08.23.09
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Microsoft-backed mob wants Firefox dead
AS we showed many times before, the Microsoft ecosystem is very much like a cult that acts against anything which is not Microsoft, driven by faith rather than understanding of fairness and civility. There is also a good deal of gifting (distribution of wealth within this “cult”).
In the news this week we found this report from IDG News Service. It suggests that Microsoft managed to sneak out of regulatory action virtually unpunished, as usual.
If Microsoft can’t strike a deal with European Union antitrust regulators over Internet Explorer before Windows 7′s scheduled Oct. 22 launch, the company will likely ship the browser with the new OS anyway, an analyst said today.
So basically, nothing substantial was achieved by Opera’s action. Mozilla has rightly complained about this and here is the original explanation.
In the material below we’ve tried to articulate in detail those key aspects of the proposal that need modification (Protecting User Choices and the Ballot Mechanism). Our assumption is that the EC and Microsoft may be close to a resolution; thus, the ability to radically change the proposal may be constrained as a practical matter, but I’d welcome feedback on other essential terms or clarifications that may be missing.
Needless to say, the Microsoft crowd will deform and spin this against Microsoft’s competitors.
It was not long ago that the Microsoft faithful Paul Thurrott wrote: “I’d recommend a boycott of Opera if I thought anyone was actually USING the damned thing…”
Around that very same time, Microsoft partners were boycotting Opera and urging others to do the same. It’s like some kind of economic sanction which totally neglects the crimes Microsoft has committed (with convictions) for Internet Explorer to illegally gain market share.
Here is how Opera put it, as quoted by Alibaba.com:
“Microsoft has been doing something illegal for a very, very long time,” says Jon von Tetzchner. A lot of people outside of Redmond, Wash. would probably agree. But in this case, the 41-year-old chief executive and cofounder of Opera Software, is griping about something we’ve all heard about for a decade: Microsoft’s bullying attempts to own the Web browser market by bundling its own version into Windows. Von Tetzchner half got what he wanted on Thursday, when Microsoft announced it would release Windows 7 in Europe without Internet Explorer, to counter European Union charges made in January on bundling the browser.
“Microsoft shill or fanboi, Andrew Thomas, calls for the death of Mozilla Corporation,” we learn from an alerts. Who is Andrew Thomas? Going back to Monday (August 17th), we find him writing in TG Daily that “Microsoft uses TG Daily writers to improve Office 2010.”
Software behemoth Microsoft has roped in TG Daily writers as unpaid consultants to improve spell and grammar checking in the upcoming release of Office.
It’s revealing, isn’t it? It shows how close Thomas has come to Microsoft. It is not news to us that TG Daily delivers a lot of Microsoft propaganda. Rob Enderle [1, 2] is one of their writers and Microsoft is a major sponsor (advertiser at the very least). The tag cloud speaks for itself. And it seems like like Andrew Thomas is just another Enderle being groomed by Microsoft.
Watch what he writes about Mozilla:
How much longer are we expected to put up with these whining scumbags who patently cannot compete on a levelplaying field…
[...]
Any company that uses lawyers rather than technical excellence to make a dollar deserves to die.
“Whining scumbags,” eh? Mozilla as the bad guy.
“Actually,” tells us a reader, “the court is pointing out that the playing field is far from level. “MSFT scumbags” have been whining for years to prevent having to compete on even terms. It’s entertaining, to be sure, to read the incoherent rantings of MSFT fanbois, but maybe Punch or the National Lampoon would be a more appropriate forum for Thomas than the TG Daily.
“Look for more Microsoft revisionist history to come in the near future. Thomas hits on many points: EU requiring *unbundling* of MSIE, illegal tying of products, illegal abuse of monopoly positions (going back to the old illegal per-processor days), inability of MS products to compete on technical merits (.NET is so slow and unstable that benchmarking is banned), and so on.
“Thomas is confusing ‘common’ or ‘unavoidable’ with ‘popular’
“Elvis is popular. Digestive gas is common. Butterflies are popular. Cockroaches are common.
“It seems that the whining is due to the declining use of MSIE in favor of both Firefox and Chrome.
