10.15.09
Posted in Courtroom, Microsoft at 7:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is sued for the disaster that hit T-Mobile customers last week
MICROSOFT NOW claims to have only recovered part of the data that it lost in the recent catastrophe. But it’s too late (almost a week late) and a lot of damage was done not only to the brands but also to customers and staff whose company that they trusted (Danger) got devoured by Microsoft. As we correctly predicted some days ago, the lawsuits are coming regardless of what Microsoft does (T-Mobile tried compensation in vain).
Document: Microsoft, T-Mobile sued over Sidekick data outage
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Here’s a copy of one (PDF, 21 pages), filed on behalf of Maureen Thompson, a Georgia resident who experienced a “complete and catastrophic loss of all data on her daughter’s Sidekick.” The suit claims that the architecture of Danger’s Sidekick data system contributed significantly to the problem.
We will definitely hear more about this in the near future. It could quickly develop into class action (people ‘chaining’ their previously-restrained lawsuit onto existing one/s). Microsoft is being sued a lot in recent years. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Marketing, Microsoft, Patents at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Spin, deception, lobbying and the likes of them as demonstrated by new examples from Microsoft
AT THE beginning of 2008 we wrote about Microsoft's taxoperability proposition. Ballmer and Smith made it abundantly clear that they shall use elite-serving front groups like WIPO to protect their monopoly against the biggest competitor, Free software. While Mr. Ramji is still producing “fluff pieces” for Microsoft (that’s his job [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12], even after departure) in order to give the impression that Microsoft is not fighting Free software when in fact it does, even in the courtroom, business goes on as usual. As Glyn Moody explicitly warned in 2007, Microsoft was bound to exploit this dishonest duality to pretend that its interests are the same as those of Free software and therefore its suggestions on the matter should be accepted. It also happens in ODF at the moment. They try to control both sides of the debate, so in a future post we will explain and show how this devious strategy works in practice.
“They try to control both sides of the debate…”One reader of ours has written about Microsoft’s attempt to fool the EU-based regulators into thinking that applying software patents to Free software in Europe would be reasonable. We wrote about this last week [1, 2, 3, 4] and now that the European Commission invites feedback, another reader of ours is working on a document as long as several dozens of pages — a document which will be submitted to the Commission as a recommendation. We may put it in the Wiki for regulars to help edit and improve.
All the above is not particularly new or exciting, but there are exceptions. Perhaps the most fascinating bit of news is this report from The Register. It shows rather nicely Microsoft’s influence in (or intersection with) the United States government. It not only relates to Microsoft’s role in promoting terms like “intellectual property” and support of bodies that are protectionist (for elite/national interests). It also relates to Microsoft’s influence at the DHS [1, 2, 3, 4]. If time permits, we will expand on it later. █
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“David Smith commented that Gartner will not bash MS if MS chooses to slip Vista.”
–Jamin Spilzer, Microsoft
Summary: Gartner Group promotion of Vista 7 brings back memory of its bullish outlook for Windows Vista
THE Gartner Group recommended Windows Vista in all sorts of way. It hailed Vista when it comes to security for example and as the quote above shows, it negotiated with Microsoft how the operating system would be covered. From February 6th 2007, for instance, we extract the “The Vista Imperative?”
It states: “Sooner or later, most organizations will deploy Windows Vista. Learn how Gartner can help you understand what the effects will be, what the benefits are and how much it will cost, so you can decide how fast to move.”
We wrote about Gartner a few days ago in light of an detailed exposé from another Web site and now we find Gartner promoting Vista 7, despite its many known problems. Will Gartner eat crow? We may only find out in a few months when the PR campaigns run out of steam (i.e. budgets). █
More on the Gartner Group:
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Posted in Apple, DRM at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some Apple news that can be found today
A FEW DAYS ago we wrote about this massive new bug in Mac OS X. It does not quite stop there. From the British press today:
• Apple’s Time Capsule eats data
APPLE’S BUILD QUALITY goes from strength to strength with users of its expensive Time Capsule product complaining that it bricks their hard-drives.
The Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register, which went live over weekend, has already logged 294 dead devices that have been killed by Apple’s rogue Time Capsule.
