the case of Vista, degenerated) over the past decade or two.
[...]
Companies and people buy products, not patents. I’m sure that 10,000 patents is a nice symbolic achievement for Microsoft, but 10,000 products would be better.
Microsoft’s own patent troll is still receiving flak for trying to ‘engineer’ material that justifies what he does.
According to Xchange, a former Microsoft executive has underwritten a study aimed at patent trolls. The study will be aimed at determining who is to blame for the large amount of patent suits -filed by non-practicing entities – that have hit the U.S. courts in the last decade.
Why blame someone else? Nathan has already resorted to outright extortion to achieve goals of profiteering, which makes him a huge part of this problem.
Google
GNU/Linux-powered phones are being stifled by Apple. And yet again, Apple is pretty much attacking Linux-based products [1, 2, 3] for no reason other than expanding or securing a monopoly (not yet a monopoly, but they can hope for a monopoly on a feature). Here is some coverage about the latest:
Google’s smart phone may have been a little smarter were it not for an Apple intervention, according to sources
As a legal showdown between Apple and Palm mounts over Palm’s use of multi-touch technology, which Apple recently gained a patent on, new details are emerging about Apple’s efforts to prevent its competitors from offering multi-touch.
Did Apple ask Google not to put multi-touch capabilities on the Android-based G1? Rumor has it that Apple may have approached Google while the company was developing the G1 with HTC, and asked the search giant not to put gesture capabilities like pinching on the device. The news comes from an anonymous “Android insider” who spoke with Venture Beat.
In other news, Google paid Microsoft for the ‘privilege’ to merely interoperate and Microsoft uses this as an opportunity to crow about “innovation” all over the press.
Google today launched Google Sync, a service that allows people to easily move and synchronize contacts and calendar items between devices. The company is licensing patents from Microsoft “covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers,” according to a Microsoft statement.
This is also covered in Slashdot and it’s bad news for reasons we've been through before. █
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02.11.09
Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
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A competitive market, in which a number of producers offer a variety of similar products that all have their own unique selling points, is good for consumers. That’s because producers gain customers only by tailoring products to match consumers’ demands. Or put another way, consumers can look at a selection of competing products and choose the one that’s best for them. Innovation by one producer is followed by others’ imitations, so over time the overall quality of all the product offerings improves.
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Recently, online poker room Bodog unveiled an Instant Play option designed for Mac and Linux players as well as Windows users who might find it helpful. The Instant Play software loads right in your web browser using Flash. In fact, it took me just 15 seconds to open it. It provides the easiest outlet for Mac poker players to be able to compete with many of the bells and whistles of their Windows counterparts without having to hunt down a program like Parallels or Boot Camp. The Instant Play option, however, does have a few drawbacks.
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Inspired by Roku’s awesome Netflix video download box and impressed with Boxee’s free A/V media center platform, it was merely a matter of time before I’d create the BoxeeBox, an Ubuntu-powered HTPC that I call my “one box to rule them all.” Here’s how it’s done.
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In order to save them some time and possibly prevent them from causing a devastating BSOD I’ve decided to collect their comments and publish them here, so they just need to reference this page. Here we go.
1. You will have to waste hours learning a new OS and applications.
(So what is the difference?)
2. I like Windows, it works for me.
(Writing this blog with pins stuck in my face works for me, but I can imagine more comfortable ways to do it.)
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An educational software organization in Germany is pilot testing an educational software system based on virtualized Debian/KDE desktops. Kreisbildstelle Stade’s “Desque” system serves up virtualized desktops over “standard” broadband connections, letting students and teachers access their desktops from home or school, the organization says.
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That was a real question, asked by someone considering buying a new computer. It surprised me: I’ve been seeing more people asking if they should consider Mac or Linux (mostly Mac, very little Linux), but this question goes way beyond that. It made me pause; the answer is complicated.
It’s certainly not “dumb” to buy a Windows machine today. I have to quickly qualify that by saying that I think most people would be better off with a Mac, except (of course) those that need certain Windows only apps on a daily basis. Even those folks could use VM software to run the Microsoft stuff but I wouldn’t recommend that right now unless it’s casual use.