“Microsoft business model seems to be more about thrashing about and causing disturbances. Members at Groklaw have pointed out that Microsoft is the new SCO. Rather than let that drag on and drag down the economy further, it is time to consider the RICO Act. This one time we can benefit from vendor lock-in: at Club Fed.”
Another problem posed by Microsoft’s monoculture is insecure software which makes the Internet far from acceptable. Quoting examples from the news this week (this is an Internet Explorer issue):
i. Using IE with Hotmail’s photo uploads led to security flaw (Updated)
The Windows Live Hotmail team has indicated that it has disabled adding photos directly into the body of an e-mail due to a security flaw that occurs when using Internet Explorer.
ii. Hotmail pulls Attach-Photo feature over security concerns
Microsoft has suspended the “Attach-Photo” feature in Hotmail as a result of security concerns.
iii. “Microsoft Hotmail users angry over pulled photo feature
Windows Live Hotmail users have been venting their frustration at Microsoft Corp. for the past month since the software maker suddenly removed a popular feature because it created a security hole.
To make matters worse, Microsoft refuses to eliminate a Web browser which is not only standards-hostile (by design) but it also insecure by design.
Good news for fans of Internet Explorer 6, the version of Microsoft’s online browser that debuted in 2001. Even though the company is now up to its eighth version of the browser, it will continue to support IE6 until at least 2014.
[...]
And many developers don’t want to bother making their products conform to IE6. Mark Trammell of the Digg content rating site, blogged, “Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an 8-year-old browser superseded by two full releases.”
With rusty software like Internet Explorer 6 out there, one ought to expect more scandals like the following:
i. Lawsuit seeks to pry information from banks on account breaches
The 11-page complaint alleged that cyber-thieves are stealing millions of dollars from U.S. bank accounts every month via virus infected e-mail spam.
ii. Hackers Stole IDs for Attacks
In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren’t previously known.
In the face of calls for a ban on Windows, Microsoft loves to pretend that these issues are not its fault, but as Microsoft spreads old and holey software by choice, this defense ought to be challenged severely. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Deals, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Search at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Scrutiny and challenges ahead of “Microsoft 2.0″; Wolfram|Alpha and Advance Internet deals spotted
Regardless of the outcome of the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal, Yahoo! is now behaving like a drone of Microsoft [1, 2]. As Hadoop escapees show us, this also has negative effects on Free software inside Yahoo! [1, 2]. Based on this report, other Yahoo! ‘refugees’ are starting to form a business elsewhere.
A team of Yahoo veterans who built its behavioral targeting advertising technology are publicly launching a hybrid ad network today called Rocket Fuel, which they’ve tested over the past year with major brands including Nike, Dell, Microsoft, and American Express. Despite keeping quiet, Rocket Fuel’s ad network reaches 40 million people and shows them about 100 million ads per month.
Great damage (e.g. to consumer choice) has already been done by the signing of the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal, which is revocable nonetheless. Antitrust regulators may still break it apart.
Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. hope that by joining forces, they can tilt the balance of power in Internet search away from Google Inc. First, however, Yahoo and Microsoft have to convince regulators that their plan won’t hurt online advertisers and consumers.
As the U.S. Justice Department reviews the proposed partnership, approval figures to hinge on this question: Will the online ad market be healthier if Google’s dominance is challenged by a single, more muscular rival instead of two scrawnier foes?
Microsoft too admits that this is not final. From Reuters:
Microsoft legal chief sees risk in Yahoo deal
[...]
The deal, struck in late July after months of talks, faces a tough regulatory review, and the possibility that it won’t be enough to effectively challenge Google Inc (GOOG.O).
Reuters names some other challenges such as this one in India:
According to Komli Media’s analytics platform Vizisense, the combined share of search traffic from India for Yahoo and Microsoft in July is only 8.49%, compared with Google’s 91.19%. However, the combined reach of search users is higher, at 37.90%, compared with Google’s 93.17%.
In China, which is the largest Internet population, it’s all about Baidu and Google. We wrote about this some weeks ago and also cited supportive numbers. Speaking of such numbers, the above shows sheer dominance by Google outside the United States (US) and not too surprisingly, the Microsoft-friendly meters that Microsoft loves to reference and pay [1, 2, 3] are not measuring things globally. Classic hype and deception for Bing. Among GNU/Linux users (many of whom are outside the US), it’s mostly the same story:
It’s therefore somewhat telling that Linux users overwhelmingly choose Google as their preferred search engine, according to data released today by Chitika, an online advertising network. Chitika analyzed data from 163 million searches across its advertising network between July 30 and August 16, and came up with the following…
According to this, almost 95% of GNU/Linux users are also using Google (neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft’s search engine identity du jour).