The site assures those who have lost a hard-drive to Apple’s superior build quality that they are not alone.
• Apple releases a non-patch to fix hard-drive errors
In fact the problem is more like what other PC users call a crash and it is bloody annoying.
Like most Apple confessions of poor quality, its statement says that the problem of philosophical Macbooks only affects a small number of users. In other words it’s just those Mac computers that believe in “thinking differently”, just like Steve Jobs has always told them to.
• iPhone saves woman from bear
Realising she wasn’t carrying any anti-ursoid equipment, Rowley decided to throw her Apple handset at the bear in the hope of distracting it.
The tactic worked and Rowley escaped.
She later returned to the scene in hope of retrieving her precious smartphone, only to find that – unsurprisingly – the beast had chewed and mauled the device.
Smart bear? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Samba at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Jeremy Allison from the Samba team argues that Mono and applications that depend on Mono should be put in “restricted” repositories
Jeremy Allison comes from Novell and so does Mono, which was acquired by the company along with Ximian. But as our interview with Allison shows, this man who worked for Novell (on Samba) was brave enough to make his voice heard and finally move to Google. He protested against the patent deal with Microsoft. Just as a reminder and a little bit of background, Novell issues have not been resolved yet*.
“A few days ago we also wrote about Git#, which is part of the trend of making GNU/Linux building blocks more closely tied to Microsoft APIs and/or programming languages.”Novell’s Banshee has a new release but little is said about the fact that the software uses parts of Mono that Microsoft explicitly excluded from its Community Promise, which means that the software is only “safe” for Novell customers to use.
A few days ago we also wrote about Git#, which is part of the trend of making GNU/Linux building blocks more closely tied to Microsoft APIs and/or programming languages. Here is some newer coverage of Git# from a source that typically promotes a lot of Microsoft tools.
GNU/Linux expert, distribution developer, and author Chris Smart has just added this to evidence that “Mono is a [Microsoft] trap.”
Still aren’t convinced that Mono is a trap which ultimately only benefits Microsoft?
Take a look at this “Highly Confidential” document from Microsoft (from Comes vs Microsoft case) entitled “Effective Evangelism” and decide for yourself. It exposes Microsoft’s game plan for dominating the market with their platforms (which we already know, but some choose to ignore).
To quote a memorable (and not out-of-date) quote from Microsoft President Bob Muglia: “There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
Next, this brings us to Jeremy Allison’s latest good columns where he politely approaches one problem with Mono.
But the problem is that Mono is dangerous for Free Software. The heart of the matter is, as usual, software patents. Microsoft have patents on the technology inside .NET, and since the Tom Tom lawsuit, Microsoft have shown they are not averse to attacking Free Software using patent infringement claims. Microsoft have tried to allay some fears by putting the .NET specification under their “Microsoft Community Promise” which you can read here:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
Miguel hailed this a the solution to all the patent problems with Mono. But this promise is simply not good enough to base a language environment implementation upon. After all, if the rug is pulled out from under that implementation by the threat of patent infringement you don’t just lose the implementation itself, you lose all the programs that depend upon it. That’s a really dangerous situation for Free Software programs to be in. The Free Software Foundation wrote a good analysis of the problems with this promise here:
http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono
But my basic issue with the Microsoft Community Promise is that Miguel doesn’t have to depend on it like everyone else does. Miguel’s employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell.
The emphasis above is not ours. Allison knew about the Novell deal and also saw it from the inside ahead of journalists. Allison also proposes a solution:
Microsoft isn’t playing games any more by merely threatening to assert patents. Real lawsuits have now occurred and the gloves are off against Free Software. Moving Mono and its applications to the “restricted” repositories is now just plain common sense.
That would include applications like Tomboy and F-Spot.
“Mono is a problem for many reasons, the main of which is the fact that it promotes Microsoft, the company which attacks Free software more than many other companies combined.”There are many comments on this new article (lots more to come), which include: “Nasty stuff! In the meantime, RedHat keeps a strong leadership in the server, and I am starting to move my desktops to purely Qt/KDE installs (to avoid any Mono contamination).”
