09.25.09
Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Clearly IT, especially those in the desktop space, is looking at, if not an inflection point, then certainly the beginning of sea change. There is no question that the definition of a desktop is undergoing a change as more and more companies rethink the necessity to put a machine under each desk. Data breaches, maintenance costs, changing device preferences and increased connection speeds are making us consider the solutions we are asked to present; as maintenance and installation costs become the long pole in the budget tent, anything that we can do to shorten that pole is good. And a Linux desktop, whatever that means, is certainly going to play a big role providing those solutions.
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How do operating systems and breastfeeding figure in the same discussion? One is intuitive and the other isn’t — or neither is, or both ought to be, depending on your point of view (and perhaps how your mother fed you).
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Kernel Space
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Recently Linus Torvalds referred to the Linux Kernel as bloated and scary. So what is next? Does anyone want to go back to the days of spending hours tinkering with your system in order to use your Scanner or Printer or Webcam. Or are you like me and you enjoy the features of the current Linux Kernel, you enjoy the pain free setup. And other features like easily being able to setup accelerated 3d for gaming and Compiz Fusion.
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The kernel folks at your favorite distro — Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian, SuSE or whatever — do a great job. Somehow, they come up with a kernel that works with just about machine, from 10-year-old klunkers to brand new 8-core speedsters. When you think about it, it’s amazing your machine boots at all!
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Applications
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There are a few things that set WikiCrowd apart from other wiki engines. Take, for example, its installation procedure. WikiCrowd doesn’t require any database back-end, so you only need a machine with an Apache server and PHP 5.2 for it. WikiCrowd comes as a single install.php file which does the donkey job of installing the wiki on your server.
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Desktop Environments
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After getting a lot of feedback from the crowd regarding window managers I’ve decided to try a few out. Initially I’ve tried awesome and wmii, and I’m fairly impressed with both. I do wish I could combine some of the features that I like from each one–and maybe that is possible.
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I’m quite conservative with my desktop usually, I like the default Ubuntu configuration and know it well. That said I’m enjoying using gnome-shell and intend to use it for a while at least. I’m looking forward to it evolving, including new concepts and growing more popular. The negatives I’ve noticed I think are mostly down to lack of time. I’m not sure if it’s going to be “ready” for the targeted date of next March and am not sure that it should be – there’s plenty more to prototype.
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Here’s an interesting note from Kahel’s project website:
“Kahel OS is not just an Operating System so to speak. IT is not just a Technology Product on a Linux and Open Source Platform added to the thousands of FREE Distros already available in the community. IT does not explicitly want to be different or to be set apart from the rest. However, among others, we simply would like Kahel OS (just like our team) to be the embodiment of our IT Values and Philosophy.
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Mandrake/Mandriva/Ulteo
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Thanks to experimentations by Prabhu Ramamoorthy and the nice work of Phil Lavigna, everyone can now use Ulteo OVD in the clouds with Amazon EC2.
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Today, Mandriva, Europe’s leading Linux editor, released a new version of Mandriva Mini, a product based on Moblin™ version 2 technology, an optimized open source Linux operating system project for rich Internet and media experiences on Intel® Atom™ processor based devices.
Mandriva has proven its ability to succeed in target markets, notably with a Classmate PC design for education.
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Debian Family
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Given the likelihood that the Software Store will eventually become a channel for selling applications in addition to distributing Free ones, and that that development is in the interests of everyone, I don’t see a reason to worry so much about the implications of the term “store.” Although the application won’t serve as a store in Ubuntu 9.10, it may well become one in future releases. And that’s fine.
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A few minutes ago, Canonical uploaded the default wallpaper(s) and artwork for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system. The default theme is still Human but the Window Border has a different color and the default icons are Humanity. The big surprise is that there are now 17 new wallpapers, except that compilation of “astronomical” backgrounds we announced a couple of days ago. However, the orange wallpaper you see in the screenshots below is the default one and it’s also set as the background for GDM (the login screen).
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The login window that will be greeting all users of Karmic Koala has finally been revealed.
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Overall It’s a great improvement, and having ‘active’ and ‘available’ networks separated is a simple but bloody useful idea!
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Today is Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala artwork deadline which means all the artwork will remain unchanged from now on, until Karmic is released. There have been a lot of updates today, so let’s take a look at how Ubuntu Kamic Koala will look like.
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December 3rd, 2009 – Alpha 1 release;
January 7th, 2010 – Alpha 2 release;
February 4th, 2010 – Alpha 3 release;
March 4th, 2010 – Beta 1 release;
April 1st, 2010 – Beta 2 release;
April 15th, 2010 – Release Candidate;
April 29th, 2010 – Final release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
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In GNOME, the panel takes up enough screen real estate on a netbook to be annoying. A few paragraphs back, I mentioned that I took stock of the few icons I had on the panel and came up with two that I really needed. They’re both panel applets, and I don’t know of any other way of launching them. So I deleted all of the icons I didn’t need and moved the sshMenu and Trash applet icons to the top panel.
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We’re kicking off the regular series of LoCo stories with a great one which truly encompasses the spirit of Ubuntu.
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I still think Linux is going to gain and keep huge share here – the price is right, many developers know it, the tools are, depending upon edition, there, and it’s open-source, a big plus in embedded apps. But Windows will hold its own here, for at least a while longer. Even Microsoft, I think, will have a Linux offering at some point.
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The LiMO Foundation is celebrating Vodafone’s endorsement with two handsets from Samsung, but the news that the Linux-based alternative isn’t dead won’t be received well over at Symbian.
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Sub-notebooks
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Sean Daly from Sugar Labs, the company that develops the XO’s kid-friendly front-end software, maintains that OLPC is still achieving some great results despite press reports to the contrary. “OLPC is concentrating on getting laptops to kids and not its image in the tech press,” he told us.
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While IBM and Canonical are initially aiming only at business users in Africa, I won’t be surprised to see this partnership spread to other similar efforts around the world. There are reports that the software suite the companies are producing is being tested in areas outside Africa. It’s inevitable that computers will make their way into the hands of people around the world who might not have previously been able to afford them. The IBM and Canonical partnership presents solid evidence that existing freeware and open source can be powerful drivers for that trend.
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Trinity Audio Group’s awarding winning Indamixx line of portable studio’s partners with Renoise and Create Digital Music to kick off this falls hottest song contest. “Trackers are back” says creative director Ronald Stewart.
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The Swiss company Skysoft has made software available to display radar data for air traffic controllers. The application, Albatross Display, and its source code was made public earlier this month.
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Open-Xchange, the leading provider of open source groupware, now gives users the ability to consolidate any kind of existing webmail accounts – for example from Google and Yahoo — into a folder in Open-Xchange so they can managed more easily.
