05.17.09
Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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General:Write a minimum of 4 lines about Linux (could be distro specific like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.)…maximum length in not there. The lines should be rhyming though might not follow a meter system. No need to mention but still: absolutely original lines should be submitted.
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One of the most recent articles is about an incident with a major botnet. Apparently, the creators of the botnet decided to hit the “big red button” which brought roughly 100,000 Windows machines to their knees in bluescreen madness.
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Server
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Positron Telecommunication Systems Inc. announced today that it has released the V-114 PCI adapter, the first commercially available embedded PBX PCI adapter based on the open source Linux Project, Asterisk®. The V-114 offers a standalone solution that integrates Linux, Asterisk and Telephony ports all on a single PCI adapter that installs simply and easily into any operating system as an Ethernet adapter.
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Landscape is a commercial service for helping enterprises to scale and manage multiple Ubuntu deployments on both servers and desktops. The new release includes features for managing Ubuntu in Amazon EC2 cloud based deployments which is something that prior versions Landscape did not manage. The Amazon EC2 support makes a whole lot of sense now since with the recent Jaunty Ubuntu release, Ubuntu has cloud capabilities and can be easily run as an Amazon EC2 instance.
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Kernel Space
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Greetings everyone!
GlusterFS is a clustered file system that runs on commodity off-the-shelf hardware, delivering multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage. The architecture is modular, stackable and kernel-independent, which makes it easy to customize, install, manage and support different operating systems. Multiple storage systems can be clustered together, supporting petabytes of capacity in a single global namespace. Building a configuration of a few hundred terabytes can be accomplished in less than thirty minutes.
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Today DisplayLink is taking steps to bring its USB display technology, formerly only available on Windows and Mac, to Linux. DisplayLink’s chips enable one or more high resolution displays to be connected via the standard, universal USB 2.0 connector. The library released today enables the creation of Linux software – X Servers, drivers, and other applications – which will work with the growing universe of products using DisplayLink technology.
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Graphics
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Just minutes after announcing Mesa 7.5 Release Candidate 2, Brian Paul has announced that he is in the process of pushing out Gallium3D state trackers for OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0. These two new state trackers for this forthcoming Linux graphics architecture are coming just two weeks after an OpenVG state tracker was released for accelerating this other Khronos API.
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Tiago Vignatti has announced he has revived work on the VGA Arbiter for Linux and will be attempting to push this code upstream in the Linux kernel, just four years after this arbitration code was first hashed out.
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You might be interested that over a weekend a mate and myself introduced Beryl back in to the fold. This is a direct result of our frustration of how bloated Compiz has become and is becoming more of a fashion thing rather than functional for having multiple desktops.
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Applications
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aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems.
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Back in the day, 1999, around august time to be exact, I was working for a fairly horrible company in London. I had been a beta tester on Loki’s Civilisation: Call to Power, but I couldn’t easily buy a copy from anywhere in the UK. Finally, a friend and I ordered it from the states. We waited weeks for the delivery, and finally a month or so after ordering, it arrived.
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BackTrack is a powerful hacking suite. It is well made, with stylish touches that add to the overall feel of the distribution. It runs very fast in the live mode, even faster than most installed distributions. Most importantly, the array of tool is rich, well balanced and overall quite impressive.
The Beta version did throw a few errors here and there, but it was nothing major. Small consistency issues also arise, and there’s the lack of support for Ext4, which I expect will be solved soon. Documentation needs to be improved, starting with the website SSL certificate and continuing with lots of questions regarding the general usage.
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Ubuntu
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For the new Linux user, Xubuntu is an easy to use version of Ubuntu that is fast, simple, and reliable. Experienced or “get it done” types will appreciate the minimalist approach, that can be beefed up to whatever degree that is needed.
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Wow, while there may not be many end-user improvements in Ubuntu 9.10 yet and the desktop looks just like that of Ubuntu 9.04, there does seem to be some performance improvements. Besides the huge SQLite improvement that did not come as a surprise, there are better compilation times with GCC 4.4, much better disk performance with the newer Linux kernel, and other improvements throughout. One area that still needs to be improved upon is with the Intel Linux graphics performance after going through radical changes with kernel mode-setting, DRI2, and the Graphics Execution Manager.
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I recommend you try Linux on your current PC before making your decision. Ubuntu Linux is one popular distribution that’s extremely easy to set up and get running. You can boot it directly from the CD (which you burn from a downloaded .iso file), install it from inside Windows, or put it onto a bootable flash drive.
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MOBILE HARDWARE MAKER Motorola has won a deal worth $310 million to provide gear to China Mobile Communications.
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Timesys announced its first LinuxLink development subscription support for the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci architecture. The LinuxLink framework now supports TI’s video-oriented DM6446 and DM355 RISC/DSP system-on-chips (SoCs), and provides Linux-based reference board device drivers and automated development tools, says the company.
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That’s right mobile gaming fanatics. GamePark’s new GP2X Wiz portable game system is now available. The new device sports a 533Mhz 3D accelerator plus flash engine, 1 gigabyte flash memory, SD card support, and will run you about $180.
The Wiz is also built on the king of open-source OSs Linux, which, alongside the Wiz SDK, means users can create their own games.
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Sub-notebooks
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Trinity Audio Group announced a netbook version of its Linux-based multi-track recording product. The Indamixx Netbook Model 2 is an Intel Atom-based MSI Wind, with a 10-inch screen, 3G, and a 160GB hard drive, pre-installed with Trinity Audio’s digital mixing and editing suite.
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The preloaded Linux software mix still appears to be based largely on 64Studio, a community project that maintains a Linux distribution for creative content professionals, such as A/V producers and recording engineers. However, Trinity Audio has now ported its suite to a “Transmission 3.0″ distribution based on Ubuntu Linux 9.04, says the company.
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Dell has announced a ‘new’ netbook, the Inspiron Mini10v, an eerily similar model to the company’s previous offering, the plain Mini 10. The obvious difference is price, which drops to £200 in the cheapest Ubuntu Linux version.
The price reduction has been achieved by stripping out the odd feature that most netbook buyers would hardly have used, specifically the HDMI interface, and by using a different graphics chipset, the plain Intel GMA 500 rather than the equally basic Intel GMA 945GSE.
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It’s an interesting situation playing out in the academic software market that other software vendors would do well to watch. By swallowing its competition, Blackboard is keeping its hold on the marketshare and presumably positioning itself for the future. But simply buying competitors to keep hold of the market, and not making changes to retain the customers that opted for their products over yours in the first place isn’t sustainable. There are alternatives — there are always alternatives. In its drive to purchase, not revise, Blackboard has tossed its open source competitors a great opportunity.
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Sun
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Sun Microsystems will hold its first-ever kernel conference in Australia later this year. Perfect timing, says a company spokesperson, as more and more companies turn to Open Source to remain innovative in harder economic times.
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Last week on 7 th of May OpenOffice.org 3.1 was released and more than 2 million users downloaded that version until now. OOo 3.1 is the first feature release after the successful OOo 3.0 release 7 months ago. What was done in that version. Here you can find the numbers beside the features described in the “ what’s new guide”.
