Links: ForgeRock's First Post, Firefox 4, LpOD 0.9.2...
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-23 09:54:37 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-23 09:54:37 UTC
Summary: News links about Free/libre software
I do not understand the concept of Free Software being evil in any way. We do not view family or community as evil. How could Free Software be evil? Families raise children and set them free. It would be frowned upon to raise children as slaves. Family, neighbours, communities and nations donate their labour and resources to help individuals and groups. That’s not evil. It is because we are social beings that we help one another.
Have you looked at the new Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn't need to purchase Office 2010.
Facebook connects its 500 million users using an array of open source software to enable social networking as well as data intelligence. Facebook's open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it.
These days I am receiving quite a number of mails that ask the same question: If a FOSS project is sponsored by only one company or entity, do you think it's a healthy project?
Community. This little nine-letter word is the lifeblood of open source. Barely a day goes by without some aspect of it impacting our lives, be that via Linux, a local book club, your closest group of friends or any one of a million other places. In an age when anyone over 45 seems to have stories about the end of local communities, the open source community is thriving.
-
ForgeRock/SUN
ForgeRock today announced general availability of OpenAM 9.5 software, the latest release of the OpenAM access management product, part of the I3 Platform. This represents the first full release of OpenAM since ForgeRock commenced sponsorship of the open source OpenAM project and provides a smooth migration option for Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8 users.
It’s significant for open source because it signals that the OpenAM community – especially the part on ForgeRock’s own team – is up to speed maintaining and evolving the code and that the transition from its former home is going well.
I get that Oracle runs on open-source software. I know that Oracle is a major Linux supporter. But, please, please dont mistake Oracle as an open-source, open-core, or any other kind of "open" business at heart. Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, is all about making billions of dollars. There's nothing wrong with that. That's what all businesses are about. But, to Ellison open source is just the means to that end and nothing else. If a program doesn't fit into his plan, it's not going to get supported.
So, while Oracle recently put up a page listing its native open-source projects and the ones that it inherited from Sun, don't think for a minute that all those programs are actually going to be supported. They're not.
-
Events
Linux.conf.au announced a Call for Papers for its 12th annual open source Linux conference for developers, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on Jan 24-29. Linux.conf.au 2011 (lca2011) starts off with two days of mini-conferences, and is followed by three days of main sessions and an "Open Day" of events and presentations that is open to the general public.
-
Mozilla
Mozilla has reached an important Milestone as its new JavaScript engine “JaegerMonkey” is now faster than the current “TraceMonkey” in a key benchmark. Mozilla wants JaegerMonkey to be faster than the competition and launch on September 1, which means that JaegerMonkey will make it into Firefox 4.0.
A beta version of Firefox 4.0 has been released with a new look and new features
As such, Blizzard will no longer be leading the the Evangelism group inside of Mozilla and will instead help to manage the web-facing side of Firefox full-time as the Web Platform Director. During his time at Mozilla, Blizzard notes that he has already worked closely with Mozilla’s engineering team, helping to determine what was important and what wasn't inside of the project. Blizzard says that, while the 'new' job will be interesting, "It’s entirely built of soft skills: listening closely to web developers, both front end and back end."
-
SaaS
In February 2008 Amazon S3 crashed and the whole of Amazon S3 stopped for a few hours. In March 2009 a bug inside Google Docs had allowed unintended access to some private documents. Some people with cloud concerns ask, “What if my documents, stored by the provider of the web office (eg Google Docs) are lost?” Different question: what if your laptop is stolen or your hard disk crashes? If you are using cloud services or not, it’s always a good advice to have a backup of your data.
[...]
These hints can be used exactly the same when not using cloud services and they prove that it’s not very dangerous to use cloud. Or do you install non-open source software from sources you can’t trust? And you keep your credit card numbers secure all the time? And you do backups of your local data, don’t you?
VMware is preparing to attack Microsoft Exchange across the IT channel. The strategy calls for VMware’s channel partners to begin selling Zimbra — an open source email system — starting on Aug. 1, 2010. Here are the details, which The VAR Guy confirmed at HostingCon.