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Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, and Incendonet, Inc., a leading provider of speech recognition solutions for the enterprise, today announced that companies using Asterisk for their IP-PBX communications needs can now add speech recognition-based solutions in a plug and play manner to improve customer service, reduce operating costs and increase mobile worker productivity with Incendonet’s SpeechBridge®.
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Shugar: For startups and small companies, there are public cloud offerings coupled with other commercial cloud vendors that can provide a pay as you go infrastructure minimizing CapEx investments and reducing the risk in deploying new products. For larger or enterprise companies, a hybrid model maintaining existing compute infrastructure while leveraging public cloud offerings for less critical or experimental projects may provide more flexibility at reduced CapEx.
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Business
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Why throw your money away? In the almost decade I’ve been working in the IT field, I’ve seen companies make some really stupid financial decisions when it comes to technology. Everything I’ve wrote above are things I noticed real companies doing. Buying Windows licenses for associates that don’t do anything Windows-specific, spending money on the Windows Server operating system just to share a measly 5-12GB of files, and buying Outlook licenses for people that probably could do well with Thunderbird or web-mail are just some of the things I’ve seen companies do to flush their money away.
The moral of the story is to think before you act, and buy the things you absolutely need, and to save money where you can. If you can save money within your organization, you can put it in another area, such as purchasing more servers or increasing your allowable bandwidth. If you require Windows servers and applications, that’s absolutely fine as not all businesses can control what the suppliers require. However, use free software wherever it may fit in your organization. You’ll put some money back into your IT budget. So why do IT departments use closed source software when they don’t need it? I have no idea.
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The economic malaise currently gripping the globe has claimed many victims, but one area of business that has actually benefited is open source software adoption.
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A platform that goes well beyond what was achieved with LAMP and that extends into portal, integration busses, process management and data management. And that is fully supported by open source management tools.
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Government
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Open source vendors are calling on the UK government to put its money where its mouth is and police its own rules on public sector open source software procurement – which were revised in February this year.
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Licensing
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An education organization in France has successfully sued a software vendor for failing to comply with the open source General Public License. The ruling is significant because it demonstrates that software recipients, and not just developers, can launch GPL enforcement cases in France.
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It’s the reason why Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer calls Linux viral. But French courts obviously think it has merit because the GNU General Public Licence has been upheld in a court of appeals in France.
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The Advisory Opinion held that as long as the IP address of the party downloading the software in Iran (or other sanctioned country) was logged by Mozilla’s server but not otherwise used by Mozilla (say, for example, to serve to the user a web page in Farsi), the company did not have sufficient knowledge of an export of encryption software to Iran to be liable under the regulations.
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Openness
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As a result, recognising that a new approach was needed, Second Life’s founder Philip Linden stepped aside from the day-to-day running of the company, and brought in Mark Kingdon. When I interviewed him earlier this year, he was naturally upbeat about the future of Second Life, so I was glad to have the opportunity to talk to him this morning about how things are going, and to see whether Second Life really has found its second wind.
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NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky gave a talk Tuesday at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, our friends just on the other side of Harvard Square. His subject was the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. Even for those of us familiar with his ideas, he brought in a few new wrinkles, which have already been the subject of commentary around the web.
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Use the search box on the left to search the European Information Space for Open Access scientific publications. The DRIVER Information Space consists of
* approximately 1,000,000 documents
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EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is an organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. The organisation is both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research institutions, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings.
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As local and state operational budgets dwindle, many government agencies are turning to open source software to help manage workflow both internally and with other departments. As part of a Collaboration Initiative, The New York State Department of Labor launched LaborForge, a public repository designed specifically for sharing labor-related source code and design documents.
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China will get the biggest increase in voting power at the International Monetary Fund when the global lender completes a long-awaited restructuring in 2011, the head of the IMF said on Tuesday (22 September).
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AstroTurf
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Faced with a shrinking audience of journalists for their press releases, a consortium of universities has launched Futurity, a site that will aggregate edited versions of the best materials produced by university press offices.
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Amid an increasingly hostile climate towards secondhand smoke and tobacco advertising, tobacco companies are battling to maintain both their nicotine markets and the ability to use their logos. R.J. Reynolds stopped advertising cigarettes in magazines in 2008, but is once again printing its Camel logo in major magazines like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and Maxim, in ads for a new form of non-combusted tobacco called “snus” (rhymes with “moose”).
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In fact, Scott’s own group had played an integral role in mobilizing the protesters. According to internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights had been working closely for weeks as a “coalition partner” with three other right-wing groups in a plot to unleash irate mobs at town-hall meetings just like Doggett’s. Far from representing a spontaneous upwelling of populist rage, the protests were tightly orchestrated from the top down by corporate-funded front groups as well as top lobbyists for the health care industry.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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A few days ago I was ruminating on the recent on-the-spot conversion of the US FCC’s Chairman to network neutrality. I pointed out there was a new site devoted to preserving the same in Europe, called EU Open Internet, which has now clocked up a respectable 2,700 signatures.
Unfortunately, there is a specific threat to net neutrality in Europe, hidden away in the Telecoms Package.
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A judge ordered the government Thursday to release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the records be provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by October 9, 2009.
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After months of internal review, the Obama Administration today announced a new policy on the use of the state secrets privilege. The state secrets privilege traditionally allows the government to withdraw particular pieces of evidence from a court case on the grounds that the evidence would reveal sensitive classified information. Despite this limited purpose, it’s been repeatedly misused by the Bush and now Obama administrations to try to throw important litigation out of court, and is badly in need of reform.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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His last book, The Da Vinci Code, was wildly popular in China and propelled translations of his earlier novels onto bestseller lists as well. The latest thriller, which follows the further adventures of intrepid symbologist Robert Langdon, should sell well over here too.
Once it’s translated, that is. People’s Literature Publishing House expects a Chinese edition to be on shelves sometime in 2010.
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Earlier this week TorrentFreak reported that there had been objections over one of the proposed lay judges set for the Pirate Bay appeal. Now there are yet more claims of possible bias, this time with two of the main judges who have both been members of pro-copyright groups.
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The major music labels say that they stand to lose £200 million this year in the UK alone thanks to Internet file-sharing. But one of the country’s biggest ISPs is now slinging around some huge numbers of its own, saying it will actually cost ISPs £365 million a year to adopt “three strikes” rules meant to stem piracy.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Nothing really, as it presents a clear picture of IBM’s attitudes in regards to Linux.