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Way back when I was a wire jerker and learning about electronics there was explained to me a phenomenon called the domino effect. This means that when one part of an electronic component fails, the surrounding parts also fail. Just like a row of falling domino’s, hence the name.
The same thing can also happen in software. When programs are tightly bound with each other and one program fails it effects all other programs. On some operating systems the only way to recover from that situation is to reboot the computer.
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SGI
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We are a leader in HPC and data management. We sell a broad line of mid-range to high-end computing servers, data storage and visualization systems and software that provides additional differentiation to these offerings as well as on a stand alone basis. In addition, we provide customer support and professional services related to our products. We are a leading developer of enterprise-class, high-performance features for the Linux operating system. We provide our customers with a standard Linux operating environment combined with our differentiated Linux extensions that improve performance, simplify system management and provide a more robust development environment.
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Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC) is in a category all by itself when it comes to massive globally shared main memory and globally addressable memory on SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 systems. With numerous installations in the 4 TB range, and a number more in the 8 TB range, the groundbreaking scalability of SGI systems extends to 21 TB of globally addressable main memory at customer sites. This is over five times the size of memory that other vendors can offer today. The system is designed to accommodate 128 terabytes of globally shared memory under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system! The system may also be partitioned among multiple instances of Linux and provide globally addressable shared memory among OS instances via SGI’s unique NUMAlink(R) interconnect technology.
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Kernel Space
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NVIDIA has released the 180.29 Linux driver for x86 and x86_64 platforms. The release notes list quite a few changes, but in fact they are just copied forward from the earlier beta releases.
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The Nouveau driver has seen a lot of progress in the past year when it comes to new NVIDIA GPU support, improved 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration working for some GeForce series, and various other improvements. All 3D work for this open-source community-generated driver for NVIDIA graphics card is being done within Gallium3D.
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Desktop Environments
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Over the last weekend, the Plasma team held their second meeting in Porto, Portugal. The meeting was organised by Akademy Award winner Nuno Pinheiro inviting the Akademy Award-winning Plasma team to his home country. The meeting was kindly hosted by the Departamento de Engenharia Informatica (Department of Software Engineering) of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. The Plasma team (and most probably many of the KDE users) are grateful for being provided this opportunity to collaborate on the desktop.
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Distributions
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As such, Mint is an up-to-date desktop Linux. It’s based on the Linux 2.6.27 kernel and uses Gnome 2.24 and X.org 7.4 for its graphical interface. Mint comes in two versions. The first, the Main Edition, is the one that comes with support for multimedia codices and drivers for proprietary hardware. The other, the Universal Edition, doesn’t include any proprietary multimedia or hardware support.
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Don’t count out PCLinuxOS just yet. The Ripper Gang announced today the release of the third public beta of PCLinuxOS 2009. According to them, the series of beta ISOs are released under the name of N1PTT to honor the loss of Robert Green, a long time friend of PCLOS community who recently died of cancer.
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Red Hat
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Sometimes The VAR Guy is a little slow. Red Hat has achieved two important company milestones, according to CEO Jim Whitehurst (pictured), that The VAR Guy nearly overlooked. It took some time for our resident blogger to realize the significance of Whitehurst’s statement. Take a look for yourself.
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The next few months should see three supported and modular versions of Red Hat’s JBoss application server rolled out, scaling from web to full enterprise-class scenarios.
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Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.
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Devices/Embedded
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PC BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies announced a new ARM version of its new previously x86-only Linux fast-boot add-on. HyperSpace has now been optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8 architecture running on netbooks, and is initially targeted at Freescale Semiconductor’s new i.MX515 system-on-chip (SoC), says Phoenix.
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The Dell Latitude E4200 and E4300 laptop computers run a version of Linux as an “instant-on” operating system running on hardware with flash memory that is separate to the main Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system running on an Intel Core2 Duo processor. In theory, users can do email and other light applications under Linux, Mozilla and so on, and only switch to the Windows operating system and the Intel processor for the heavier applications.
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Project Pandora is looking increasingly more like it actually might result in providing us with a real world, actual device to play with (ie, not be over-ambitious vapourware after all) while the GP2X Wiz finally gets a commercial release over here in early March. Stay tuned for our first hands on impressions with both of these tasty open source handheld gaming consoles as soon as we manage to get hold of them.