Why is Novell doing this to itself? Or is it doing it for Microsoft? Mono is a problem for many reasons, the main of which is the fact that it promotes Microsoft, the company which attacks Free software more than many other companies combined. Mono puts Microsoft in control of developers (as in “developers developers developers developers”) and on top of this there are software patents to tighten the grip.
Imitation is rarely the path to winning (or just winning over developers). In order to recruit new support for Free(dom) software, one needs to offer something unique; experience suggests that Mono failed to attract even Visual Studio people.
In Novell’s headquarters, what’s debated at the moment are issues of marketing, not necessarily freedom. A longtime apologist of the Novell/Microsoft relationship elaborates on this subject. █
_____
*This Web site’s goal remains to put pressure on Novell — using its customers — and to rectify its commitment to its suppliers, the Free software world which includes not just developers but also other companies (development peers), enthusiastic users, and people who spread the software. The main issue with the deal is a combination of software patents and an obligation from Novell to do all sorts of things which advance Microsoft’s own ecosystem. SUSE intervention was attempted as means of alleviating or annulling the deal. Attempts were made in the past to do so through negotiation and many people who were using SUSE got involved, myself included. Novell argued that the deal with Microsoft was “irrevocable”, so there was little left to do but to protest through explanation of the consequences and have Novell regret the path that it chose.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ParaScale, Inc., a startup company developing cloud storage software solutions, today announced that OC3 Networks, a leading Los Angeles-based regional provider of enterprise managed hosting services, has selected ParaScale software as its cloud storage solution.
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So Linux in general is no longer a domain for geeks, and is well and truly “desktop ready“, possibly more than Windows. For those wanting to explore the alternatives to their commercial OS, Ubuntu is a great place to start, with its out-of-box simplicity, massive software library, and huge online community. If you think you might be ready to take the plunge, you can read more on their web site, and Googling for “Ubuntu” will certainly give you some reading material to peruse. Just remember that with an Ubuntu “Live CD“, you can actually boot into a “live” desktop running off the disc, so you can try it out (even surf the web) without touching your hard drive whatsoever! I ask you again: does it get any simpler?
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KDE
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Here’s a little teaser article, showing off some of the work we’re doing for the upcoming Amarok 2.2.1. As some of you may know (or maybe not), we have decided to turn the 2.2 “Sunjammer” series into a longer lasting series, similar to the 1.4.x “Fast Forward” cycle. This means, we’re not branching to 2.3 immediately, but instead we will make new releases about every six weeks, each including a number of new features and bug fixes.
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Micro$oft has hundreds of developers working full-time on the user interface, while KDE apps are usually developed by only one or two people at a time, most of them working in their free time as a hobby. Micro$oft has dozens of the best-paid designers in the world, KDE has a handful of mostly freelance artists. Taking all this into account, Windows 7 is a shame for the Microsoft developers, because it’s in my opinion easily surpassed by KDE in terms of polish and design.
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GNOME
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Here is a new collection of themes for Gnome and ubuntu, we choosed the most stylish- featured themes.
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4- Guest accounts
Guest accounts, based on the xguest package, can now be established to offer safe temporary access to the system via gdm or kdm.
5- 3G features request
The next version will have better hardware support for USB 3G keys like download (and upload) quotas, PIN/PUK code management, operator selection.
6- Improve wireless support
As Mandriva 2010 is based on Linux 2.6.31, it will get the benefits of improving wireless support like enhancements for RTL 8187 wireless driver, include support for for RTL 8187 SE wireless driver and adopt Mesh utilities and test support for ralink, atheros and others.
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It is always good to have alternative for practical reasons among many factors which serve as basis for the move or choice. Stability, flexibility, easy of use, level of security, efficiency, lower cost are my personal basis when i have to choose between something. Specially when the quality, degree of it’s delivery are the same or when the difference are hardly noticeable.
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Ubuntu
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Are you ready for the change? Very soon the Canonicals are going to release the latest member of their most loved Ubuntu family, Ubuntu 9.10! The day is not far away…. already the developers have released the beta versions of the system, which we are going to use today to see through the future!
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Until now, Dell has been shipping Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) with its Linux computers and, frankly, this operating system is more than a year and a half old. Well, thanks to the Dell fanboys and girls who submitted requests to the IdeaStorm project, the computer manufacturer decided to honor its customers’ requests and now you can get your Dell computer with a custom version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).