Let’s start with a little trip down memory lane. IBM Thinkpads were favorites amongst Linux users for years and years. What did IBM ever do to to show its appreciation for its loyal Linux Thinkpad users? Who paid the Microsoft tax even when they didn’t want to use Windows, and jumped through all kinds of hoops to install Linux and get all the hardware working? Not much, some information pages but never official support. Which shows once again that it is a mistake to support vendors that treats its Linux customers as second-class citizens; the “if we be nice to them they’ll be nice to us!” tactic does not work.
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IBM is claiming a series of competitive wins against Microsoft. Big name companies are said to be choosing Lotus products over Microsoft’s collaboration software.
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Server
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While CentOS and Debian Linuxes have supported the z implementation of the Linux kernel, the mainframe variants of Linux from Red Hat and Novell are what nearly all mainframe shops use, and this code is available for free even if the installation and technical support for it is not.
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Kernel Space
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I attended the first LinuxCon this week and saw firsthand evidence of a growing, thriving Linux community. Notice I did not call it the Linux kernel community nor Linux development community since it’s much more than the kernel that is key to the fate and progress of Linux, with an increasing role for users as well.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst disagreed with Linus Torvalds’ contention that Linux has become bloated. Whitehurst said that Linux is growing and becoming more full-featured. The bloat will come when features are added that no one wants.
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Earlier this month we shared that X-Video and EXA support were coming to Gallium3D in the form of a state tracker to accelerate these X.Org APIs across any Gallium3D driver.
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The SystemTap team has announced the release of SystemTap 1.0; SystemTap is a dynamic tracing tool for Linux.
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Applications
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After featuring some of the best Free and Open Source 3D animation software, it’s time to take a look at some 2D computer graphics program for Linux users who are into creating two-dimensional models. These free 2D animation software is as capable as those that are commercially available so do take time to try them first before emptying your wallet.
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I must admit, even though I will be 50 years old next March I still like down time playing games. Over the past several years I have enjoyed playing games that run natively on my Mandriva GNU/Linux system. I wrote an article earlier this year with some of my thoughts on the matter of gaming on GNU/Linux: GNU/Linux and Commercial Game Developers.
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Quickly is a new utility to simplify Linux application development by bootstrapping repetitive project setup, user interface, packaging, and release chores. It targets both new application developers and those who simply want to speed up recurring tasks. Quickly is a product of the Ubuntu project, but is flexible enough to be used in other distributions and for other types of tasks — the real power of Quickly lies in the templates that automate different aspects of project configuration and maintenance.
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Red Hat Family
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Three brokerages raised their price targets on Red Hat Inc, a day after the world’s biggest provider of Linux software posted better-than-expected results.
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Red Hat was one of the few standouts during the day, its shares up 12 percent on better than expected earnings and sales.
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The software distributor earned $28.9 million or 15 cents per share. In the same period last year the company earned 10 cents per share
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Debian Family
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How to achieve that goal is a pretty complex question, and I’m not qualified to give a good answer. A blog post by Elizabeth Krumbach of Ubuntu Women offers some good suggestions for raising the profile of female contributors to Ubuntu, but none of those suggestions has yet been acted upon, as far as I know. Nonetheless, this is an issue that can’t be ignored if bug #1 is truly to be eliminated.
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Canonical head and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said over the past weekend that the Lucid Lynx, or Ubuntu 10.04, desktop would still be based on the Gnome 2 desktop environment and that the release following Lucid Lynx would use the Gnome 3.0 desktop.
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Although the handheld reader will connect to Windows PCs through the USB port, its underlying platform will be built on Linux for “open development,” he said.
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Sub-notebooks
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The Emtec Gdium Liberty 1000 netbook is made from a different mold than most of the mini-laptops available today. I mean sure, it has a 10 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and it’s about the same size and shape as every other 10 inch netbook. But it shuns the usual Intel Atom processor for a 900MHz Loongson CPU and instead of a hard drive the computer has a removable USB key called the G-Key. Not only can you store files on the removable key, but the entire operating system runs off the USB flash drive, making it easy for multiple users to share the same netbook without getting their settings and data crossed.
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Moblin 2.1 is expected for release in the fourth quarter of this year, which should place it in time for the next round of new Intel-powered mobile devices to hit the market and ahead of what we will see next January at the Consumer Electronic Show. Moblin 2.1 will hopefully be a nice Linux-based operating system for mobile phones and handheld devices while continuing to excel on Atom-powered netbooks and nettops.
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The next GLOW (Greater London Open source Writers) meetup is coming up on Monday September 28th, from 6pm.
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Lawyers for Texas Instruments are taking aim at a group of calculator enthusiasts who posted the cryptographic keys used to modify the devices so they run custom-designed software.
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AstroTurf
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Doctors have been agreeing to be named as authors on studies written by employees of the pharmaceutical industry, giving greater credibility to medical research, according to new evidence.
The Guardian has learned that one of Britain’s leading bone specialists is facing disciplinary action over accusations that he was involved in “ghost writing”.
The wider phenomenon has come to light through documents disclosed in the US courts which have revealed a culture in which doctors agree to “author” studies written by employees of drug firms. The doctors may have some input but do not have access to all the evidence from the drug trial on which the paper’s conclusions are based, the documents showed.
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The proof is in the role that Whole Foods has played in opposing the two most critical domestic agenda items of the Obama Administration. On the Employee Free Choice Act, the most critical labor law reform in over 50 years, Whole Foods has been in the vanguard of the corporate charge to kill the bill and keep unions on the ground. This is hardly surprising, as Mackey absolutely loathes labor unions:
The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.
Mackey dresses his feelings up a lot prettier than Lee Scott, but he ultimately will do whatever he can to kill unions at Whole Foods and beyond.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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The Obama administration said Wednesday that it would maintain President George W. Bush’s state secrets position when it came to lawsuits leftover from that administration.
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Poll
Why does the Obama Administration insist on secrecy of the draft ACTA text?:
Civil law injunctions and damages for infringement are national security hot spots
ACTA negotiators don’t want people asking informed questions about the substance of the agreement
No one in the Administration cares enough about transparency to change the policy set by the Bush Administration.
I don’t know, but there must be a good reason
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A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.
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MI5 has hired 50 computer-savvy hackers – some of them still teenagers – to work in a newly formed top secret Cyber Operations Command.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Poor Kelly Corrigan, first-time author, didn’t get invited to this weekend’s National Book Festival on the Mall to plug her 2008 memoir, “The Middle Place.” She won’t be rubbing shoulders with heavyweight authors such as Sue Monk Kidd, John Grisham or Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz. No major newspaper bothered to review the California mom’s tale about cancer and family and recovery when it was released. Her publisher didn’t send her on tour. All the old-school staples of book promotion — the book festival, the tour, the glowing newspaper review — Corrigan got none of them.
What was a newbie author to do?
She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site.