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Recently I did some performance measurements on charts. I used a big line chart with 13 series each with 4000 data points.
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FSF/GNU
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The Gnash free flash player development team is setting its sights on getting to version 9.0 by the end of the summer and is launching a project later this month to ensure that they meet their goal. The project, known as the “Gnash V9 Summer Bash” will engage student interns to hammer through a number of ActionScript3 (AS3) Class Libraries that are critical to v9 and v10 functionality. The success of the project will result in Gnash compatibility with a number of high-demand websites — including educational, major media, and other popular sites.
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Programming
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There is a lot of demand for making Google’s App Engine web application hosting platform accessible to more programming languages and frameworks. Originally launched supporting only the Python language, Google recently announced that App Engine would also support Java programs. Now, developers are adding support for that platform to their JVM based languages and frameworks. The developers of the Grails web framework have announced that the framework’s latest version 1.1.1 officially supports the hosting platform. It has also been reported that the Scala programming language cooperates with the AppEngine. Scala – a pragmatic combination of functional and object-oriented programming approaches – uses the Google Eclipse plug-in for this purpose.
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AN OUTFIT called Tune Hunter has accused a raft of companies including music-search service Shazam plus Apple, Amazon, Napster, Samsung, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, AT&T Mobility, and Pantech Wireless of nicking its idea for a music identification system.
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Of course, one of the main reasons why the album became so well known was because EMI sent cease-and-desist letters to everyone who posted copies of the album, and then to anyone who posted that they were going to participate in the “Grey Tuesday” protest. The whole thing seemed pretty silly. It’s not as if anyone listening to The Grey Album would find it a substitute for either of the other albums.
Steve Weber, creator of the phrase “anti-rival goods” 14 (2005)
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 News Roundup at 5:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The core system software, as the company now calls its BIOS, builds on Linux operating system software and virtualization technology. Virtualization software started out as a way for users of one operating system, such as Windows XP, to run another operating system, such as Mac OS X or Linux, in a virtual environment. But as the technology has evolved, developers have recognized other advantages, aside from interoperability. By creating a virtualized layer of software, known as a hypervisor, between a computer’s hardware and the operating system, for example, data can be transparently checked for viruses and other malicious software. In the business world, a single big server or a cluster of computers can run virtualized systems so that resources can be divvied up among customers.
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This statement was widely reported by the press, but much of the coverage (and Coleman himself) appears to be of dubious accuracy. Kylin is not a new top-secret operating system, it’s a publicly available FreeBSD derivative that was created by academics for research purposes with funding from the Chinese government. Contrary to Coleman’s assertion that it is immune to cyber weapons designed to target Linux and UNIX, Kylin is actually designed to comply with UNIX standards and has a Linux binary compatibility layer. Certain aspects of Kylin’s design are documented in mainstream computing journals like IEEE. Its hardening features include filesystem encryption and access control frameworks. In fact, its security features appear to be roughly equivalent with those of the average commercial Linux distribution.
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Desktop
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So, the vast majority of people will not have to worry about software. The key to enabling Mom and Dad to use Linux instead of Windows is
1. making sure they can get Linux pre-loaded on their new computers,
2. making sure that drivers are available and easily found, so that plugging devices in “just works”,
3. making sure configuration and network connections work smoothly, and that the geeky bits are hidden, and
4. convincing them that it’s OK that they can’t call on Cousin Bubba’s friend, because he only knows Windows.
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The key thing throughout the experience has been that Ubuntu is genuinely a better choice for my father’s laptop. It has to be said that a large part of this is the failings of Windows Vista. If the laptop had come with XP installed, I would probably have suggested he stick with it, although I’d have installed Firefox and OpenOffice.org for him. But Vista is a turkey of an operating system that works against its users.
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Kernel Space
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So far, the response to the new Linux.com has been really positive and, save for a few glitches here and there, we’ve been very happy with how the launch has gone thus far. As we transition from launch mode to operations mode, it’s worth taking a little time to reflect on what we’re going to be doing on Linux.com.
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Applications
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I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s computers, and I see Audacity installed on a lot of them. Not many software programs deserve the adverb “versatile”, but Audacity is one of them. It is the Swiss Army knife of audio applications.
Audacity is used for all sorts of audio tasks. There may be more specialized applications in each category, but Audacity does a great job. If you have anything to do with audio, this program deserves to be in your toolbox.
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The indie developer Electron recently released Caster for Linux. Caster is a cross platform “3D” 3rd person shoot’em up game in which the character moves cross a map, hunts different types of monsters and collects energy items. Starting with one type of “weapon” the player collects five further weapons throughout the episodes. Skills like jumping or dodging and weaponry can be updated during the game depending on the score gained in the previous level.
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There is a popular joke about Linux users that we are so busy tweaking our system to do things for fun that we don’t have time to do important stuff. Getting things done in a structured manner (regardless of your OS) has always been a challenge for me. Writing down things to do on a piece of paper just doesn’t work for me anymore, specially since I spend a lot of time in front of the computer it makes sense to have a GTD application on my desktop I can have access to all the time. So ever since I made the complete move to Linux I tried quite a few organization tools to help me get things done much more efficiently, some of these tools are OS independent but all of them works on Linux. Hopefully you will find some of these apps helpful.
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Another month has passed, and it’s time to present the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.1.
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There’s been a lot of buzz about Hadoop lately. Just the other day, some of our friends at Yahoo! reclaimed the terasort record from Google using Hadoop, and the folks at Facebook let on that they ingest 15 terabytes a day into their 2.5 petabyte Hadoop-powered data warehouse.
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Hadoop uses commodity hardware, so every month, your costs decrease or provide more capacity for the same price point. You probably have a vendor you like, and they probably sell a dual quad-core (8 cores total) machine with 4 1TB SATA disks (you specifically don’t want RAID).
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Ubuntu
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In this walkthrough, senior editor Robert Strohmeyer walks you through the steps needed to install Ubuntu–a popular distribution of the Linux OS–on a PC. This fast, simple operating system runs well on limited system resources, boots quickly, and is very easy to operate.
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It’s an unscheduled stop today on my never ending distro tour. I had planned to look at Chakra Project next as regular readers will know, but due to a strange series of events I ended up sidestepping onto the recently released Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. So, it would seem odd of me not to take a decent look and see what improvements have been made in the last 6 months. The last time I looked at Ubuntu in depth was actually 12 months ago with the 8.04 release. I found it to be a solid enough but somehow lacking a little in ambition. Would Jaunty jump forward with new features? I decided to find out…
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New Distribution Releases
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development (compiz) version 1.9.27-compiz
This is a major update for the Compiz series of Elive
* Module: Now instead of configuring compiz from ecsm you can do it from a module
* Cube: The cube is disabled by default now due to its instability compared with the wall mode
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Latest version of Linux lets developers take better advantage of target hardware platforms and open source software.