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Phones
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THE RUMOUR MILL has come up with another tale about a Nokia Linux phone.
The story circulating is that the Nokia N920 could be released with Maemo 6 Linux next year.
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Nokia published their Q3 numbers in this pdf. The photo shows the new hot Nokia N900 Linux phone available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
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ACER HAS SHOWCASED its latest products including a smartphone and a netbook, both running Google’s Android platform. The firm also hinted at its future strategy, saying that it expects to grab a double-digit share of the smartphone market, and to be the top global supplier of laptops by 2012.
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Research company Telecom Trends International says over 60% of smartphones will be running Linux-based operating systems by 2016 – less than a week after Gartner analyst (and vice president) Ken Dulaney said Linux would end up with just 5.4% of the smartphone market at the end of 2012.
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Sub-notebooks
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One of the first we notice is the way the desktop is laid out. By using plasma-netbook we are longer focused on using the Application Launcher to open programs, we utilize the Search and Locate folder along with Favorites.
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Mozilla has pushed back the release of its Firefox 3.6 beta by another week, although an early build of it is now available for any brave testers out there desperate to tinker with it from today.
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For a sense of how very many open source software tools there are for medical professionals–ranging from medical records keeping apps to medical image viewing software–check out this collection of 100 of them. Open source software is also having an impact on clinical trials, one of the most important ways that emerging drugs and treatments make it to patients who need them. Today, a free, open source version 3.0 of OpenClinica, the most popular open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) application for use in clinical trials came out.
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Having grown well beyond its humble beginnings as a personal project, the Asterisk open source PBX turns 10 this month and currently has more than 400 contributors.
Asterisk was first released in October 1999 and now claims some two million downloads for this year alone — up from 1.5 million last year.
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Let’s break it down. There are four combinations of apps and OSes:
1. all proprietary applications on a proprietary OS (PoP)
2. (at least some) free applications on a proprietary OS (FoP)
3. (at least some) proprietary applications on a free OS (PoF)
4. all free applications on a free OS (FoF)
I think the order here is important as it indicates the typical migration process from all proprietary to all free. A person typically starts using Windows with all proprietary apps. They learn of some great free alternatives and start using them. They then try out GNU/Linux but still want a few proprietary apps or codecs. And, sometimes, they eventually move to an all free system.
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After a few days of cleaning, bees will take on other hive chores like feeding larvae and grooming the queen, taking pollen, water and nectar from foraging bees and placing it where needed.
When the new FOSS user gets beyond the ‘feeling out’ stage, they begin to identify areas that need improvement or finding alternatives.They will post specific questions on forums asking “how to..” and generally set about the task of ‘tweaking’ their software or app.
After a few weeks of housekeeping duty, bees are pretty much fully developed now in terms of everything from flying to stinging. They now become ( usually) guard bees, inspecting every bee that comes into the hive to be sure it belongs and warding off any potential threats to the colony.
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Business
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Jay recently speculated, and I agreed, that we may be starting to see a return to support and other services, rather than commercial code and licensing, as the preferred mode to monetize open source.
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Licensing
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Two prominent IP lawyers have warned that the all-pervasive General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is legally unsound.
They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software.
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Openness
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The European Union has delivered a killer blow to Google’s Book scanning powergrab by dumping two million pages of historic Euro documents onto the web.
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The model featured in the Ralph Lauren Photoshop stick insect outrage – in which she was Photoshopped to within an inch of her life – claims she was sacked by the company for being “too fat”.
Filippa Hamilton in the Ralph Lauren adFilippa Hamilton suffered such an extreme digital makeover in an ad for the fashion company that BoingBoing was prompted to gasp: “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis.”
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned Texas Instruments (TI) today not to pursue its baseless legal threats against calculator hobbyists who blogged about potential modifications to the company’s programmable graphing calculators.
TI’s calculators perform a “signature check” that allows only approved operating systems to be loaded onto the hardware. But researchers were able to reverse-engineer signing keys, allowing tinkers to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators’ hardware. In response to this discovery, TI unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) required the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys. EFF represents three men who received such letters.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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An all-party group of MPs has recommended mandatory nanny filters for all mobile devices and data devices that can access the internet – and wants the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation secretive censor system extended to the whole world.