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The term “frugalista,” which is so widely used that even the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, has now been trademarked by Natalie P. McNeal, a Miami Herald blogger, causing a brouhaha in the world of personal finance bloggers. McNeal’s lawyer has been sending letters to other bloggers who call themselves “frugalistas,” informing them that they must immediately stop doing so.
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The music industry’s battle to have persistent internet pirates disconnected was dealt a huge blow last night after leading musicians including Lily Allen settled their differences and agreed that plans to suspend internet access were too draconian.
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Instead, they released a statement saying persistent offenders should have their bandwidths “squeezed”.
Artists including Allen, George Michael, Annie Lennox, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason signed the statement.
Jim Hogg teaches GNU Linux to high school kids 14 (2008)
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 GNU/Linux, Novell, Patents, Ubuntu at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to an impulsive decision to reject Ubuntu
THE short story is that Tux Machines made an informal call to boycott Ubuntu because of something that Mark Shuttleworth had said. This is not a final thing, but it is saddening because Tux Machines is my favourite news site.
In my humble assessment, the biggest problem Free software might be facing is software patents; womanisers, resistance to feminism and misogynists are true issues, but they exist in many aspects of computing; they are not exclusive to Free software or specific to particular distributions of software and there is nothing about “closed” or “open” in the software sense which implies openness or closeness when it comes to other religions, sexes, races, and nationalities. Instead of “Mark Shuttleworth”, that remark which rubbed Susan the wrong way could just as well come from “Steve Ballmer” or “Steve Jobs”. Making a tactless remark is not impossible; it happens now and then by accident. Mistakes happen, especially when people have no chance to reread or rethink a spoken word (where there is no opportunity to ‘proofthink’, either). Microsoft, for example, stages in advance so-called 'interviews'. It’s all just theatre, it’s fake. Like the 2008 election, it is conducted by the PR industry with advisors rallying and combing past every single thing that the candidate said or might say; there are secretaries and aides, which Mr. Shuttleworth might not enjoy the company of.
“Making a tactless remark is not impossible; it happens now and then by accident.”To neglect Ubuntu is to lose far too much. We have always been rather supportive of Ubuntu, with the exception of other people putting words in this site’s mouth, i.e. misrepresentation. Where we criticise Ubuntu it is usually opinion or advice, purely factual. We actually defended Ubuntu when it came under attacks from critics inside the GNU/Linux world.
At the end of the day, let us remember that Ubuntu is really fighting for broader acceptance of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Here it it from the latest news:
Shuttleworth: Don’t Give Up the Linux Desktop
Speaking at the LinuxCon conference late Wednesday, the Canonical founder pitched his approach for expanding Linux to provide a better user experience and broadening its appeal. The approach involves having a degree of cadence and coordination between projects and distributions, as well as improving quality and design.
More here:
LinuxCon: Shuttleworth’s Three Methods to Improve FOSS Development
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Speaking before a combined session of LinuxCon and the co-located Linux Plumber’s Conference, Shuttleworth drilled home the importance of these concepts in the Linux development ecosystem, particularly cadence.
Shuttleworth has long maintained that if free and open source software projects can begin to sync their development cycles with each other, then both upstream and downstream developers (and, ultimately, users) will benefit. This is large part of the strategy behing Canonical’s strict six-month release for the Ubuntu distribution and the 18-month Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) cycles.
IBM is now working with Canonical/Ubuntu to actually advance GNU/Linux on the desktop. That’s more than IBM ever does for the platform on the desktop.
Tux Machines has been critical of Ubuntu for years, so Mark’s remarks were probably a trigger. Mark will hopefully apologise in public.
As for the technical criticisms from Tux Machines, as it showed just hours ago, the looks of Ubuntu can easily be changed. As a blogger who was cited by Tux Machines only hours ago stated in the headline, Ubuntu may be “the most promising Linux distro in the world.” In summary, he writes:
Given the recent spate of expansion of the ecosystem surrounding Ubuntu- from Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu -Dell partnership among others- there is no gainsaying that Ubuntu is sure to be the Linux distro of choice in the future for both individuals and corporate customers.
For these five and possibly more other reasons, i strongly believe that Ubuntu stands among the lot as the most promising OS in the Linux world.
Even a hardcore user of GNU/Linux, Penguin Pete (Trbovich), is now embracing Ubuntu.
So, here I am! I think I am probably the the most die-hard power user to have ever adopted Ubuntu as their main system, not counting the Ubuntu development team itself, so this will be interesting.
I personally have Ubuntu installed on 3 computers, so those who wish to characterise me as “anti-Ubuntu” (as some people tried) are simply delusional or highly misinformed. I even used the first-ever version of Ubuntu.
In conclusion, why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Mark Shuttleworth is not Ubuntu. The millions of Ubuntu users are part of Ubuntu and to throw away a distribution because of a single remark from a single person is hugely different from rejecting a company like Novell for its policies that it was unwilling to change even after strong opposition from its very own community, even its own employees (Samba developers for example).
Don’t boycott Ubuntu. Nothing is perfect, but Ubuntu is not a real threat to Freedom; it’s also the basis for development of gNewSense. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“[intellectual monopoly is] a neo-colonialist plot to ensure the continuing dominance of Western nations.”
–Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code
Patents: a friend of a coloniser?
Summary: The European authorities no longer take patenting for granted; the situation is still more complex in the US
AS planned for several weeks now, European technocrats and lesser informed officials are to meet and discuss the effect on intellectual monopolies on the European economy. This is a meeting that started yesterday and carries on at the time of writing. As The Register puts it:
A meeting of members of the European Commission and Council of Ministers will today and tomorrow discuss whether the European Union’s intellectual property laws are holding back the region’s competitiveness.
The meeting coincidentally intersects with the World Day Against Software Patents, which was celebrated in India and in Europe (and maybe in more places). This year's date was not intended to collide with the above meeting as it was simply the same date as last year’s World Day Against Software Patents [1, 2, 3].
In the United States, there is blind insistence that intellectual monopolies are good. Being tools of mere exploitation, it should not be entirely surprising that the US Chamber Of Commerce defends them. Mike Masnick and others refute these claims at the moment:
Chamber Of Commerce Gets Basic Stats Backwards, Calls For Stronger US Patent Protection For No Good Reason
David Levine points us to an analysis by Kevin Smith (not the movie maker) at Duke University of a recent report from the World Economic Forum, placing the US as 19th in how strong our intellectual property laws are. This report caused the US Chamber of Commerce to say it’s evidence that the US needs stronger IP laws. Yet, Smith points out how silly this analysis is. First, being 19th out of 133 is already pretty damn near the top of the list. Second, the way the WEF ranked the strength of IP systems was based entirely on “executive perceptions” of IP laws in certain countries — hardly a definitive measure. But, most important, the report shows nothing of the actual impact on innovation.