What can Microsoft do for a breakthrough? According to some reports, Wolfram|Alpha negotiated an agreement with Microsoft, but it’s not quite what CNET tries to make it seem.
Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch.
It would be better for Wolfram|Alpha not to associate itself with a company so hostile towards science, a company that thrives in ignorance.
Microsoft has signed another deal with Advance Internet, a newspaper group. It will have a negative effect on balance in the news.
Microsoft makes another move to restart its internet business with the announcement of a local advertising partnership with a major newspaper group in the US
Several days ago we saw Microsoft/NBC buying another news Web site [1, 2], which means it will be less than eager to criticise Microsoft, the paymaster.
A writer at Seeking Alpha has more details on what should be announced tomorrow.
On Monday, Advance Internet is announcing its new partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), an agreement that tells us a few things about the emerging, post-recession marketplace.
What will be the effect on newspaper coverage now that Microsoft is working with them? It would be naïve to assume that that the answer is “none”. █
“And let’s face facts. innovation has never been Microsoft’s strong suite. We’re much better at ripping off our competitors. For example, we did not invent either ASP or IE, we bought them!”
–E-mail from an unidentified Microsoft employee, as revealed in the antitrust trial
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Posted in America, Europe, Law, Microsoft, Patents at 5:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s patenting practices agitate the scientific community, patent reforms seen as necessary and likely
JUST THE OTHER day we mentioned Microsoft’s patent on “studying evolution”. It’s an example of some of those patents which kill [1, 2, 3, 4]. Given the relationship between the pharmaceutical cartel and Microsoft, this may not be entirely surprising. In public speeches, Bill Gates likens development of software to the invention of life-saving drugs in order to justify software patenting.
The Register has another report on this subject which we only alluded to on Thursday.
Microsoft goes Darwinian with evolutionary tree patent
[...]
Because such a patent could potentially hobble an entire scientific field, evolutionary biologists will surely be keeping a closer eye on Microsoft’s newfound interest in gene-splicing software.
In the words of Science: [emphasis in red is ours]
A 2-year-old patent application by Microsoft has claimed the invention of techniques that evolutionary biologists have been using for years to discern how organisms were related to one another through evolutionary time, based on similarities in genetic sequence. As word about it spreads, the phylogenetics community is increasingly worried. They think the patent is unlikely to pass muster at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office because it seems obvious. However, should the application be approved, some researchers may find that they are doing work that infringes it.
At Groklaw (News Picks), Jones writes: “You might find the reactions to this article by scientists of interest here, including the comments, and don’t miss the graphic of Darwin’s first sketch of the “tree of life” superimposed with a WGA notice.”
What on Earth is Microsoft doing?
Windows and Xbox are already killing innocent people [1, 2, 3] and Microsoft is now stepping in stomping on the medical field too. For those who do not know just how corrupt this industry can be, check out what’s happening this week with Obama and healthcare. There is an already-exposed AstroTurf whose aim is to ensure an ill system of uninsured people stays in place.
Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod’s public relations and ad industry ties — which received some scrutiny during the presidential campaign — are again being questioned. Opponents of health care reform (mostly Republicans) are criticizing the “huge ad buys” that pro-reform groups are making through Axelrod’s old firm. “Two separate $12 million ad campaigns advocating Obama’s health care plan … were produced and placed partly by AKP&D Message & Media, a firm founded by Axelrod that employs his son and still owes Axelrod $2 million,” reports Politico.com.
This would probably take us further off topic, so going back to the issue with patents, here is a new essay titled “Looks Like IP Is About To Slow Down Innovation In Clean Tech”
Plenty of studies have shown, over and over again, that in an emerging market, the last thing you want is patent protection. It slows down innovation and adoption drastically. That’s because in a brand new emerging market, the bigger issue is actually figuring out how to get the market established — and that means a lot of different efforts getting thrown at the wall, and the ability for multiple parties to try different approaches to getting things to work in a way that the market wants. Often this means a lot more sharing of ideas (even among competitors), as everyone begins to recognize that getting over that adoption hurdle is a much bigger deal than hoarding IP. And that’s a key point.