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Now, I am not from New York. Thus, I don’t know much about Jim Dolan, the owner of Cablevision, Newsday, Madison Square Garden, and the New York Knicks. But the local press offers a sense of the man. The New York Daily News said that he is “a little bit wacky, lashing out indiscriminately behind the scenes, speaking nonsense whenever he talks at all.” Gawker, a New York blog, said that his “loathing for reporters, propensity for feuds, and general belligerence are legendary.”
[...]
It’d be one thing if anti-SLAPP laws protecting free speech were unknown in the US, but they’re not. California, Illinois, and Indiana all protect against SLAPP suits brought against an exercise of free speech. Heck, California even allows the defendant in a SLAPP suit to counterclaim against the plaintiff for litigation costs and punitive damages. For New York, the media capital of the world, to be trailing behind in protecting free speech is just embarrassing.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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New content – and quite a lot of it – will soon become available on YouTube. The video-sharing site’s struck a revenue-sharing deal with Channel 4 that’ll give it access to full-length, recently broadcast shows along with about 3,000 hours of archive material.
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They see it, they freak out and go negative (or, worse, call in the lawyers). But if you take a step back, you can ask yourself (1) if the copying really matters one way or another and (2) if there’s any way to use that copying to your advantage, rather than freaking out about it. That’s the point we’ve been trying to make for years. In most cases, freaking out isn’t going to make the situation any better (and it has a better than even chance of making it worse). But embracing it, and figuring out ways to use the copying to your own benefit can be tremendously rewarding.
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For what its worth I don’t have a problem with whats happened. None at all. I don’t rationally believe it is ‘stealing’ either (hence the hopefully sarcastic quotation marks).
In fact it’s rather justifying, it means that someone else believes/agrees my writing enough to share the value with his tribe.
Internet Video Celebrity Caitlin Hill 21 (2007)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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First, Linux. Oracle has been in the Linux business for a while now but Ellison said the company was surprised by the interest in Linux. He noted that the Oracle’s virtual machine will run any OS, such as Windows or Solaris and, of course, Oracle Enterprise Linux. What was surprising, he said, were the results of an HP survey which asked customers running Linux under an Oracle database which Linux they were using. About 65 percent said they were using Oracle Enterprise Linux.
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Desktop
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Of course you might be thinking “OS X is supposed to be the most user-friendly OS available, so wouldn’t migrating to Linux be even more difficults?” Not exactly. There are certain elements of OS X that inherently make the process of migrating to Linux easier than when migrating from Windows. Take, for instance, the mounting of images and drives. This task is completely obfuscated from the Windows user, but the OS X user actually knows to unmount a drive before removal. But what about simple, every day usage? How do you make that more understandable for one moving from OS X to Linux? Let’s find out.
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Dell released a laptop last month that uses Linux and a minimotherboard to give customers near instant access to things like their e-mail and the Web. That is to say, people can ignore Windows altogether by just using this instant-on system to do their daily tasks. In Dell’s own studies, people spent 70 percent of their time in this instant-on world rather than booting up Windows when they were at home.
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Applications
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The launch2net beta for Ubuntu Linux is available in a 32-bit and a 64-bit variant; a list of compatible devices can be found on the vendor’s device page. While Nova Media hasn’t determined the prices for the final version, the Linux version is reportedly going to cost considerably less than the Mac OS version, which is currently available for just under 50 euros.
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Web Browsers
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Frederickson has placed the files he downloaded a few days ago on a Rapidshare account for anyone to access. You can find them here.
Will Google be pleased about this? Probably not, considering they removed the files from the Chromium folder shortly after our post. But whatever, it’s open source, yo.
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Originally intended as a separate download — or at least released that way in beta form — Opera Unite now comes bundled with the release of Opera 10.10 beta as a standard feature.
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Opera Software announced a new beta of its flagship Opera 10 browser Wednesday that comes with Opera Unite built in. Opera Unite is essentially a web server that runs inside the browser — instead of just passively browsing the web, Opera Unite lets you share photos, chat and host a simple website directly on your own computer.