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Novatel Wireless’s Linux-based mobile hotspot device will soon be offered by two U.S. wireless carriers, says eWEEK. Verizon Wireless will start offering the “MiFi 2200″ to customers on Monday, while Sprint will introduce the Linux-based device in June, says the publication.
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Despite the light weight and thin form factor, the finish on the device isn’t tacky–though it does have a ‘plasticky’ feel to it. The Cool-er runs a Linux operating system and has a 1GB storage card slot.
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Interead is also hoping to strike deals with retailers. If successful, the company could further get the kind of volumes that it needs to drop prices down to $200. The company is also open to working with software develops to create apps for the device which runs the Linux OS and launch an iPhone-like app store for the Cool-er.
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Amazon’s Kindle runs GNU/Linux, which is no surprise given its suitability for these kind of consumer systems. The Kindle is fast establishing itself as the leading ebook platform, so, at first blush, that might seem unalloyed good news for free software.
Sadly, though, Amazon has also proved that it is no great friend of freedom – first, by embracing DRM for its books, and secondly, by cravenly disabling the text-to-speech capability because The Authors’ Guild has eighteenth-century ideas of what copyright is about.
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Here’s one, with the rather hubristic name of Cool-er, which has the bonus of being British (although it doesn’t seem available here yet).
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Nokia’s Navteq digital-mapping subsidiary announced a partnership with Intel to encourage development of location-based services (LBS) software using the Linux-based Moblin platform. A new, Intel-sponsored microsite on the Navteq Network for Developers portal provides resources for those developing LBS software for Atom-based MIDs (mobile Internet devices).
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Sub-notebooks
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If you’ve purchased a netbook, you’re most likely looking at either Xandros Linux or some version of Windows. Although the Xandros operating system is a serviceable operating system, it always seems you are using an operating system hindered by hardware. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of flavors of Linux out there that can be installed on your netbook that will give you a similar (if not identical) experience to that of your standard laptop.
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The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the start of the Skins2 Contest for the VLC media player. VLC (formerly called VideoLAN Client) is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats. The contest will run until the 29th of May and a public vote will be held from the 29th of May to the 1st of June. The VLC developers point out that they reserve the right to veto inappropriate submissions.
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As some might know, Blender is an open-source 3D content creation application – it’s cross-platform, a pioneer in the free 3D application market, and I use it. Not only do I use it, love it, and hang out in the #blenderchat IRC channel on freenode, I host the Blender Model Repository, taking over from Andrew Kator long time ago when he suffered legal issues. It’s been running stable for the past year or so, every so often getting new model submissions, and users finding it a useful resource.
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So what’s the takeaway? When open-source is just a vision or a programming goal, it can achieve its goals regardless of the size of the community that grows around it. But when you throw social networking into the mix, open source development gets hit with a wrench. While a number of interesting open alternatives to common, proprietary social networking platforms exist today, they are never going to be able to carry the kind of clout of the big social networks. An open-source social network has to be the game-changing application like Twitter was to the normal Web back in 2006 — you can’t just copy the best and expect to find much success.
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Maybe they’d like to start using ClamWin: free and open to scrutiny.
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AccesStream, a provider of open source identity access management solutions, announces the Version 1.0 release of its solution to the open source community.
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When Linking Arms, Inc. launched its nonprofit organization back in 2005, its founders set forth a seemingly modest mission to train and prepare at-risk youth for entry into productive adult life through educational resources, sports, mentoring and tutoring programs.
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Fresh out of the Mozilla Labs oven this week is a beta version of Prism, a new incarnation of WebRunner that integrates Web applications with the desktop. The idea behind Prism starts with from the premise that as more people move their computing activities to the cloud, users will become increasingly dependent on Web apps designed to replace locally-based email, calendaring, and word processing.
The problem is, running these types of apps in a Web browser adds clutter and unecessary steps to what should be a straightforward user experience. Mozilla wants to eliminate that particular pain point and streamline the way we use Web-based applications.
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Business
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In this eWEEK podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, xTuple CEO Ned Lilly explains how the current economic climate is helping to drive the open-source phenomenon into the enterprise application arena.
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FSF/GNU
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In response to our proposed revision of our amicus curiae brief in the Tenenbaum case, the RIAA is attempting to block our submission to the court, saying, “…FSF’s latest brief demonstrates even more strikingly the deep animus FSF and its counsel hold for Plaintiffs, their counsel, and the recording industry. Such a biased organization cannot properly assist the court in providing neutral information and analysis.”
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Government
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Is there something about Estonia that makes them special? According to the Open Source Index, they have the highest Community Activity rank of all the countries measured. Now, the US is not far behind in that metric, but I think we should look a little deeper. Perhaps Estonia scored so high because they have an ethos of community activity that naturally carries over to software. And perhaps the US scored so high because within the open source community we get it. But we remain a small minority within an enormous landfill of proprietary software development. When enlightened, American software programmers can be as good as the Estonians at community activity. The trouble is, there just aren’t enough of us. Yet.
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Love him or hate him, Barack Obama will be President into 2013.
This is a key moment for open source. In some ways it is going from strength to strength. But it remains vulnerable to counter-attack from the copyright industries.
So far the President’s record on open source is mixed.
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BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
* Open and Accessible Data – the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
* Open Standards – the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
* Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and
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Mayor Gregor Robertson and Coun. Andrea Reimer want the City of Vancouver to support open-source software and open standards.
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Open (But No Source Code)
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Luckily, the judge did not fall for this, and after a hearing in which both sides presented their position, is allowing the site to continue operating while the trial continues, noting that shutting down the site: “might cause irreparable prejudice to the defendant.” It’s good to see another reasonable ruling, though troubling that the recording industry tried to push for an immediate injunction.
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French European Parliament MP Guy Bono says he’ll call for legal action against France if it adopts the corporate entertainment cartel’s HADOPI law.
Pushed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy on behalf of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, France’s lower house of Parliament has passed the “three-strikes” law, also known as the HADOPI law.
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You could’ve been forgiven for believing it was over for Tanya Andersen, the disabled single mother who, after being brutally bullied by the RIAA and its teams of legal hitmen, was awarded close to $108,000 in fees and costs, the highest amount ever.
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Normally, this post would be something best left to someone like William Patry, whose credentials on copyright are above reproach. Lawrence Lessig has responded to Helprin in a contemporary and ingenious way, but Lessig’s main focus now has moved from intellectual property matters to what he has called “corruption” (and what Harvard Law School, his new employer calls “a major five-year project examining what happens when public institutions depend on money from sources that may be affected by the work of those institutions”).
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RealNetworks is upping the ante in litigation seeking to prevent it from distributing DVD-copying software. The company argues the Hollywood studios are a “price-fixing cartel” that have no right to prevent consumers from duplicating the movie discs.
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RealNetworks has accused the major film studios of antitrust violations in documents filed Wednesday with a federal court.
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Now this is interesting: with the arrival of a demand for some $4.5 million in damages, one of the founders of Pirate Bay has come up with an innovate method of paying it. Gottfrid Svartholm has set up something called internet-avgift which encourages ordinary Internet users who are friendly to the Pirate Bay cause to donate towards the cost of that fine. In fact, the system enables them to send those donations directly to the law firm which represented the music companies during the trial.