Those who are in charge (mostly large businesses or nations) are unlikely to give up their monopolies without resistance from the bottom. Let us wake up and make our voices heard. If they can no longer (legally and diplomatically) control by force, they might as well establish new laws that criminalise particular thoughts and their application; It has nothing to do with innovation and incentives anymore. █
“Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.”
–IP Watch on Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Microsoft, Standard at 3:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft accuses Google of doing exactly what Microsoft did; WebsiteSpark is introduced as a dumping technique to battle against Web standards
A LOT of people do not remember that Microsoft pushed its .NET extension into Firefox without permission [1, 2]. Microsoft was using Windows Update for competitive reasons alone, which was an abuse of its power, as we mentioned shortly afterwards [1, 2]. But Microsoft is a total hypocrite and this would not be the first time that Microsoft accuses others of doing exactly the same things Microsoft is doing all the time. Microsoft complains about other companies pushing stuff into its Web browser and to make matters worse, Microsoft ignores the benefits (Google wants to force Microsoft to finally embrace SVG as it should) and instead characterises this as a danger. Yes, it’s a danger… to Microsoft’s business prospects.
Microsoft Using Scare Tactics For Google Browser Extension?
[...]
Is Microsoft really concerned about the security of its users in this case, or is it just trying to dissuade people from using a competitor’s plug-in? If the latter is the case, perhaps they should get in gear and support the latest technologies. Browsers are one market where Microsoft still dominates over Google. They don’t want to lose that share.
There are many flippant responses to it. Savio Rodrigues, for instance, judges it without trying it and Mary Jo Foley — like many others — fails to express her thoughts about the positive sides of what Google is doing. Microsoft successfully changed the subject of debate and it seems to have no particular issues with other extensions to Internet Explorer, toolbars included. It is only acceptable if it helps the ‘master’, Microsoft.
In other news, Microsoft’s attack on Web standards continues. Korea is already a prisoner of ActiveX and Microsoft is trying to encourage more of the same trap by paying — not charging — Koreans. Now there is this from the BBC about Web-based games:
Games firms in South Korea are getting a funding boost from Microsoft.
[...]
South Koreans are also known to be a nation of very heavy Microsoft users and Internet Explorer is used by more than 95% of web users. By contrast in many other nations IE’s market share has dropped below 70%.
The above neglects to mention just why so many Koreans use Internet Explorer. They have no choice because Microsoft attacked Web standards so brutally in this nation that those without Windows and Internet Explorer are unable to access banks and use government sites. To encourage more of the same, Microsoft’s anti-LAMP and anti-Free software initiatives go up a notch with the introduction of another *Spark, among others. We wrote about these initiatives in:
Microsoft now has this thing it calls “WebsiteSpark”, which is about increasing dependency on Microsoft. “WebsiteDump” is a more appropriate name for it. It is a trap, but more docile Web sites — including Mary Jo Foley’s blog — market it as “free”, whereas others realise that there are strings attached.
If accepted into the program, developers get access to various Microsoft Web design and development tools, including three licenses for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, two licenses for Microsoft Expression Web 3, and one license for Microsoft Expression Studio 3.
Matt Asay correctly explains what Microsoft is trying to do here.
Microsoft tries to spin the open-source LAMP alternative as disjointed, and further argues it is a more expensive development path, and even that Microsoft offers better Web performance than LAMP-based development.
But this isn’t the way the Facebooks of the world see it. They view the open-source LAMP stack as the proven, scalable winner in Web development. Microsoft can’t match that with a price tag.
Web developers should know better. Under the WebsiteSpark programme, Microsoft’s software is free like a free puppy. It does not cost anything initially, but as Bill Gates once put it so epically, “they’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Microsoft’s software leaves a mess on the carpet (downtime) and costs a lot of money in the long run. Microsoft is not a charity, even when it pretends to be helping startups and the underprivileged; it’s all just part of the business plan. █
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Posted in Deals, Dell, GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Turbolinux at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Moblin is a step forward for GNU/Linux, but software patents do not appear to be off the table
YESTERDAY we wrote about Moblin eschewing Silverlight, noting that it was (sometimes still is) based on SUSE [1, 2]. There is a complex history to it, which continues to present day.
As we explained two days ago, Intel is not a friend of GNU/Linux, but it must keep up with the competition, so Linux is not a platform that Intel can afford to ignore. Intel and Novell are quite close, as this very recent video of Guy Lunardi shows. Likewise, Intel is close to Microsoft, whose operating system it is constantly promoting these days; there is even collusion with Microsoft [1, 2, 3].
As we repeatedly showed, Dell had mysteriously joined the Microsoft/Novell deal very shortly before Microsoft’s patent attack began [1, 2]. Now we find this in The Inquirer:
Dell and Microsoft back Moblin
[...]
During her keynote at the show, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Software and Services Group Renee James was joined by Ian Ellison-Taylor, Microsoft’s general manager for Client Platforms and Tools to announce the collaboration.
This partnership is expected to help developers write applications once and have them run across Windows and Moblin devices, expanding the reach of Silverlight from the desktop and into mobile consumer electronic devices.
“We see this as a clear extension of our current efforts with Novell where we are building an open source implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight that is targeted at the broad range of Linux–based PCs,” said Ellison-Taylor.
Heise has some more details and Turbolinux, which also joined Microsoft’s Linux racket, is mentioned in various places. This does not necessarily suggest that there is consistency here when it comes to “Linux tax” in Moblin.
Throughout its lifetime, Moblin swapped desktop environments and distributions several times. After the Ubuntu shuffle came OpenSUSE, but also Fedora was put at the centre about a year ago, before Moblin was passed over to the Linux Foundation. According to this, Fedora is still at the centre, which is somewhat baffling and the information may be out of date.
Atom-based devices can run Windows but also Moblin, an open source custom Fedora-based Linux operating system targeted at netbooks, handhelds, smart phones and car computers. Intel started the Moblin project in 2007 then passed it over to the Linux Foundation.
Then there is this press release, which suggests that Ubuntu is somehow magically back under the name “Ubuntu Moblin Remix”. Are there now variants of Moblin, too?
Sam Dean argues about the effect of Moblin on ‘fragmentation’, further adding or at least showing that Moblin targets device types that are almost dominated by ARM.
If Moblin becomes a serious player in open source mobile operating systems, it will contribute to a great deal of fragmentation. Android is just gaining its stride, and heading beyond just smartphones, while Google is likely to put big marketing dollars behind Chrome OS. It’s already announced that it is talking to hardware partners.
At IDF today, the first edition of Moblin Linux for smartphones were demonstrated. They could lead to Intel chip-based smartphones.