One thing to assess and to measure is “innovation” — whatever it may mean — but what about mortality rates in the case of medicine? As we showed three weeks ago, life-saving drugs are being banned or blocked because the patent system is driven by profit, not ethics. Will this ever be rectified? Here’s a start:
An en banc ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has narrowed the reach of U.S. patent laws covering companies’ overseas sales and production.
Glyn Moody has just published the following:
Why We Must Call Them “Intellectual Monopolies”
[...]
There we have it: the more opponents collude by using the “eye-pea” term, the more the monopolists can point to this as “proof” that copyright and patents are property, not monopolies.
As we noted some days ago, the European Commission had begun reassessing the patent system. Here is another take on the subject:
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Market and Services plans to conclude a contract for a comprehensive study on patent quality. The aim is to study the quality of patent rights with economic analysis in order to propose effective policy solutions for the optimal functioning of the future patent system in Europe considering its objectives to encourage innovation and the diffusion of new technology and knowledge. This should take into account a system with the co-existence of national and European patents, and a future Community patent which is currently being negotiated between Member States.
There is bad news here. The Community patent, which can facilitate software patents inside Europe, is rearing its ugly head again. █
“Today, nearly 40 percent of a senior’s healthcare spending is on pharmaceutical medications.“
–Dennis Hastert
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As Microsoft struggles to keep Office in the market, Google seizes the opportunity and poaches big customers
IN PREVIOUS posts about the i4i case we showed that not patents alone were the issue. Microsoft befriended a company for the sole purpose of taking a look at its portfolio and then eliminating it through imitation and bundling [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. As Mr. Updegrove points out, so many articles were published about the subject (Microsoft is now appealing urgently), but his thoughts on the subject are thought provoking, so here are some portions of interest:
The other reason I haven’t yet written is equally simple: the latest skirmish that i4i won in Texas really doesn’t matter very much.
Huh? Then why, you may fairly ask, are we reading so many breathless articles (3,227, by the Google News count as of this moment in time), speculating on the consequences and opportunities that will follow when the sixty days runs out under the Texas judgment, and Office disappears from the shelves of the U.S. retail world? Isn’t Office Suite Life As We Know It about to end?
Well, no. Sorry. The key of course, is that patents in general, and the i4i patent as well, are all about money. Whether or not Microsoft’s emergency appeal to lift the Judge’s order barring it from selling Office with Word as currently configured (i.e., with the specific offending XML capability included upon which the i4i suit focuses) is successful, I’ll wager you that no one will have any more trouble buying Office the day after the 60 day pendancy period runs out than they did before. That’s because the key to the solution is also all about money, calculated under three alternate paths.
[...]
1. What about the “New Microsoft?” For some time now, Microsoft has been saying that it has grown up, leaving its Bad Boy adolescent behavior behind. One element of that bad behavior was getting small companies to open their technological kimonos to give Microsoft a peek, in hopes of getting an advantageous business relationship, only to find that Microsoft instead knocked off their technology, including it for free in a Microsoft product, and putting the little companies out of business, or close to it. That’s what i4i says happened here, and the judge agreed. So much for the New Microsoft.
Over at Groklaw, Jones writes: “I have a suggestion for you, so you can test his words out: search through Ecma’s OOXML standard for yourself, and I believe you’ll find it refers to “customXML” over 1000 times. The article goes on to state that i4i examined OpenOffice and found it doesn’t infringe their patent.”
The blogger at Google Watch says that advantage is being taken by Google.
Don’t think that Google and other providers of word processing software aren’t watching the Microsoft vs. i4i case with interest.
Unrelated to the above court ruling, it turns out that Motorola has dumped Microsoft Office for Google Apps.
Business Insider reports that Motorola ’s Mobile Devices Division (a.k.a mobile phone division) will be replacing some Microsoft Office services with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Apps as the company’s collaboration/communication platform . The move will net Google another 20,000 users of its enterprise Google Apps service, and should help lower Motorola’s operating costs.