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The UK film industry today backed the record industry’s long-running campaign for laws to force ISPs to cut off persistent illegal filesharers from the internet.
At a conference in London today, a coalition including Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), the UK film sector’s copyright enforcement body, will aim to put pressure on the communications minister, Lord Carter. FACT will add to lobbying by its record industry counterpart the BPI for the government to impose French-style “graduated response” regulations on ISP, that end in disconnection if warnings are ignored.
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In a bid to educate pirates, copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP to track down people who share their titles on P2P networks. The alleged infringers then receive a warning and are given the opportunity to resolve the issue. However, this system is vulnerable to abuse and therefore completely useless.
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Nowadays we infringe copyrights numerous times throughout the day without even thinking about it. Watching an unauthorized SNL clip on YouTube. Playing the radio in the background at work where customers can hear. Loaning a copy of your Finding Nemo DVD to play at your kids’ daycare. Downloading clip art to use in a personal scrapbook. Scanning your own wedding photos. Forwarding a funny photograph to a friend. Loaning a co-worker some software. Etc., etc., etc…
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Copyright law is set up to protect critics, while leaving fans of creative works out in the cold
Steve Weber, creator of the phrase “anti-rival goods” 13 (2005)
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 Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Patents at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest news about patents with emphasis on software
Microsoft
THE COMPANY from Redmond has been busy creating patent FUD against Linux using an assault on TomTom. This does not mean, however, that the company is immune to the very same patents its actively lobbying for around the world (with the simple aim of making truly Free software illegal). IDG presents this new story of the company which won hundreds of millions of dollars for what it claims to be patent violations in Microsoft software.
A small security company that won a $388 million judgment against Microsoft after accusing the company of patent infringement has big plans for the future.
Uniloc, with U.S. headquarters in Irvine, Calif., prevents software piracy by creating a unique device fingerprint that can distinguish the computer in your hands from any other computer ever built. Vendors that want to prevent unauthorized use of software tie their product activation processes to Uniloc’s patented method of identifying a device.
Patent Ambush
FAT is a good example of patent ambush, a practice whereby a company seeds the market with its technology and then waits until it spreads widely before attacking/extorting. It is a form of ambush, or the setting up of a trap for competitors.
Rambus is a recent case study [1, 2, 3, 4] in this one particular area. The FTC had the company investigated. But now, however, it turns out that the FTC does just what it always does. The British press says that the FTC just lets Rambus off the hook despite patent ambush.
US regulators have finally thrown in the towel after seven years of battling memory chip designer Rambus in court.
The Federal Trade Commission today said it’s officially dropped claims Rambus violated antitrust laws by hoodwinking the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) industry standards group into approving memory technologies on which it was quietly obtaining patents.
The FTC has been wrestling with Rambus for yonks on claims the firm manipulated the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) – the body in charge of memory industry standards, not some distant galaxy – to adopt memory technology designs that Rambus was sneakily patenting.
This looks pretty grim for the FTC. It tolerates abuse in the standards/patent industry and thus breeds mistrust.
Further on the same subject of patents in standards, read what this man shrewdly says.
Either EU remains committed to open standards or the term “open standards” need to be removed from the new interoperability framework decision. Perhaps just standards as in formal standards from ISO would be more adequate? Open standards should not be stolen from the winning innovative Internet realm just because the greed of those that prefer royalty based industry standards.
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” The term “open” is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies while the term “standard” is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis.” (at least still)
If one needs to pay a competitor for use of a so-called ‘standard’, then it’s proprietary, not open. “Open” should not be taken just for visibility, or else new terminology is required, such as “free(dom) standards”.
Counter-Productive
Look what IBM is doing.
“Last week, the USPTO granted IBM a patent for its System and method for comprehensive automatic color customization in an email message based on cultural perspective. So what exactly did the four Big Blue inventors come up with? IBM explains: ‘For example, an email created in the U.S. in red font to indicate urgency or emphasis might be mapped to a more appropriate color (e.g., blue or black) for sending to Korea.’ IBM took advantage of the USPTO’s Accelerated Examination Program to fast-track the patent’s approval. BTW, if you missed the 2006 press release, IBM boasted it was ‘holding itself to a higher standard than any law requires because it’s urgent that patent quality is improved.’”
IBM should be shamed for this. It is still a big part of the problem. Digital Majority has found another good article about the economic impact of this gold rush to own every idea under the sun.
It costs high-tech companies an average of $5 million to defeat a frivolous suit. So often defendants pay large sums just to make the case go away. This money is diverted from worthwhile research and development that could go to innovation leading to more jobs and economic growth.
The American economy is in critical need of invention and innovation. But if we want intellectual property industries to help invent a way out of the recession, we must put an end to the legal gamesmanship that rewards lawsuit abuse over creativity.
All industries directly or indirectly affected by patents — including finance, automotive manufacturing, high-tech, bio-tech and pharmaceuticals — will benefit from patent reform. It will encourage innovation — from the lone inventor in his or her garage to the high-tech company that files a thousand patents each year, and all businesses in between.
Moral Issues
Economic issues aside, there is a moral and mortal issue at stake too.
Patents as a whole are becoming increasingly controversial. It’s not just about software patents, which happen to be more relevant to Free software in the sense that they harm free distribution. Patents sometimes kill. They get to define who lives and who dies.
Here is a new article that Groklaw aptly labels “Pandemics and Patents”:
Swine Flu Not an Accident From a Lab, W.H.O. Says
As for the use of oseltamivir, the generic form of Tamiflu, the W.H.O. has certified only one drug — Antiflu, made by the Indian company Cipla in both pill and liquid forms — as equivalent to brand-name Tamiflu.
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The move could prompt patent lawsuits by Gilead and Roche, which developed and sell Tamiflu, so Cipla will sell only to countries indemnifying them against such suits, the company said.
There is also more recognition that human rights are being compromised: “Experts Aim To Balance Intellectual Property Rights And Human Rights”
The United Nations human rights framework is being brought to bear on intellectual property law, in the hopes that the weight of expert voices in human rights can lead IP regimes toward a better balance between the needs of industry and the needs of public policy.
The Working Group on the Right to Development, an intergovernmental political body, in August 2008 took on the task of examining two intellectual property-related development partnerships that could influence the work of policymakers in at least two UN institutions.
Europe Awoken
Can Europe stay a haven to FOSS developers at all? Was it ever a haven when threats of embargo were issued across the Atlantic? There is forever a danger that Microsoft tries to legalise software patents in Europe. Since it cannot compete based on technical merits it will try to injure and illegalise FOSS. It is so much easier than producing a better product sometimes. Here is a timely new reminder of the situation:
MEPs locked horns with the Commission again in 2005 over a proposal to harmonise patent protection law for computer-implemented inventions, dubbed the ‘software patents’ directive. MEPs demanded that Charlie McCreevy, the European commissioner for the internal market, revise the draft legislation, but he refused on the grounds that EU governments supported its objective. An overwhelming majority of MEPs voted to reject the proposal in second reading, the first time the Parliament had ever used this power.