There is more information about the smartphones outreach of Moblin, which confirms that to Intel it is mostly about expanding to more hardware, not necessarily replacing Windows. Intel also intends to offer software shops and there is nothing wrong with that. The most interesting report speaks about Moblin coming to full-blown desktops.
Intel has expanded the scope of Linux-based Moblin by porting the OS from netbooks to mobile devices and desktops, where it could compete with Microsoft’s Windows OS.
In its latest filing, Microsoft told its investors that it worried about Hewlett-Packard and Intel turning to Windows alternatives, namely GNU/Linux in this case. It sure looks like it is happening. So to characterise Intel’s work on Moblin as beneficial to Microsoft would be absurd. But that’s not the point; the question is, will Intel bend GNU/Linux in the direction of becoming Microsoft-taxed, just like SUSE? This is hopefully preventable as that would spell a defeat to the freedom of Free software in the mass market. █
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09.24.09
Posted in IRC Logs at 7:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Read the log
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To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Well, if you have your computer I could give you a few things to try. After all, sometimes, watching a tv series could get boring. Or it could be that you’ve seen your videos over and over and over again. You need to do something new. In that case, you might want to try doing these things that I do. It might not be the most adventurous thing at first but who knows what you might be learning along the way.
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Here you will find links to the topics we cover as well as links to software, websites articles, and other resources mentioned in the episodes of Going Linux.
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Desktop
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What would an old computer be good for? The refurbished computers are older models but nothing obsolete, and are loaded with open source, minimalist software like the Ubuntu operating system. An older computer running Ubuntu is almost as fast as a modern machine running pretty but heavyweight Windows, and there’s barely a difference between the two when using the internet.
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A tip of the propeller hat to Bob Murphy, Mike Hanson, Nick Barter and Peter Gilbert, who spent Saturday afternoon preaching the Linux gospel inside the Morris County Library.
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Some things that I think were key to her success:
* Google
* The extraordinary tendency of the Ubutnu community to participate in forums and write guides and wikis. There is more of a “culture” of that in open source but I think the Ubuntu user community is a little more affected with the tendency.
* Vista sucking bad enough to motivate her
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Server
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Two-factor model for calculating hard-to-price asset-backed securities now runs on graphics processing units paired with Linux servers.
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Finally, although not associated with an inherent mainframe flaw, IBM saw the potential of running Linux on System z hardware and created Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) on the z boxes.
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Kernel Space
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Paul Blankenbaker announced yesterday the release of Network Security Toolkit 2.11.0, a completely redesigned and engineered version of this Linux distribution that provides tools for system administrators and security experts.
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Gwenole Beauchesne of Splitted Desktop Systems shares that the H.264 video playback performance has improved significantly thanks to this VA-API support and with 1080p clips it’s working out much better than Adobe’s own proprietary Flash 10 player for Linux.
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Unlike with the ATI RV770 launch where we were able to report on their evolutionary leap in Linux support through providing same-day Catalyst drivers and many other feature improvements and also had out Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 Linux benchmarks. This time around though, we have nothing. We have no Evergreen hardware in hand and have not even received any technical briefings on this new hardware.
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boot.kernel.org (BKO) offers another possibility for Linux users to boot the free operating system via the internet. Still in its early days, the project allows Linux systems to be started via HTTP. Clients only require a broadband internet connection and the open source gPXE boot loader, which can be provided on a USB flash drive, a CD or – for those who miss the good old days – a floppy disk.
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Mesa 7.6 provides support for a number of new OpenGL extensions with its software rasterizer and the Intel i965 driver mostly, there is the rewritten Radeon/R200/R300 driver that uses the buffer manager (a.k.a. the Radeon 3D driver re-write), GL_EXT_framebuffer_object support for ATI when using the TTM memory manager, proper OpenGL 1.5 support for the ATI R300 series (and VBO + OQ support), and the assembly shader rework. This in fact is just a small portion of the changes. Mesa 7.6 is quite a huge update compared to Mesa 7.5, which was just released in July.
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The softpipe driver will remain an area that’s used for experimenting with new ideas by developers.
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While VIA’s Chrome 9 DRM has yet to be accepted into the mainline Linux kernel since its mostly used by VIA’s binary-only driver and then recently an updated 2D driver, with the viafb driver outside of X.Org, this frame-buffer driver has picked up many improvements with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel.
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This keynote wraps up the event. I’ve really enjoyed LinuxCon and look forward to attending the event again next year (in Boston). Kudos to the Linux Foundation.
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Applications
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In my view i think, that this is an useful Applications for the Kids. I’m very interested in the upcoming Versions.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment
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Benoit Schillings, who joined Nokia after its 2008 acquisition of Scandinavian mobile Linux firm Trolltech, is to take up his new role on October 1. Myriad, created from the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs develops a, er, myriad of mobile software including browsers and Java engines.
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There will be quite some talks related to KDE. Accidental? We don’t think so. It shows that KDE is on the forefront of integrating open web technologies into the desktop. It also means that KDE is exciting and cool.
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We’re going to build a complete application that wouldn’t take too much additional work to qualify for re-distribution as a bona fide open source application. It’s an RSS reader which allows you to add your own feeds, lists the stories on that feed and then lets you read those stories within a browser window attached to the main application.
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GNOME
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Version 2.28 sees the team behind the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix warming up for version 3.0, scheduled for a March 2010 release. The current release continues the tradition of dotting lots of i’s and crossing plenty of t’s, but also brings a new broom to a few nooks and crannies.
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GNOME 2.28 represents a moderately compelling incremental improvement. WebKit-based Epiphany is definitely worth a try, and I’m finally starting to warm up to Empathy thanks to the bug fixing and user interface refinements delivered in this release. The enhanced Bluetooth support is also a welcome addition. Version 2.28 is a little bit light on new features relative to some previous GNOME releases, but that’s understandable as a lot of development effort is currently focused on preparing for the next-generation GNOME desktop.
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GNOME 2.28.0 is barely out the door and it’s starting to make its way into distributions, but the developers aren’t planning any vacations. They already started work on GNOME 2.30, which, depending on the advancements in the platform, might be crowned as the next major release, labeled with the 3.0 version number. If the developers aren’t happy with the progress made, they might wait until GNOME 2.32 to apply that version bump. Either way, we will know about it by March 2010, when 2.30 will be released. Should they decide that it doesn’t stand up to their expectations, we will probably receive GNOME 3.0 in September 2010.
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It is best for low end computers and perfect for netbooks and sure it is best than windows 98. Now I can say it is a perfect windows killer.