This is covered in some other places and there are more such stories on their way. Last month it happened in the New Zealand Post and Slayton lied about it, but this time around she actually defends Google Apps. There are pros and cons to Fog Computing, but as long as Google Apps can export documents as ODF (which is can), then lock-in is minimal. Regarding privacy, given the many back doors in Microsoft products, it’s not as though Microsoft Office offered much privacy, either. This issue is therefore off the table. Regarding downtime/uptime (in the context of SaaS), prospective customers should ask themselves how much downtime is caused by a virus infection in Windows/Office. More to the point — how much labour and compromise does the latter type of downtime entail? █
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Posted in IRC Logs at 3:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Read the log
Enter the IRC channel now
To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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08.22.09
Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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These and more could be interesting gift ideas for fellow Linux users, sys ads or family. 
It could also be a good conversation starter in any convention or seminar for Linux and open source stuff.
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It does not have a:, c: d: to z: drives. Linux does not see internal drives, partitions and external devices as seperate drives. According to Linux (and every *nix based operating system) every piece of hardware is treated as a file. Even the computers memory, the internal busses, USB devices, mouse and keyboard are all files under Linux. To use these devices is all done in exactly the same way. Reading and writing to the relevent file. They are called devices only for our benefit.
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For the people who want to stay out of politics and just concentrate on technical issues, that is great. Just don’t be too harsh on people who realize that politics is also important and they put their energy into that. A healthy middle ground would be the best. It would be nice to see companies supporting GNU/Linux and taking it seriously. It seems that slowly, hardware and software manufacteurrs are getting the hint but it has been a long and hard battle which will continue for quite a long time to come. It is not easy to ignore politics and especially for a software revolution such as GNU/Linux.
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Google
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The easiest to understand are Google and VMware. Google, with its Linux distribution Chrome OS, is placing secondary emphasis on the operating system and primary emphasis on where it takes you: the Web. Given Google’s strength in cloud computing, this makes perfect sense. Google needs an operating system just long enough to move users “off” their personal computers (or mobile phones, for which Google has developed Android) and into its cloud services: Google Apps, Search, Wave, etc.
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“It may be better to help Nokia throw meatballs into Google’s punch bowl — Nokia still has a chance of spoiling the Android feast,” Kuittinen said.
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Desktop
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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately using Windows as my main OS, jumping between Windows 7 or Vista. This is mostly in part because I’ve been working with some native Windows programs throughout my daily routine. But I decided yesterday to give up working on Windows natively and returning back to my preferred Arch Linux mainly because of one thing.
Multiple desktops.
Yes, something as simple as having multiple desktops is what caused me to ditch my Windows designing environment.
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The bottom line is whether one is a DIY type or an average PC user one can get a complete, rather high powered GNU/Linux based PC system for under $800.00.
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Kernel Space
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Ian has been working in a branch of Mesa with what he calls the “Assembly Shader Rework” and rewriting the ARB program parser and adding in support for NVIDIA layered extensions. His hopes were to get most of this ready for Mesa 7.6 and it looks like this will end up working out right on schedule.
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Applications
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Theme support – Another Summer of Code project from 2008, this time by Justin Rodriguez, adds theming support to libpurple and Pidgin. This currently isn’t very well documented at all, but themes are now supported for the buddy list, sounds, and status icons.
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Brazilian independent software vendor (ISV) Handcase says it will port about 60 of its PalmOS applications to the Linux-based Moblin operating system. The apps include free as well as paid commercial products.
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I thought this would be a good time for us to share our next six months outlook for Bordeaux. Maybe I should start with whats taken place over the past few months then go over our future goals.
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Even though there are plenty of good web-based RSS/News readers or aggregators that are available today, a lot of us still prefer to use desktop feed readers. This is mainly because desktop clients are more flexible and offer integration with other installed applications.
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Desktop Environments
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Love it or hate it, the Sugar Learning Platform graphical user interface is strikingly different from any of the usual windowing desktops. With this radical departure from the norm, we’ve seen much discussion. And while my favorite interpretation is Aquatic Sugar, the new website from Paraguay Educa comes in a close second…
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As I have said repeated, I like eye candy. One of the aspects of eye candy I like more than any other is transparency. With the right Linux desktop there is almost no limit on how you can configure the look and feel of your desktop. And that means you can have as transparent a desktop as you like.