One last point: there is growing concern that software patents may arrive at continental Europe through a form of unity with the UK (Charlie McCreevy is Irish), which has already permitted Nokia to do its damage.
Certain computer programs are patentable according to the UK IPO.
[...]
The Patents Act says that something cannot be patented if it consists only of a program for a computer. The IPO has historically been stricter in denying software patents than European patent authorities, despite UK law being based on the European Patent Convention, on which the European Patent Office bases its decisions. The US allows software to be patented. The UK IPO now states that Software that allows programmers to program a mobile phone system remotely from a computer can be patented because it is more than just a software program. The ruling overturns an initial decision that the invention is unpatentable because it consists of nothing more than a computer program.
Watch out for the back door of Europe. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ASUS betrays GNU/Linux after getting “closely tied up with Microsoft”, a new Web site called “It’s better with Windows®” appears
ASUS really blew it when it decided to take Microsoft’s invitation and turned its back on GNU/Linux (profits at ASUS now down 94%). We also have allegations of kickbacks now [1, 2].
Groklaw has found this curious complaint about the way ASUS treats GNU/Linux after it had gotten “closely tied up with Microsoft,” to use its executive's own words.
A friend of mine pointed out the Eee PC Seashell (1008HA) for example, which looks very nice on the website. But hang on, what’s this. I’m now told by your marketing department that “It’s better with Windows®”, and I am invited to find out more by clicking a a link.
Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones writes: “ the link is to a site calling itself It’s Better With Windows, and if you check out who owns it, it is registered on GoDaddy to a Michael Sharp, in Kent, Washington. This wouldn’t be an Intel-type of deal, by any chance??”
Further, the post states:
I also see that Windows is “Compatible”, and that I can be “confident” my devices and applications will work. Ok, lets see. My HP Printer, digital camera, 3G dongle, sound card, mobile phone and wireless stick all refuse to work on a Windows XP machine without navigating some obtuse vendor websites or chugging through a load of vendor supplied CDs. It does have a CD-ROM drive, right?
You make some nice kit, and were instrumental in the rise of the netbook form factor all around the world. I can completely understand you pandering to the masses clawing for Windows XP because they don’t know any better. But don’t insult my intelligence by telling me it’s ‘better’, because it flat out isn’t, and a patronising, condescending pro-Windows website isn’t going to convince me otherwise.
Linux was good enough for you at the launch of your Eee PC models two years ago, and it’s even better now. How quickly you changed your allegiance when the hardware caught up with the requirements of Windows. We now know who our real friends are. Maybe you never really were our friend, maybe you just used us to steal a march on the competition. If that’s the case then you suck.
It does have a tinge of Slog-type attack on the viability of GNU/Linux on sub-notebooks , such as those which are backed by NPD. █
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Posted in Site News at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Commenting on the Web is not working anymore
THERE IS a nasty new breed of vermin out there. Actually, it’s not new, but it has gotten worse recently. I came to realise that some people out there descended to new tactics of personal attacks that make use of my name. They post nasty things under my name, but people have no way to verify one’s identity on the Web, unless the Webmaster is under complete control. In the past (around 2006) I had people post nasty things under my name claiming that ‘I’ was a child molester, transgendered, and so on and so forth. Later on, the same crooks who ‘planted’ such claims about me all over the Web started linking to it. But there is an even worse strategy. If discrediting a person does not suffice, then ruin relationships too.
“In the past (around 2006) I had people post nasty things under my name claiming that ‘I’ was a child molester, transgendered, and so on and so forth.”Some time ago I noticed attacks on peers or journalists supposedly coming from my name. People were trying to incite reporters against me by attacking people under my name. A few months ago, using such a strategy, I even saw the whole “Nazi” thing being used to portray me negatively by posting such tripe under my own name. Then, on Saturday I came to discover that people also insulted a friend of mine under my own name. I usually don’t notice such things (there are many conversations around the Web and it’s impossible to track all), but the attacked person, whom I consider to be a friend, could not believe what was said, so he E-mailed me yesterday to ask if it was a faker/forger. It was.
There is no easy solution to this problem. The Web can’t be stopped and people can steal identities. Several years ago, Pamela Jones from Groklaw said she would never comment outside her site unless she announces this in her site. This means that all postings from her outside Groklaw should be treated as potential fakes. I’ve found several and confirmed with her that these were indeed fake.
With the exception of verified accounts and places where I can PGP-sign my messages (e.g. USENET), I won’t comment in public anymore. There are people out there who sink to the lowest level to discredit me and turn people against me by pretending to be me and I don’t know any other solution for this utterly repulsive smear campaign. █
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05.14.09
Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audio
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This week on the show: Ubuntu One, more ATI pain, Sony wants to go more open, Windows 7 RCs will be crippled, lots of announcements and Fab reviews the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
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In this episode: OpenOffice.org 3.1 is out and we take a guess at just how many lines of source code it has, Glibc has been forked, a ZDNet report whose name we can’t pronounce takes a potshot at Moonlight, and our Open Ballot asks whether we need a standard package manager.
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While this has been a long and dirty mess, the good news is that as of today there is a merge-able version of the Creative X-Fi driver for ALSA. Novell’s Takashi Iwai who wrote the original X-Fi driver has managed to get in contact with Creative Labs to create this genuine X-Fi ALSA driver, which is in far better condition than his previous hack-ish attempt. This new Sound Blaster X-Fi driver is called snd-ctxfi and more information on it can be found within the ALSA development list.
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Events
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Grodno will host the international conference of free software developers Linux Vacation/Eastern Europe 2009, Gleb Rubanov, one of the organizers of the event, told BelTA.
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This year I went to a convention known as Penguicon. It is a convention where you can dress up as your favorite anime/Star Wars/ or whatever you want to dress up as…if at all. I choose the scariest costume that I can muster. ME. Ok stop running for that window, get back in your chair and read on.
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Interviews
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We have the opportunity to interview Tristan Nitot (in italiano su Webnews), president of Mozilla Europe. Tristan speaks about the relashionship between Mozilla and Google, Chrome and the future of Firefox on mobile platforms.
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The Fedora 10 CDs and DVDs came in at half the price, and were of far better quality, and were shipped around the country more cheaply, and the process was just way better.
Why was this so? Simple. The “leaders” of a project can be overwhelmed with mundane tasks, and with so much to get done, some tasks just get pushed to the back burner. But if you can find the right volunteer, and if you say to that volunteer “this is your task, and I’m counting on you to do it better than I did,” that task becomes *incredibly* important to that volunteer, and they become embarrasingly awesome at it in very short order.
When you trust people, and when you expect them to do great things, they will. That’s the most inspiring lesson of Fedora, for me, and I continue to learn it over and over again.
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The founder of btrfs talks about features, terabyte raid arrays and comparisons with ZFS.