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GNOME
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I spent this weekend in Boston for the annual GNOME summit. I really enjoyed it this year, although there were fewer attendees than previously it felt very focussed and productive. There’s some cool stuff going on, and it’s always great to catch up with all of the usual free software suspects in Boston.
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The first Telepathy session session on Saturday evening at the Boston GNOME Summit was very much of a Q&A where myself and Will answered various technical and roadmap issues from a handful of developers and downstream distributors. It showed me that there’s a fair amount of roadmap information we should do better at communicating outside of the Telepathy project, so in the hope its useful to others, read on…
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Most, if not all, top distributions of Linux ship a live CD that allows an end user to preview the operating system without installing it.
Foresight Linux is the exception.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source specialist Red Hat has announced an online virtual conference, the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009, to take place on the 9th of December, 2009. The conference will focus on the Linux ecosystem and the companies enterprise portfolio, including virtualisation and cloud computing. Various Red Hat executives, including Navin Thadani, will be presenting and planned content tracks include business, government, technical and vertical solutions.
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Dell has confirmed that its Android phone will launch in the U.S. next year, says eWEEK. In other Android news, Samsung is prepping a “Galaxy Lite i5700″ for Europe, a music-oriented phone is coming from INQ, Spotify, and Telia, and Verizon is spinning a MiFi-enabled phone, say various reports.
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Sub-notebooks
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At an Acer product launch in central London earlier today, Register Hardware got up close and personal with the firm’s first netbook to ship with two operating systems.
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Each week is starting to open up new horizons for Android (GigaoM Pro subscription required), and it’s easy to forget that the operating system didn’t even gain its first users until last year. Google’s Chrome OS won’t arrive until next year, and one has to wonder how many milestones Android will hit by then.
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Intel Open Source Technology Centre Imad Sousou says that vendors will begin announcing netbooks running Moblin 2.0 within the next week or two. The news came out of an interview with ZDNet UK, where Sousou discussed the current state of Moblin Linux. The operating system is optimized for use on netbooks, particularly those with low power processors like the Intel Atom, and small screens with resolutions of 1024 x 600 pixels or lower.
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The survey of more than 400 developers also showed that the open source database MySQL is closing the lead that SQL has in emerging markets. According to the survey, more than 50 percent of developers in the emerging market countries said they are using Microsoft’s SQL Server, but 46 percent said they are using MySQL. MySQL is slightly stronger in India and Latin America, but Microsoft’s SQL Server leads in China and Latin America, Evans Data officials said.
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The number of public administrations in Belgium that use the open source office productivity suite OpenOffice is rising steadily. And with it the use of the open document format ODF.
OVAM, Flanders’ Public Waste Agency, already adapted its back office to support ODF a couple of years ago. They are now awaiting the decision of the Flemish Minister of Environment to move the four hundred desktops to OpenOffice.
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Now, let’s explore the 5 HRM applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, providing a screenshot of the software in action, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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EnterpriseDB is touting enterprise-level capabilities of its Postgres Plus Standard Server 8.4 open source database, which was released this week. The company says the database, which is based on PostgreSQL database technology, offers enterprises cost benefits of open source, performance benefits of a community-developed product, and the reassurance of vendor support.
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Conversely, a good product may also elicit a need to purchase support, but for very different reasons. Aside from insurance or an SLA, we may feel a certain obligation to support the developers. First, they wrote a wonderful piece of software that we depend on and that saves us untold amounts of time. Second, we need to ensure that the project will continue. Finally, we may wish to “sponsor” certain features, rather than code them ourselves.
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Or consider SageMath. This is a GPL program that aims to replicate pricey programs like Mathematica and Matlab, using an interface derived from open source Python.
What this delivers is transparency. Teachers and even kids can make additions to SageMath, learning Python in the process, and these improvements too go into a commons.
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In development since 2002, the game creation tool Game Editor finally becomes Open Source.
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Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.
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Government
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Norway’s Kongsberg municipality is the recipient of the country’s first Open Source Software Municipality award, in a ceremony that took place last Monday in the capital Oslo.
The new annual award is an initiative by Friprog, Norway’s resource centre on open source and open standards, Norway’s Unix User Group and the University of Oslo.