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Moovida, Fluendo’s latest version of open source media center based on Gstreamer’s framework, was launched 4 months ago. To inaugurate our newly published documentation for developers, Fluendo decided to organize a contest in collaboration with Mandriva.
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If you haven’t tried Gentoo, I really do suggest giving it a whirl. It’s time-consuming, but I had always found the end product to be very worthwhile.
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Zenwalk
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Zenwalk 6.2 is the latest version of Zenwalk, a Slackware-based, desktop-oriented Linux operating system. The last review of Zenwalk on this site was of Zenwalk 6. That was just six months ago. What changed between Zenwalk 6 and Zenwalk 6.2? Where the changes of a cosmetic or bug-fix variety, or where they much more substantial?
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I’m genuinely impressed by Salix, although I have to admit that it doesn’t seem greatly different to Zenwalk in either use or construction.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) rallied $1.17 or 4.70% to $26.05 after The biggest seller of the Linux operating system reported second- quarter sales and profit that beat analysts’ estimates as subscription revenue rose.
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Shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) surged more than 14% in early trading today after the software company reported better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter results. Red Hat shows net income for the quarter ended Aug. 31 of $28.9 million, or 15 cents a share. This figure was up from $21.1 million, or 10 cents a share, a year earlier. Additionally, revenue climbed 12% to $183.6 million. -Marketwatch
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Red Hat’s ($27.95, +$3.07, +12.34%) fiscal second-quarter profit jumped 37% as the company again posted slightly better-than-expected results on growing revenue and higher margins. Competitor Citrix Systems Inc. (CTXS, $37.61, +$1.47, +4.07%) was also rising.
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After Red Hat (RHT) released earnings last night, Bank of America upgraded the stock from Neutral to Buy. The company earned twenty cents per share, easily beating analysts’ estimates of fifteen cents per share. With the upgrade, Bank of America raised its price target from $23.50 to $29 per share.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) soared 13% now trades at $28.11 on an unusual volume of 7.01 million shares after it reported net income for the quarter ended Aug. 31 of $28.9 million, or 15 cents a share. That was up from $21.1 million, or 10 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue climbed 12% to $183.6 million
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Red Hat Inc. jumped 12 percent to $27.96 for the largest advance in the S&P 500. The biggest seller of the Linux operating system reported second-quarter sales and profit that beat analysts’ estimates as subscription revenue rose.
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Overall revenue for Red Hat was up double digits, by 12 percent, with subscription revenue up by 15 percent. With other segments of IT, like the PC space, happy to be flat on a year-over-year basis, that’s saying something.
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Red Hat offers the Linux operating system and JBoss middleware, which lets computers share data. Red Hat makes money by providing technical support and software patches, and by selling premium paid versions of free open source products.
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The recession is proving to be an opportune time for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) as it continues to grow revenues and earnings. According to Red Hat executives, the growth is coming at the expense of rivals and as a result of customer confidence in the abilities of Linux and Red Hat’s JBoss middleware platform.
The growth of Red Hat’s business is not however a sign of bloat. During Red Hat’s second quarter earnings investor call on Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst responded to an analyst question about Linux founder Linus Torvalds’ comment earlier this week that Linux was bloated.
“As Linux has continued to grow and its applicability continues to expand, there’s just more feature functionality that people are looking for to be built into the operating system,” Whitehurst said. “I don’t think of that as bloat.”
Whitehurst added that in his view, bloat is when vendors add features that people do not want. Linux, he said, is growing but with features that people do want.
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Debian Family
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Some of what I was explaining was around control. You want to control your technology right? Well if you don’t have access to the code, if you don’t have a license that permits you some freedom with that code. Then you have very little control over all and you certainly can’t find alternative suppliers to develop new functionality into existing products.
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Scores of people completed the USB Thumb Drive test during Atlanta Linux Fest. That’s great. But thousands of additional Ubuntu users would surely like to test their systems for Ubuntu 9.10 compatibility. Stay tuned: I hear Canonical plans to potentially move the USB Thumb Drive diagnostics software online — for anyone to use.
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Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica tried out the final alpha version of Ubuntu 9.1, which improves on boot performance significantly. Much like Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.1 comes with optimization for computers with solid state drives (SSD).
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In April this year, Canonical introduced two new wallpapers and three new themes, along with a revamped boot splash theme and a brand-new login screen, for their Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) release. On October 1st, they will unveil Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Beta and I bet everybody is wondering if Canonical will actually change the user interface (read: skin it) with a breathtaking one. The truth is that we have no idea if they will come with that professional-looking theme everyone was expecting since Jaunty, or they will just offer enough possibilities for users to create their own personalized desktops.
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I’ve spent the last few weeks testing Ubuntu One, Canonical’s file-storing and sharing service. Below is an outline of my experience, and thoughts on the future of the application.
Ubuntu One, which will be installed by default in Ubuntu 9.10, allows users to sync files between different Ubuntu computers. The service runs in the background, and can be accessed either through a Web interface in Firefox or via the Nautilus file browser, with which it seamlessly integrates.
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Hopefully you will never see this improvement, but it’s now going to be there for when those bugs do creep in.
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Running under the theme “ICTs and Innovations — Strategic Opportunities and Challenges,” the exhibition is set to end today.
The Ubuntu stand proved popular with its Freedom Toaster which visitors were using to download software free of charge.
Ubuntu, the organisation, derives its name from a community developed Linux based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers named Ubuntu.
Whether one uses it at home, at school or at work Ubuntu contains all the applications one will ever need, from word processing and email applications, to web server software and programming tools.
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Cadence, quality, and design were the core themes of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s closing keynote talk at LinuxCon.
Speaking before a combined session of LinuxCon and the co-located Linux Plumber’s Conference, Shuttleworth drilled home the importance of these concepts in the Linux development ecosystem, particularly cadence.
Shuttleworth has long maintained that if free and open source software projects can begin to sync their development cycles with each other, then both upstream and downstream developers (and, ultimately, users) will benefit. This is large part of the strategy behing Canonical’s strict six-month release for the Ubuntu distribution and the 18-month Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) cycles.
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Arium announced the release of Linx hardware and software debugging components that now support Intel’s Atom CPU. Version 7.7.1 of the SourcePoint debugging software also adds code trace and flash programming functionality, together with Arium’s now-Linux-ready ECM-XDP3 hardware emulator, says the company.
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RMI Corp. announced a design win for its MIPS-based Au1250 processor in a Linux-based home energy monitoring system. Threshold Corp.’s Au1250-based device monitors and manages energy consumption in real time, and appears to incorporate the company’s NFC-based “BlueSpot” auto-configuration technology.