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Server
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Krone said customers tend to add open source applications, like the Apache Web server, or proprietary products, like Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) databases, to those Linux-based servers to address a wide spectrum of business problems. To meet this trend, most EMC storage hardware and software products have been adapted to run in a Linux environment. For example, EMC’s PowerPath family is available in Linux.
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Kernel Space
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One of the discussions your editor missed at the recent Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop covered the proposed reflink() system call. Fortunately, the filesystem developers have now filled in the relevant information with a detailed email exchange, complete with patches. We now have a proposed system call which has created more open questions than answers. The creation of a new core system call requires a lot of thought, so a close look at these questions would seem to be called for.
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In a majority of the tests, Ubuntu came out ahead of Nexenta CP2, which is based upon largely the same packages but incorporates some of OpenSolaris at its core. In some of the tests where Ubuntu took the first place position, the lead over Nexenta was very evident and huge.
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Graphics
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It has been two or three weeks since we were last presented with a new display driver from NVIDIA for Linux, whether it be in their 180.xx or 185.xx series, a stable release, a beta release, or any of their legacy driver updates. This timespan is quite long compared to the past few months where they have released as many as five Linux drivers per month. This evening though there is now a new stable release in the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series.
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Andrew Humber, NVIDIA’s senior PR manager for their Tesla and CUDA products, has passed along word that they have submitted OpenCL 1.0 supportive drivers to the Khronos Group for conformance certification. This initial OpenCL support will be on Linux and Windows, though there was no mention of OpenCL on Solaris/OpenSolaris or FreeBSD where they also maintain proprietary drivers.
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concept-girl-black.jpegYes, it’s about time! The third open movie project had been lined up to start much sooner, but more urgent work (Blender 2.5 coding) forced it into the future. After all, it’s the purpose of the team here in Amsterdam to test and improve the 2.5x versions significantly!
Now we intend to start up September 1, delivering a result around March/April 2010.
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Applications
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So you’ve installed that shiny Ubuntu distro onto your PlayStation 3 and finagled a couple of cool applications to boot. And yet, there’s still a lot of empty real estate on that newly formatted hard drive, and you’re no doubt pondering what else you can load up on your now living room-friendly PC. Turns out, there are literally thousands of options available; but the task of sorting through the seemingly endless lists and testing each and every app to see if it suits your tastes and jives with the PS3 can be a daunting task. But luckily for you, we’ve done exactly that; we rolled up our sleeves, burned the midnight oil, and muscled the necessary digital elbow grease to whittle down the Ubuntu archives to the top 10 absolute keepers. So what are you waiting for? Plug in your PS3’s keyboard and mouse, fire up Jaunty Jackalope, and read onward to get cracking.
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Boxee was first released in mid-2008 to users of Apple (AAPL) Macintosh computers and machines running the Linux operating system.
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Desktop Environments
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I have been recently covering various Linux desktops. So far you can read about Fluxbox, Xfce 4, Window Maker, and IceWM. I also touched on creating dropshadows with xcompmgr and transparent windows with transset. If you have been reading me long enough, then you know my favorite Linux desktop is the Enlightenment desktop. I have been using this desktop for quite some time and have never felt it lacked for anything in the desktop space.
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The first beta version of the new and shiny KDE 4.3 has been released. The list of new features and improvements is long and impressive as ever. There is a new tree view mode in System Settings, many cool new features, the desktop search becomes more visible to the user, and yet more polishing in user interfaces all over the place make using KDE more fun
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Three weeks ago, I switched my main desktop from GNOME to KDE. The switch was not a rejection of GNOME, nor an unreasoning enthusiasm for KDE. It was based on my determination to learn about a side of GNU/Linux that I had been partially neglecting, and a growing appreciation of KDE’s innovations on the desktop. And, thanks to the attitudes that GNU/Linux has taught me, the switch needed almost no adjustment period, either.
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François Dupoux announced yesterday evening the immediate availability of SystemRescueCd 1.2.0 Linux distribution. Big news comes with this version of the tiny Gentoo-based operating system for systems administration and data recovery, as it now has a new desktop environment, Xfce4, and it is powered by the just released Linux kernel 2.6.29.3. Without further introduction, let’s have a detailed look at the main features of SystemRescueCd 1.2.0…
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The SystemRescueCD developers have announced the release of version 1.2.0 of their Linux distribution.
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All in all, Slackware is actually a good distro, and its customisation options are excellent at every stage. Its package management system, while a little difficult to get to grips with, is probably only as difficult as APT, and as soon as you get X started most of the file editing stuff does not matter so much. Against a distro like Ubuntu, Slackware is slower, less easy to use, less up to date and less well supported, but its strongest aspect it is customisation abilities, which would appeal if you wanted to run a server or know what you are doing.
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Sabayon
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Now that we released both 4.1 Gnome and KDE, we started working on next releases of Sabayon.
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Lots of work to be done as you can see. I also want to let everyone know that Sabayon Linux gave a slide presentation recently and you can find the English and Italian versions to view.
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Red Hat
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The joined organization, named “DuraSpace,” will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms – Fedora and DSpace. DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users. DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission. The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will operate out of offices in Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA.
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In Fedora 11, we have a number of features that are the result of a planned process of maturation. We often put new features into the distribution with the purpose of garnering more information on how people put a technology to work. Then that information can be digested by developers to help them design and refine their software. It’s a cultivation mentality: By focusing more attention on advanced technologies, we help them mature and improve faster. Including them in a popular, high-volume distribution whose mission is to advanced free and open source software is a natural strategic fit.
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*buntu
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Welcome to Karmic Koala Alpha 1, which will in time become Ubuntu 9.10.
Pre-releases of Karmic are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.
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The system is fast as usual, with no major problems at the moment, except for the fact that the video drivers don’t work, yet. As always, we did not expect something exciting from the first, and not even from the next two or three alpha versions of Ubuntu. Probably starting with the fifth or sixth alpha we will see some big changes, like that professional theme everyone is still waiting for, and which Mark Shuttleworth promised us.
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The first alpha CD for our next release is now available. This is at a very early stage of development so is advised for brave testers only. See the overview from Ubuntu, the announcement or just go straight to the CD download.
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I was reading a very interesting blog post section today called “Relevance to Open Source and Paradigm shifts” by Alan Kay and SteveJ which is about how ideas in society change and how to achieve critical mass.
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Linux has gained in popularity among server and device vendors as being a good general purpose operating system. When it comes to device vendors which often have different chip architectures and needs than a general purpose operating system provides, there is a need for customization which adds time and expense to a project. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista is now taking aim at that issue by splitting apart its Linux distribution into what it refers to as Market Specific Distributions (MSDs).
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Board-specific Linux kernel support for the Beagle has been merged into the mainline Linux/OMAP git staging tree at source.mvista.com/git. There have been a number of hobbyist projects based on the BeagleBoard, including the BeagleBot robot, the HY Research Beagle MID (pictured at left), and an upcoming netbook with a detachable screen from startup Always Innovating, called the Touch Book (pictured below).