Elseware, Atari founder and ‘Pong’ man Nolan Bushnell is to be awarded a BAFTA Fellowship Award at next month’s gaming BAFTAs. Bushnell is only the second games designer to be honoured by the Academy in this way. He was also, as an aside, the founder of the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain in the US. A solid-gold FACT!
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Networking middleware vendor IP Infusion announced it will ship a new version of its Linux-compatible, carrier-grade networking software in April. ZebOS Network Platform 7.7 adds support for OpenSAF high-availability (HA) standards, as well as Provider Backbone Bridge-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), a technology aimed at large carrier Ethernet networks, says the company.
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Phones
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There had been speculation in the past that ZTE was working on a Google Android powered smartphone, possibly for T-Mobile, but we’ve heard little recently to support that notion.
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ACCESS China Inc., a subsidiary of ACCESS CO., LTD., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets, and NEC Electronics Corporation, a leading provider of semiconductor solutions, today announced that they have jointly developed a reference design for smartphones. This solution is compliant with the CDMA2000 1x mobile telecommunications standard and based on ACCESS Linux Platform(TM) mini, developed for price-sensitive and emerging markets, and NEC Electronics’ MP201 application processor.
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Sub-notebooks
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The Linux environment was a pleasure to use, and the quirks didn’t take long to get used to. The file structures are similar to what I’m used to seeing in XP, and the programs are close enough that I didn’t have any trouble working on the system. We haven’t run benchmarks on the Mini, so I can’t comment on its performance comparatively. However, Linux is less resource-intensive than the XP on our earlier review unit, which bodes well.
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The HP Mini MI netbook provides one of the slickest available Ubuntu GUIs. Hobbyists have now figured out how to install that pretty GUI on non-Mi platforms.
[...]
If you’re a Ubuntu user and are considering giving the theme a spin, make sure to check out the entire thread. Installation and use are not as clear-cut as you might hope and there is a real risk involved, particularly for users who are not experienced with these kinds of mods. You may have to do a little clean-up work on Open Office and a few other packages. But as one poster writes, ” I love this new look!” and you may too.
Free Software/Open Source
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For years now, there’s been talk brewing about the concept of Green IT. Pundits have predicted in years past that sustainable IT would be job one soon, really soon. Gartner said in 2007 that in 2008 it would be THE most important checklist item for IT managers. 2008 has come and gone, and I don’t remember hearing a whole lot about green-ness being the top priority for tech executives. Perhaps that has something to do with sustaining the company being more important than sustaining trees. In any case, it looks like green IT is still in the forefront of executive minds, and with a new administration it may become even more important even than Gartner said it would – it may become the law. So where does open source software fit into the mix? How green is the GPL? Pretty green, if you ask me. In fact, companies that already use open source software are well on the way to greening their IT departments.
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Rigs of Rods is going open source. How cool is that?
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OpenEdit DAM is a web-based, open source digital asset management solution integrated with web content management. Licensed under a royalty free, perpetual and transferable GNU LGPL license, OpenEdit is free to download and use, including all upgrades.
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Events
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The volunteer organisers of the “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” (FOSDEM 2009) demonstrated the fine art of scalability with a very well organised event. 250 talks for 5000 developers arriving from all over Europe, were held with very few problems. If such an event can have a general technical hot topic, then it was the omnipresent netbook and any number of Android mobiles: open source can slim down, be purged of non-essentials, start faster and look forward to a buoyant open future, running as a stable OS on many new small devices.
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This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers’ Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what’s hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future.
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SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, is returning to Los Angeles February 20th through 22nd. I’ve had the opportunity to attend the first event and a few more since then, including SCALE 6x. I look forward to SCALE 7x, and my schedule will allow me to attend the Friday sessions.
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Mozilla/Firefox
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This video is a demonstration of the Gestures Module for Mozilla Fennec browser that I’ve been working on the latest days. The video shows the engine working, along with user experience ideas and concepts that I believe to work well with a mobile device and a chromeless browser.