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Of course, one should be planning for routine security updates anyway, but here we are referring to version updates here. As with any update, you will have to prepare for a complete backup of the system as well as the data, just in case backups don’t go as well as planned.
That is another luxury of FOSS/GNU/Linux systems. The ability to cleanly update from one release to the next. In a generally safe, relatively quick manner and without additional cost in terms of new software purchase, licenses, etc..
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Mandriva Family
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Please note that final graphical design is still not available.
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A friend of mine asked me to give him a Linux distribution as soon as possible, so I decided to see if PCLinuxOS was fine for him right now. I also decided to test their early implementation of KDE 4. I’ll keep this post brief because there isn’t much to say. There isn’t a KDE 4 ISO out from PCLinuxOS yet and I assume that will take a while as they add the polish required for the next release, which incidentally will be out… when it’s ready.
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CentOS
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That’s it. The longest review ever is coming to an end. My Print Preview option in Firefox shows it’s 48 pages long should I decide to commit it to paper, one and a half times longer any other review I’ve written so far. But I think it’s worth it.
We have learned a fearful lot of stuff here. First and the most important one, CentOS can be used as a desktop. A solid, stable desktop that will see you through almost a decade of support.
You will be able to have almost everything you need. Following a crash course in CentOS tweaking and taming, we learned the difference in behavior and setup of 32-bit versus 64-bit hosts, we learned how to compile, how to solve problems with kernel versions, overcome screen resolution issues, configure proxy support and get updates, configure Samba sharing, install multimedia codecs, and get our CentOS to look pretty.
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I previously blogged about how we are promoting WiiPresent at FrOSCon 2009 in Sankt-Augustin, Germany. We give away Wii Remotes and bluetooth dongles to speakers and every conference room has a system hooked up to the beamer that is running a custom CentOS-based LiveCD (actually a LiveUSB) image.
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Ubuntu Family
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Besides some of the synthetic graphics test results being lower in Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, the rest of the Linux desktop benchmarking spectrum experienced the same or better results. With the switch to EXT4 and some other improvements, in a few tests it shows Ubuntu 9.10 really shining.
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These are previews of some of the themes i liked. There are tens of other themes as well. Choose the one that meets your taste.
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A comment to yesterday’s marketing entry lead me to Seth’s blog, a marketer who rather neatly describes various mechanisms and ideas.
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The competitive advantage of “free” that Ubuntu has simply does not sell with the enterprise market. Most corporate users would not migrate to Ubuntu simply because it is free. As long as they are willing to pay lots of money for MS Windows licenses, then it invariably means that to corporate and enterprise customers there is a price lower than free.
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Overall, this looks promising. The developers will have enough time to polish it until October, and KDE 4.3 really behaves very nice, not to mention the look.
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If we can’t have a corporate sponsor such as Canonical, IBM, Intel, Google, Linux Foundation paying for adverts, then perhaps it’s time we started doing something as a community. I’m not talking about the nascar 500 debarkle, but more of the firefox in the paper, full page spread kind of marketing. This kind of marketing would take real organisation though, lots of research and a lot of time to pull together all the people interested in making it happen. That’s probably why it’s not been done before.
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I do know that there will always be pockets of trolls waiting under forum bridges, though if we can all be a bit more positive and work together, it’ll be for the greater benefit of Linux.
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For Linux Pro Magazine readers, the name Tonido will sound familiar. I covered this sleek and user-friendly solution that lets you turn an Ubuntu-based machine into a nifty server in issue 105. Recently, CodeLathe, the company behind Tonido, launched TonidoPlug — a tiny Ubuntu-based server running the Tonido software.
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The Beagle Board is an open-hardware single-board computer that is both inexpensive and capable of running Linux® at a reasonable speed. Get to know the Beagle Board, and learn how to get a Linux development environment together on the cheap.
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The Olliance Group has announced a new “Mobile Open Source Practice,” and has hired embedded Linux veteran and LinuxPundit analyst and consultant William “Bill” Weinberg to run it. Weinberg has been named senior executive and practice manager of the open source consultancy’s new mobile practice.