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LaCie announced two Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) devices for the home or small office, equipped with gigabit Ethernet and USB ports. The $190 d2 Network offers 500GB to 1.5TB capacity, while the $380 Big Disk Network combines two drives via RAID 0, for 2TB to 4TB.
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RoweBots Research, Inc., the leading supplier of tiny embedded Linux RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of DSPnano, Version 2, and Unison(TM), Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s R8C, M16C and R32C/100 microcontroller (MCU) families to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time. DSPnano is the functional equivalent to an ultra-tiny embedded-Linux RTOS for Renesas’ 8- and 16-bit MCUs, including the R8C and M16C.
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Phones
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The Android smartphone platform is poised to grow nine times over by year’s end, if new predictions from Strategy Analytics are correct. While that growth rate may dwarf those of heavies like Apple and RIM, Android’s base is presently much smaller. Even with dramatic growth, will Android sales ever approach BlackBerry or iPhone numbers?
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Sub-notebooks
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Dell is shipping Windows and Linux editions of the new Mini 10v notebook at the same time, with intentions to announce a wireless carrier for the fancier Mini 10.
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iUnika, “the free company,” has introduced eco-friendly notebooks made from biodegradable materials and equipped with solar panels.
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The little eco warriors costing between 130-160 Euros (about $180-$220), weigh in at just 700 grams, boast a 400MHz processor and run Linux.
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Sullivan thinks that if left unopposed, these lawsuits could create a culture in which people become afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.
The RIAA agrees, saying that the FSF is an organisation “dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs, and classic intellectual property.” In short it thinks that the free software movement aims to liberalise copyright law, which it thinks places free software squarely on the side of illegal file-sharers.
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IBM has 1,000 programmers who work on open-source projects full-time. Much of the IBM Lotus suite of collaboration software is based on Linux, says Inna Kuznetsova, IBM’s director of Linux strategy.
“Open source allows you to get certain technologies developed in a cheaper and faster manner,” she said. “Open standards can benefit all companies and developers.”
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A new physically-based renderer is on the scene called Luxrender. What separates this one from the others, you ask? This one is GPL, Open-Source.
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Lead developer Monty Widenius heads a new vendor-neutral alliance to provide support for MySQL users who may be left out once Oracle completes its buy of Sun Microsystems.
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Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo, an advocate of open election system (OES), asked the poll body to open the source code for public scrutiny.
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Not Linux
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The NetBSD Project recently released NetBSD 5.0, the 13th major release of its Unix operating system. If you are not familiar with the BSD mentality, it’s a back-to-basics approach. Those familiar with Unix environments will find themselves right at home.
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The European Research Council has granted €2.5 million (around US$3.3 million) to a Dutch university for its research on a “more reliable and secure” Unix-type operating system. The research team seeks to top today´s popular operating systems in the market, such as Windows and Linux, particularly in security features.
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Sun
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Sun Microsystems has released the OpenSolaris programme for CommunityOne West.
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The biggest change is that graphics viewed in OpenOffice are now anti-aliased, meaning graphics will appear smoother, especially when you place one shape over another. It’s kind of surprising that OpenOffice hasn’t supported this until now. File-locking has been improved, so if you’re using the suite for cross-platform document sharing you should notice fewer glitches.
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Yesterday Project Renaissance, OpenOffice.org’s search for a new UI direction, opened for comments on the fifteen proposals currently submitted. Unfortunately, a posting on Slashdot meant that over 40,000 accesses happened in a short time, taking down the wiki.
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One of the first things you are probably wondering about is the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. No worry needed here—OpenOffice.org (OOo) has been around for many years as a feasible substitution for just about any operating system. It includes Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for illustrating, and Base for databases.
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Liberated
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Swiss company Synthesis AG has released it’s SyncML Client library (libsynthesis) as open source under the LGPL v2 and v3.
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As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe has already opened up much of Flash. For example, Adobe is supporting the Mozilla Foundation with the Tamarin Project. Tamarin is an open-source implementation of Adobe’s ActionScript 3 language, which is Flash’s scripting language. Adobe has also its own open-source Flash-related projects such as BlazeDS, a Java-based implementation of AMF (Action Message Format), which is used to integrated back-end DBMSs with Flash applications.
To really make Flash open, however, the video codecs within the SWF container format must be opened up. These codecs are On2 Technologies’ VP6 and Sorenson Spark. While, there are already several good open-source Flash players, such as the Free Software Foundation’s Gnash and Swfdec, none of them are truly feature compatible with Adobe Flash 10.
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U.S. firm Concursive has released the first version of its ConcourseConnect Web platform. The open source product serves to build community websites with blogs, wikis, picture galleries and other interactive features.
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Business
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In numerous posts, blogs, articles and forum threads on the web, we hear about the need for OpenSource projects to get money to them in a consistent and constant manner.
We also hear about the need to provide a single source provider of responsibility and financial ‘backing” of OpenSource software projects.
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Ingres and Red hat are both used to supporting large business and government customers, and they’re also both well-known for providing excellent training. Let’s see if their partnership can give Oracle, Microsoft and IBM a run for their money.
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Open source business intelligence software vendor Jaspersoft rolled out a new set of social features this week on JasperForge, its community project development Web site. The newly-added options give developers additional ways to network, exchange ideas, and create projects more quickly. Companies that rely on community involvement should take note because the current trend of using social tools to enhance collaboration won’t be going away anytime soon.
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In simplest terms Open source is code/applications that are made available for general use without cost/proprietary issues involved. To be successful and to stay in the competitive market is ever changing business world, a business should be such that, it can be able to adapt modern changes that should be applied. Open source web development is improved Ecommerce solutions for web development. There are various Open Source Technologies are available in the market that offers significant benefits to emerging companies.
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Public Sector
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In a nutshell then SharePoint is Microsoft’s attempt to box-up the Internet like an Office suite and introduce it to the proprietary business model with all the encumbered licensing, lock-in and forced upgrades that involves. Obviously we found this rather distasteful but that is neither new nor is it the point of this blog.
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A major difference between the two companies is Medsphere uses open-source software, which is software in which the programming code is freely available for anyone to acquire and modify. For example, the Web browser Internet Explorer is a Microsoft product and its programming code is property of Microsoft. However, the Web browser Firefox is open source, meaning any computer user can modify its code.
Open-source computer programs have the advantage in that they are free, so in the case of Medsphere, the state-run facilities paid for the installation and training for how to use the records system, not the software itself. Epic uses its own software.
Dr. Edmund Billings, chief medical officer at Medsphere, said his company provides an affordable option for many hospitals that simply can’t afford the higher priced services companies such as Epic provide.
“You can buy a Cadillac or you could buy a Honda, and most people can’t afford Cadillacs,” he said.
The low cost of open-source software has caught the attention of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. The senator has introduced legislation in Congress calling for the universal adoption of electronic health records by using open-source software.
“Open-source software is a cost-effective, proven way to advance health information technology — particularly among small, rural providers,” he said in a prepared statement.