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Openness
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One of the most extensive collections of rare Chinese books outside of China will be digitized and made freely available to scholars worldwide as part of a six-year cooperative project between Harvard College Library (HCL) and the National Library of China (NLC). …
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OpenFlights is a site for “flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing”.
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Google Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web, says Cameron Neylon.
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ABC managing director and tweeting Web 2.0 aficionado Mark Scott will maintain the public broadcasters’ policy of free online content, and says traditional publishers like Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited and Fairfax plan to charge fees for content is unrealistic.
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Programming
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The Qt development team is using the Qt Developer Days conference currently taking place in Munich, to release a number of products developed under the Qt brand.
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The computers we use to access Web OSs really only have to have a Web browser. Since most of the computing power is performed by the cloud server, the end-user computers can be more basic systems, saving us money. Plus, administrators can easily control the applications and settings of the virtual desktops. This can greatly simplify an organization’s network setup, especially for smaller businesses that might not be familiar with traditional virtualization or thin client architecture.
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BLU-RAY DISCS of 100GB or 200GB are incompatible with available players, according to The Blu-ray Disc Association.
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The Nobel peace prize is intended to encourage the United States president to consolidate the great intentions of his first year in office. But it may do him more harm than good, says Godfrey Hodgson.
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…protesting peacefully about climate change for example. Yep – more anti-terror idiocy, this time courtesy of the UK border police, who stopped climate campaigner Chris Kitchen from travelling to Copenhagen and interviewed him along with afellow climate activist under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Paul Lewis has the full story in the Guardian.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Negotiations on the Telecoms Package took a worrying turn for citizens rights and freedoms. The European Parliament Delegation was betrayed by its negotiators, led by Catherine Trautmann (S&D) and Alejo Vidal-Quadras (EPP). In total contradiction with the mandate given by their colleagues representing the Parliament, the negotiators unilaterally accepted to work on a proposal by the Council of the EU that negates citizens’ rights1. This dangerous proposition is set to replace “amendment 138″, voted twice by 88% of the Parliament.
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A landmark Swedish file sharing ruling that forced ISP ePhone to reveal a net user’s identity to five publishers has been overturned.
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In researching an article for a book I’ve discovered an interesting parallel between the two in regard to the issue of Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality? It is the idea that when you use the Internet, you do so free of restrictions. That any information you download gets treated the same as any other piece of information. This means that your Internet service provider (say Rogers, Shaw or Bell) can’t choose to provide you with certain content faster than other content (or worse, simply block you from accessing certain content altogether).
Normally the issue of Net Neutrality gets cast in precisely those terms – do bits of data flowing through fibre optic and copper cables get treated the same, regardless of whose computer they are coming from and whose computer they are going to. We often like to think these types of challenges are new, and unique, but one thing I love about being a student of history, is that there are almost always interesting earlier examples to any problem.
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Finland, a country I was fortunate to visit just last month (my thoughts), has just become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.
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MPs from all parties protested at Westminster this afternoon at attempts by lawyers acting for the oil trader Trafigura to stop reports of parliamentary proceedings.
The Labour MP Paul Farrelly told the speaker, John Bercow, attempts by lawyers Carter-Ruck to gag the media could be a “potential contempt of parliament”.
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Marketing experts were stunned today at the success of media law firm Carter-Ruck’s high profile ‘gagging order’ campaign, designed to generate buzz around their client Trafigura’s latest toxic waste product.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Then, we have the story of the MPAA apparently sending a bunch of anti-piracy comic books to New Zealand, home of one of many different fights on how to change copyright law. The comic book, like the BSA report, involves plenty of ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about how file sharing will unleash nasty malware and viruses all over your computers — but drawn in nice comic book form. Can we send those kids who got the MPAA comic book a copy of the Tales from The Public Domain comic books as well? There are free digital downloads for anyone who wants to hand them out in exchange for the bogus MPAA ones….
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We’ve noticed a troubling trend in how legitimate online music services are being pressured into deals with the major record labels. The labels begin the negotiations on licenses… and then sue the company.
Internet Video Celebrity Caitlin Hill 20 (2007)
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