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In this issue…
* Firefox 3.1 beta 3 test week is on now!
* The new (draft) SeaMonkey vision
* New Mozilla Education weekly call
* Redesigning the Mozilla.org website
* Extension developer survey
* Graph server rewrite
* Ubiquity and Weave documentation
* Analytics and Firefox support (SUMO)
* New SUMO identity system
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Business
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I’m staring at my Netbook right now and I only have Google Chrome installed. It’s running Ubuntu, I’m using Google Docs – this is the first computer I’ve owned that Microsoft didn’t make a penny off of me. But I’m a consumer. The conclusion of the chapter is that you can’t compete with free.
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The buzz on open source is that it can slash IT costs and save budgets. Our Linux expert looks at where and how much can be saved with FOSS — and gives some caveats.
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Funding
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Mark Cuban’s Open-Source Funding Rules
1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
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Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and all-around rich guy, put an interesting offer on the table this week. Post your business idea on his blog and if he likes it, he’ll toss some cash your way to fund it.
Cuban expects people to comment on the business plans people come up with, and acknowledges that some plans might even get stolen. “That is the idea,” he says. “Call this an open source funding environment.”
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FSF
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Colin Turner is a dedicated Free Software activist and Fellowship member, working as a scientist and teacher at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has been advocating Free Software in schools and universities for many years and generously shared some of his experiences with us in this fourth instalment of our Fellowship interview series.
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Let me issue a disclaimer right off. Before I ever typed my first GNU/Linux command in a terminal the Free Software Foundation was fighting the good fight for free software and all the issues surrounding individual freedom and privacy both on and offline. All of us owe it a debt of gratitude for the work is has done and continues to do on behalf of the principles of a free society and free computing. It’s commitment to these things is unswerving but one of the down sides of this unremitting focus is the danger of a loss of perspective on certain campaigning issues. This article takes a look back at one in particular. DRM.
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Sun
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I believe Sun has an absolute right to compete with Linux, but its misuse of LAMP does it a disservice and can only serve to antagonize would-be customers who do very much care that their middleware stack runs on Linux. If Sun wants to market Glassfish Portfolio as an integrated LAMP stack it needs to come with Linux services (even if it is just for paying customers, as is the case with MySQL support).
Without Linux, it’s not LAMP.
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The platform, called Sun GlassFish Portfolio, features open source technologies that have been productized and pre-integrated. Besides the application server, Sun GlassFish Portfolio also is built on open source projects like the Apache Tomcat servlet container, the Ruby and PHP languages, and the Liferay Portal. The components have been tested and offer increased productivity and faster time to market, Sun said. Mission-critical environments and departmental applications can use the platform, the company said. All components of the suite except Sun Enterprise Manager are offered via open source.
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Government
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Open source software development in Russia is one of the most important directives for Igor Schegolev – the Head of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation. At a key meeting with Werner Knoblich, Red Hat Vice President for EMEA, he announced support for a Russian Fedora association and for Red Hat development in the Russian Federation. He also expressed support for open source infrastructure and applications, and the development of a repository for industry best practice.
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Licensing
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Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let’s try and make things clearer.
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Free trade? What kind of free do you mean? In the Open Source world, when people are talking about what the term “free software” means, a well-informed geek will tell you about the distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.
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Hardware
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To do this with software requires some complex mathematics called Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and that’s where the ‘open source’ part of this project comes in very handy.
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Office Suites/Applications
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If you work in a business environment then you know the value of the office application. And if you have ever thought about using Linux in your office you know there are boundaries to adoption. The good thing is those boundaries are growing smaller and smaller with every year. The reason those boundaries are shrinking isn’t dictated by an ever-improving kernel. Nope. The acceptance of Linux in the office is directly proportional to the amount of outstanding office applications available.
But how many people can actually rattle off the names of five linux-based office applications? I would venture to say not many. And that’s where I come in. In this article I will list five must-have office applications that will allow you to introduce Linux into your office. Naturally this list won’t be perfect for everyone. There will always be those with proprietary needs that are simply not met by Linux. But for those who needs are more standard, this list is just for you.