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Open source applications, such as Linux and Apache, most often feed the back end of networks – operating systems, security programs, Web servers and databases. But they are quickly making their way to the desks of users. Members of the intelligence community, for example, use them to share information on investigations. The Defense Information Systems Agency announced in March its plans to open source a suite of 50 applications for human resources, training, security, acquisition and other related functions. This will allow agencies to streamline and share information inside and outside the Defense Department.
The General Services Administration is adopting open source principles to consolidate eight IT systems into one acquisition platform to allow agencies to share contracting data. In its solicitation for bids on the project, GSA said vendors must develop open source applications so other companies can compete for subsequent contracts for enhancements.
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Programming
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Among all the myriad choices that one has to constantly make in life, one would imagine that choosing a programming language for developing an operating system would be a relatively easy one, especially if the OS in question happens to be Linux. Surprisingly, that is not the case at all. Unknown to many, Linux too can be developed using a variety of programming languages. Herein, we consider some of those and look at all theirs pros and cons.
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When Chevron “learned that ’60 Minutes’ was preparing a potentially damaging report,” it “hired a former journalist” to tell its side of the story. For five months, former CNN reporter Gene Randall worked for the oil company. The subject of his video — and CBS’s “60 Minutes” segment — is “a class-action lawsuit filed by Ecuadoreans who accuse Texaco, a company acquired by Chevron in 2001, of poisoning the rain forest,” reports the New York Times.
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Currently Germany and China are the only two countries that are censoring a WikiLeaks domain. We guess that if Germany goes down this censorship route Wikileaks will not be the last news agency or publication that will be banned for writing things that the government prefers not be reported.
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Copyrights
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A study of P2P music exchanges to be revealed this week suggests that the ailing music business is shunning a lucrative lifeline by refusing to license the activity for money.
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The Author’s Guild seeks not only to prevent further cultural participation by reading-disabled people, but also to deny them the benefits of scientific advancement by blocking an existing technology from performing its intended role—and doing all this while demanding remuneration for a capability they themselves have done nothing to promote. If this is how the Author’s Guild wishes to treat those with reading disabilities—as freeloaders attempting to abuse the “added value” of TTS—then I fear for the future of equal access.
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That said, Peter Kafka, over at AllThingsD, has made the best point: most people don’t care about this bill because they don’t realize that it’s really a bill to bail out the RIAA by creating a radio station tax that goes straight into the recording industry’s bank accounts. So, rather than call it the Performance Rights Act, it should more accurately be called the Britney Bailout Bill.
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With the lawsuit between the movie studios and RealNetworks off to an inauspicious start, it looks like RealNetworks decided to pull out the nuclear option
Steve Weber, creator of the phrase “anti-rival goods” 12 (2005)
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 Deception, GNU/Linux, Windows at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another go at a comparison between truth and fiction
SURVEYS that encompass many Web sites cost a lot of money/effort/time to produce and the gain from them is mere unless a particular party gains. It is always very, very important to check where the money comes from. It’s valuable to at least understand the business model.
Here at Boycott Novell, 45% of the pages this month are served to “Linux” (that’s more than the equivalent figure for “Windows”, where “Windows” is just the way it’s parsed by AWStats, although there could be HTTP header modification because some people wrestle with stubborn IE-only Web sites).
Moments ago we wrote about the numbers from Net Applications and while we claimed that they were utterly wrong, we wrote nothing about what may be correct.
According to our reader, Chip, Net Applications claimed that GNU/Linux had a market share of 0.3% some years ago (subscription needed). In July of 2007 that’s what they are said to have claimed. But wait. This has got to be wrong because it’s highly inconsistent w.r.t. other figures we have. From the past couple of weeks we get:
Lies, Damn Lies and Linux Market Share Statistics
“The numbers from NetApplications are clearly unrepresentative of reality,” blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider. “Around 2003/4, IDC determined by survey that GNU/Linux was ahead of Mac OS at about 3 percent. Since then GNU/Linux has had growth numbers from 20 to 50 percent in various places.
“That would put GNU/Linux at 7 to 9 percent,” he asserted.
There is also this:
usiness model is rebranding Windows executables and selling them to unsuspecting rubes.
A year ago Matt Assay said it was at 2.02%
ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007. http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334 In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%. I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn’t have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.
It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest “report” is merely Microsoft’s continuing attempt to control the news about Linux’s success in replacing Windows on the desktop. It’s not working… No one whith half an ounce of brain would take the bait on a “free” Win7 (a dumbed down version that can run only 3 apps at a time) that will deactivate after one year unless the user PAYS Microsoft to activate it. Win7 is NOT free.
As our reader amd-linux (from Germany) put it earlier today:
The thing is that NetApps gets a lot of attention from US/UK IT press, while other observations that show MUCH higher numbers and are equally representative are more or less ignored.
One example is OS stats on heise.de, which is THE mainstream IT new site in Germany. They have now 15% Linux users among their readers, and it would be way more if readers like me were in a situation to use Linux in the office where I read heise.de mostly.
Another example, if you question heise.de being representative is spigel.de which is one of the leading sites of the world (133 in Alexa) and a mainstream news website. Here Linux has around 4%-6%, coming from nearly nothing 2 yrs ago. While spiegel.de is a German news site, is is read from around the world like the BBC site.
It is IMHO safe to assume that Linux worldwide is closer to 2 % than to 1%. The only source who could reliably shed some light on this would be Google, but they refuse to publish any numbers.
But the best, and this nobody can ignore, is the trend. Linux usage is virtually exploding with growth in the double digit percentage area quarter per quarter.
Readers can decide for themselves what the installed base of GNU/Linux really is. We only present some evidence here. █
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Posted in DRM, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Feel the light of Silverlight
Summary: On Silverlight bribing its way into case studies and more potential deception about openness
THIS post raises two important issues. The first is Microsoft’s “bribery as a business model”, which it has already engaged in elsewhere, e.g. in search (and it failed). The second issue is Microsoft wanting to associate its GNU/Linux- and FOSS-hostile Web plague with something that is all about love and openness.
Silverlight is not working. The New York Times has just dumped it and it just generally fails to gain ground with the exception of cases where Microsoft opens its chequebook or — as the following person put it yesterday — cases where Silverlight’s market share is being purchased.
Adobe can’t go around paying companies/organizations to use Flash while Microsoft can and is doing that. So spreading Flash as far as possible is the only option they have left because we know, nearly everyone has a price and Microsoft has the money and desire to spread Silverlight far and wide.
It’s the same situation as in sub-notebooks. Dumping is not a sustainable business plan. Another new observation worth passing forth is this about Microsoft using Big Buck Bunny to demonstrate an enemy of openness and Freedom.
I was highly amused by the irony of Microsoft, demonstrating new Silverlight 3.0 features, and using Big Buck Bunny as the demonstration footage. Could they not afford to license footage from elsewhere for their big screens? A small dose of irony in my day.
Is Microsoft exploiting Blender again? The company was already lying about cross-platform (Silverlight is Mac- and Windows-only) and it would not be the first time that Microsoft harnesses programming languages or various efforts to have Silverlight associated with "open source" fraudulently. █
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