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The site’s awesomely detailed overview of a prototype N900 includes a bumper crop of photos of the phone and screenshots of the user interface. The story also includes an exhaustive introduction to Maemo, Nokia’s Linux-ish operating system, which powers the N900.
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Sub-notebooks
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# A Tablet
The new netbook looks great, but still a tablet would be an incredible addition to the lineup. Currently, the only tablets available with Ubuntu pre-installed are un/re-branded machines which knocks the price up, and although the CrunchPad looks sweet, something from System76 with Ubuntu would be even sweeter! Tablets are a great thing to show off which not only promotes Ubuntu but also kills the myth that Linux does not love tablets. It does.
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Two separate U.S.-based system integrators are shipping Ubuntu 9.04-based netbooks that run on the Intel Atom N270 CPU and offer 10-inch displays and 160GB hard disk drives (HDDs). Denver-based System76 announced a “Starling” netbook, and Berkeley-based ZaReason weighed in with its Terra A20 (pictured).
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If I asked you to tell me the first software that was made available as open source, you probably would point to something that came out of ARPAnet, such as TCP/IP; I dare say you would at least mention one of the fundamental pieces of the Internet. But I gently brushed against an earlier computing endeavor that might qualify as the first open source application: IBM’s Airline Control Program, or ACP. If ACP was not among the first open source apps — assuming we use the definition, “of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available” — then it was certainly an influence. Yet, in my old fuddy-duddiness, I’m surprised by how few people actually know ACP even existed. Especially since I think a few tendrils of its source code helped you make it onto your airplane flight today.
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Lyx – If you do a lot of academic writing, theses, or scientific papers, Lyx will make sure the structure of your documents meets formal acceptance requirements. This app helps you with those niggling formatting details, and includes several templates to get you up and running in no time. It also includes a mathematical formula editor, support for several graphic formats, and shared geometry settings for multiple figures.
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Though the open source FreeBSD operating system has changed in many aspects over the last 16 years of its life, one item that has remained relatively static is its underlying network routing architecture.
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OpenOffice.org
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High Quality Office Suite.
OO.org is developed by a worldwide community of people like you and I. You can contribute to the development of this great application in so many ways the easiest of which is to donate some few dollars to help cover the cost of development. Having thousands of people develop the application has resulted in a very high quality product due to the fact that lots of people get to see the code, make corrections and give valuable inputs, with more people testing it and giving feedback resulting in a very stable, reliable, high quality world class product. There is no secret in the development of OO.org
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Mozilla
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I’m excited to announce the initial beta release of the Mozilla Creative Collective, the official new home and hub of activity for our visual design community. The goal of the Creative Collective is to use art as a means for spreading Firefox and sharing the Mozilla story in new ways.
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The week of September 14-21, 2009 is Mozilla Service Week, brought to you by the good folks behind Firefox and Thunderbird. They’ve partnered with Idealist.org, a non-profit jobs listing site, to link service-minded techies with non-profit organizations in need to their help.
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This extension is an early preview, but it’s really quite good, and you can definitely have fun with it.
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Social media addict or social media newbie? Either way, we’ve got four must-have Firefox extensions that will make using popular social media sites much easier and more seamless within the world’s most popular open source browser.
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VoIP
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Opsound is a good demonstration of how the ideas behind free software are being applied in other fields, with the result that open source projects like Asterisk can then benefit in its turn – sharing as symbiosis.
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Ekiga – Here’s an open source VoIP and video conferencing app designed especially for the GNOME desktop. It can handle multiple network interfaces at once, and includes an advanced contact book, configurable sound events, call hold, transfer, and forwarding, and a host of other features. Ekiga also integrates well with Asterisk and Novell Evolution.
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Business
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I have already been writing that commercial and open source are still not antonyms, and David did definitely a better job in his paper “FLOSS is commercial software” (revised earlier this year).
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Government
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Last month Rufus Pollock, Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke at OpenTech 2009 in a session with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information.
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/08/19/opening-up-government-data-give-it-to-us-raw-give-it-to-us-now/
Where is the nearest bus stop? UK Department for Transport adds NaPTAN data to Open Street Map
The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has recently released data from the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database to be put on Open Street Map (OSM).
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In an effort to engage our highly skilled workforce we are launching DataSF.org, an initiative designed to increase access to city data.
The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency.