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Censorship
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Communications minister Stephen Conroy has named the first six ISPs that will take part in the Government’s trial of ISP side content filtering, and only one of them comes from the top ten.
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UPDATE: The House and Senate stimulus packages passed without copyright filtering language attached, but now the concern is that the language could return in the closed-door conference committee that works out the differences between the bills. Right now, we need you to contact those conferees and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.
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Clearly, a lobbyist whispering in Feinstein’s ear has taken Comcast’s now famous euphemism even further into the realm of nonsense.
According to Public Knowledge, Feinstein’s network management amendment did not find a home in the stimulus bill that landed on the Senate floor. But lobbyists speaking with the Washington DC-based internet watchdog said that California’s senior Senator is now hoping to insert this language via conference committee – a House-Senate pow-wow were bill disputes are resolved.
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The Tories have admitted a member of staff altered a Wikipedia entry on the artist Titian after a row between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
Leftovers
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A Brum snapper is a little annoyed with the BBC after it apparently borrowed a copyrighted snap from Flickr showing Birmingham’s crepuscular skyline and used it as a “live” news backdrop.
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The European Commission has given its strongest signal yet that it will hold the UK government to account for its failure to act over BT and Phorm’s secret and allegedly illegal internet monitoring trials in 2006 and 2007.
Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has again demanded answers from the UK as to why no enforcement action has been taken over the wiretapping and profiling of tens of thousands of BT broadband subscribers without any permission or notification. An unsatisfactory response could eventually land the government in the European Court of Justice.
Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day
Bdale Garbee, Hewlett Packard computer wizard and Debian lead 07 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in Boycott Novell at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell is Microsoft’s GPL ‘shadow’
Microsoft has pretty much admitted that it uses Novell to implement Free software ‘on behalf’ of Microsoft because the company from Redmond hates the GPL and constantly incites everyone against it. But Microsoft still needs the GPL in order to get ardent GPL supporters ‘addicted’ to its patents-encumbered APIs (e.g. Mono).
Those who are responsible for this work are occasionally working for Novell from inside Microsoft and Novell is even welcoming Microsoft employees to join Novell’s management [1, 2, 3]. This is how convergence is gradually achieved.
The class of convergence in this case is more like assimilation because Novell is adopting Microsoft APIs and constantly adapting to its new paymasters (Microsoft, in essence, pays some of the wages at Novell). It’s not a reciprocal relationship because output does not flow the other way around.
Novell seems to have just paid for a press release to celebrate the 1.0 release of Microsoft's "pet project".
The Mono® Project, an open-source initiative sponsored by Novell, today announced the availability of MoonlightTM 1.0. The first and only open source project that provides Linux* users access to Microsoft* Silverlight* content, Moonlight demonstrates Novell’s commitment to making Linux a first-class platform for multimedia and Rich Internet Applications. Moonlight provides the platform Linux users need to use Silverlight and Windows* Media content. In combination with BansheeTM, a Novell-sponsored project to produce an open source media player, Moonlight is part of a complete multimedia solution on Linux.
There is some more balanced press coverage in OStatic.
The Financial Times is abuzz with the standards-hostile term known as interoperability, claiming it is “the great enabler.”
Global financial markets are in disarray but prospects for innovation in the real economy have never been more robust. Innovations once crafted to stand alone are increasingly built to work together, or “interoperate”.
Well, interoperability is not needed if one complies with open standards, but Microsoft does not like these. It never did. For example, in a bit of internal correspondence [PDF], Bill Gates wrote: “In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
Does Microsoft sound like a company that is interested in interoperability, let alone in standards?
Anyway, in another disturbing but unsurprising news about a development, Novell and Microsoft are sharing a room again. It’s a joint seminar.
Web seminar: Driving datacentre agility
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The speakers will walk through an overview of the technology, discuss a number of offerings in the market with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server preconfigured as an optimised guest on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and share insights into how mixed source virtualisation can help improve operational efficiency.
This is a GNU/Linux-hostile spiel that promotes only software patents and a form of ‘Microsoft tax’ to be forcibly imposed on GNU/Linux. This point was explained in [1, 2].
Novell is not about Freedom. It’s not about open source, either. It’s primarily about the Microsoft ecosystem these days. █
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