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AllGo Embedded Systems is shipping a reference design for a wireless multimedia player or home automation device based on Freescale’s ARM9-based i.MX233 SoC. The Linux-ready Stamp i.MX233 Wireless Media Player offers a WVGA touchscreen, WiFi, Ethernet, FM tuner, and Pandora and Flickr support, says the company.
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If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re big fans of ultraportable computers, and even happier when they can cope with 1080p video playback. One such device tickling our fancy is SmartDevices’ SmartV 5 MID, a 5-inch WVGA touchscreen handheld with a 600MHz processor, 2GB of flash storage and a choice of Android, Windows CE 6.0 or Ubuntu as OS.
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Editor’s choice of 10 semiconductor reference designs and starter kits which could offer engineers an out-of-the-box route to their next embedded system development.
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Meshcom Technologies, Inc. has announced a new embedded Linux line of business, EmbedOne, as well as a suite of software and services for the embedded Linux community.
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Phones
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O2 HAS NAMED 16 October as the date when UK buyers will be able to purchase Palm’s Pre smartphone, the first device to feature the company’s new WebOS platform and tipped by many as the biggest rival for Apple’s Iphone.
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Maemo was developed in-house by Nokia, and is made up of a number of open and closed source bits and pieces, including Debian Linux. It draws much of its GUI, frameworks, and libraries from the GNOME project. The much anticipated N900 is the flag bearer for the OS, and Nokia is already running a ‘fun’ competition designed to highlight its possibilities.
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On the one-year anniversary of the debut of Google’s Android mobile software on its first handset, the T-Mobile G1, Taiwanese mobile phone service provider Far EasTone raised the number of Android smartphones it plans to launch this year.
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Sub-notebooks
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5. Sugar on a Stick (Eee PC 900)
I really, really like this idea — especially for kids — but files aren’t being saved to my USB stick for some reason. At least the WiFi works…
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Alas, The VAR Guy doesn’t expect to hear much about MySQL at OpenWorld. This is, after all, an Oracle event. But some savvy speakers will surely inject MySQL into the OpenWorld conversation. One example involves Alex Gorbachev. He’s scheduled to speak Oct. 12 about “Developing Plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example.” Gorbachev’s example involves a MySQL plug-in.
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The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source Report[icon:pdf]. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software. The results are based on an analysis of 11 billion lines of code from 280 open source projects including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba over three years. The analysis was carried out using Coverity’s Scan service.
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MH: Sometimes they really surprise us, recently at the Atlanta Linuxfest one of our users, a large hosting company, was very creative in the way they auto-generated reports and emailed PDFs of their user’s hosted account usage. Sometimes our community members extend Zenoss in ways we never thought and even teach us a thing or two.
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The fourth beta of Thunderbird 3, which is the Firefox browser maker’s desktop email client, is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux users.
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Mozilla Messaging design expert Bryan Clark wrote a blog entry a few months ago about one of his experiments with rich mail visualization. He shows how CSS transforms can be used to display a message on an isometric cube. Although this example is somewhat frivolous and isn’t intended for inclusion in Thunderbird, it’s a great demonstration of how emerging Web standards can empower new approaches to presenting mail.
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When it comes to fonts, Helvetica or Arial is good enough for some people. Creative types and Web designers, however, love the nuances and subtle differences in a wide variety of digital typefaces.
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Business
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Why is there no “open source business model”? Because open source is not a business. It’s the same oxymoronic thinking as the question “how can you make money if you give the software away for free”, which simply can’t be answered without correcting the questioner’s worldview.
To assert there is “an open source business model” is to lose sight of the nature of open source. It may have been a fair thing to do when open source was a novelty to business minds, but even considering there could be such a thing leads people to misunderstand open source and treat the exceptions – like MySQL – as the rule. Not that it’s wrong to monetise ubiquity at the point of deployment by delivering the value that allows scaling (enabling adoption-led behaviour). It’s just most open source community members don’t do that.
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FSF/GNU
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Gnash is a GPLv3′d SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 & 3 classes. with growing support for SWF versions 8-10. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. There are also standalone players for GNOME or KDE based desktops.
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Since they use their massive economic power to control the marketplace, they create an enormous incentive for manufacturers to ensure their equipment works with Microsoft software. As a result, nearly every consumer device you pick up at the local discount store will work in Windows. You will have to be a lot pickier with GNU/Linux. Unfair? Monopolistic? Absolutely! But it’s still true, and we pay this cost when we opt for free software.
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At the free event, Richard Stallman, an international Free Software advocate, will argue that software patents obstruct software development.
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Attending: Mairin Duffy, Leslie Hawthorn, Adelaida McIntire, Deborah Nicholson, Stormy Peters (via phone), Hillary Rettig, Christine Spang, Hanna Wallach, Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Opening Statement: Our objective is to increase women’s participation in the free software movement and work to make sexism in person or online unacceptable within our community. Women represent less than 2% of the free software movement, yet our participation is a pre-requisite for the movements success. Having more women in our community advocating freedom will enrich our movement.
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Licensing
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An appeals court in Paris has upheld the ruling from a lower court, which found that the French firm Edu4 had violated the GNU General Public License (GPL). The plaintiff was the French Organisation Association française pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA), an umbrella organization for adult education.
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Henceforth OpendTect is released under a triple licensing strategy: 1) under the GNU / GPL license, 2) under a commercial license and, 3) under an academic license. Under the GNU / GPL license, OpendTect is completely free-of-charge, including for commercial use. The commercial license enables the user to extend the system with (closed source) commercial plugins that can either be purchased or leased. Under the academic license agreement universities can get free licenses for OpendTect and commercial plugins for R&D and educational purposes.
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Cyberoam iView is available to download from SourceForge and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Support for additional devices, applications and systems is expected to be added in the next few months.
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A Texas man has been charged with insider trading by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for trousering $8.64m of illegal profit, following Dell’s proposed acquisition of services firm Perot Systems.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It appears that she actually qualifies. Quite directly. She’s offering music from, among others, Jay-Z, Jefferson Airplane, The Specials and The Kinks. Admittedly, it’s just a quick look around, but it appears many of the artists whose works she’s distributing for free have no connection with EMI. Even if they did, remember EMI was recently claiming that it’s never authorized MP3s for distribution for publicity purposes. Uh oh.
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Update: Wow. In the half an hour or so that I took to write this post, Lily erased the blog post where she responded (I’ve got a screenshot if anyone wants to see it), and just added a note to Twitter, saying that she’s shut down the entire blog due to too much abuse. Lily, it’s not abuse if we’re just asking you to rethink your positions that appear to not be particularly well thought out.
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The legislation would impose fines of up to 300,000 euros — the equivalent of about $440,000 — as well as possible prison terms for the illegal download of films or music.
Jim Hogg teaches GNU Linux to high school kids 13 (2008)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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