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Starting on Monday, visitors of Osor, the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations, can search for applications among the 1749 open source development projects that are currently hosted on ten development websites provided by national and regional public administrations in Austria, France, Italy and Spain.
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Licensing
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Finally I’d rather have a proprietary derived work than no derived program at all, or that instead someone will duplicate my effort in creating a BSD-style or a proprietary replacement for my work.
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Science
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PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun the most revolutionary experiment in the history of education, stretching all the way back to the pharaohs. It now gives away its curriculum to anyone smart enough to learn it. It has posted its curriculum on-line for free. These days, this means a staggering 1900 courses. This number will grow.
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Standards/Consortia
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In a move that could only be characterized as surprising, Sony announced last week that it was going to be using the open ePub eBook standard, which in theory should enable Sony Reader users to access and use any books created around the standard. Sony Readers will also be able to read Adobe PDFs and Adobe eBooks, both of which come with Adobe DRM. It’s a complex announcement, but one thing is clear, Sony has laid down the gauntlet with Amazon, leaving it as the lone major proprietary reader. But is Amazon too big to care?
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It’s strange how one of the largest news organizations in the world can make such a muddle when writing about serious issues in an important internal document.
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And the key point he makes? In the past, heretics were punished for sharing their ideas. These days, you’ll be punished if you don’t share your ideas.
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Copyright reform is never simple, but a principled, forward-looking approach is the right place to start.
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While many bands are left struggling to connect with fans and giving them a reason to buy (CwF + RtB), acts like HEALTH are giving away “prizes” and Radiohead are leaking its own songs. We can now add Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground into the fray as well.
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To gain attention for his new album, Moldover created some unique packaging that turns the CD cover into a playable electronic instrument.
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And then along comes LyricWiki, a terrific resource for grabbing lyrics without the ads and dead-ends. Just type a song title, artist, or album into LyricWiki’s Search field and a list of Google hits appears on a subsequent page. Click an appropriate link and the lyrics appear without the advertising cruft. Better yet, thanks to the LyricWiki API, programmers could create desktop and mobile applications that retrieved lyrics from LyricWiki without the need for a Web browser.
At least it did. According to a post by LyricWiki’s creator, Sean Colombo, the major publishers demanded that programmatic access to LyricWiki’s collection of lyrics be shut off. Rather than face the wrath of those publishers, Colombo complied with the request.
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A federal appeals court in New York ruled that a Yahoo Inc Internet radio service is not required to pay fees to copyright holders of songs it plays, a defeat for Sony Corp’s BMG Music.
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While commercially-recorded audio from the traditional big-name music companies is on a downhill slide in both technical and artistic quality, it’s never been better for the do-it-yourselfer, the serious hobbyist, and independent artist. All this hooey about Linux needing to be more “business friendly”– why should we even care? Look at what business has done for us: the RIAA, BSA, DMCA, insane copyright extensions, “intellectual property”, patents, the near-death of Fair Use, corporate spyware, unchecked privacy invasions, a complete abdication of responsibility, a barren computing marketplace…who needs friends like that?
OK that’s a bit of a tangent, sorry, just my usual blend of mixed feelings coming out: immense sadness at the overall sorry state of affairs, and immense gratitude that we have such a strong lifeline in Linux and FOSS.
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What’s interesting is how tightly focussed the Pirate Party is. I think that’s wise: otherwise it would just become another Raving Monster Loony Party. By restricting its message to an area that it understands, and which is crying out for reform, I’m sure it will benefit in the long run. It will also, usefully, force the other parties to frame their own responses in this domain.
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If you believe that denying a fair trial to around 5 million people in this country is wrong, maybe it’s time to join the Pirate Party?
Jack Vice, Founder of robot maker Anthrotronix, Inc. 02 (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 Google, Mail, Marketing, Microsoft, NetWare, Novell, SCO, Servers, Virtualisation, Vista 7, Windows at 8:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Leftover of news relating to Novell
IT has been quiet, very quiet. Scraping the bottom of the news barrel, we have:
SCO
Groklaw looks back at one of the last stages in the SCO story. Darl McBride’s analogy with trees and branches is being torn to pieces.
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Posted in Marketing, Novell, SLES/SLED at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about SUSE, accumulated over the past week
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