[...]
Pflaum also pointed out that VMware and Zimbra have no plans to build a VMware cloud and/or to host Zimbra directly for partners. Instead, Zimbra plans to leverage existing relationships with roughly 500 hosting companies that offer Zimbra.
-
CMS
In the past few days, WordPress has become entangled in a debate about WordPress theme licensing. It was specifically centered around Thesis, one of the last notable proprietary theme holdouts. Chris Pearson, who develops and sells Thesis, refuses to license Thesis under the GNU General Public License that applies to WordPress and all WordPress-derived code.
If you’re not familiar with the background, however, the Cliff’s Notes version comes down to Thesis Theme using a license other than GPL, which created a conflict between Thesis Theme creator Chis Pearson and Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic (the parent of WordPress.com).
For more in depth coverage, please take a look at our original post about the subject, and then the follow-up as well.
Suffice it to say, we’re happy to see that Pearson will be working under GPL. It is worthy to note, however, that Thesis is now licensed under a GPL split.
If I were really vested in this issue and had money (and my last name was Mullenweg) this is what I would do: I’d just buy a copy of Thesis and then start distributing it. From the front page of WordPress. Hell, I’d make it the default theme, push it out as a “critical update”, and announce it all on video in a leotard with my face painted up like The Ultimate Warrior. (Don’t miss the “Warrior Fine Art Gallery”!)
-
Education
So the NHS has decided not to renew a large Microsoft licensing deal. Basically it had agreed a while ago to spend €£500 million on Microsoft software in return for a €£300 million discount.
What a bargain!
No more though, in this time of cuts, just when we needed the money the most, the deal has been ditched and the NHS faces a massive licence bill. But it gets better; according to sources on the ground ‘the only option would be to move to free open source software’...but wait for this... ‘the staff would not move to an unfamiliar system’.
So that’s it then.
Literally they will pay for MS products with money they would otherwise use for the good. That’s how hard it is to introduce FOSS onto the desktops, even when those desktops are running crummy old DOS screens within MS XP home!
-
Semi-Open Source
Open core is usually built by a set of internal open source components held together by a dual-licensed wrapper, plus proprietary modules on the outside. One of the best examples of this is Zimbra (an excellent product on its own) but MySQL in recent editions can be included in the same group. As discussed in previous posts, dual licensing hampers contributions because it requires an explicit agreement on ceding rights to the company that employs it, in order to be able to relicense it for the proprietary edition. This means that Open Core companies, in itself, will have an easier time in monetizing their software, but will receive much less contributions in exchange. As I wrote before, it is simply not possible to get something like Linux or Apache with Open Core.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
New York, NY, July 21, 2010//Software vulnerabilities in life-sustaining medical devices such as pacemakers and infusion pumps pose a growing threat to public health, warns a new report published by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices will be presented at OSCON 2010 on July 23. It addresses the potentially fatal risk of source code defects in implantable medical devices and explores why patients, doctors and the public should insist that free and open source software be the standard approach.
"The findings of the paper are important to anyone who has a friend or loved one with a pacemaker or insulin pump," said the paper's author and SFLC General Counsel, Karen Sandler. "Clearly, we need mandatory, public, and broad safety review of code that runs these devices. At the very least, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must require device manufacturers to submit software to the agency for review and safe keeping."
-
Project Releases
The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.3.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features and improved stability over previous versions.
-
Government
Kroes mentions Munich which has implemented FLOSS and open document flows but is still dragging its feet on GNU/Linux. They plan to be finished in 2013… If they run FLOSS apps, it is a puzzle to me why it is taking so long to move the OS. Maybe there is less urgency because the price of PCs dropped and they are running XP now… I just don’t know. Things like moving accounts and issuing memos on a few basic operations could be done on a weekend per department.
-
Open Access/Content
As a start and a workspace, I’ve posted the timeline I pulled together for the MIT OpenCourseWare Milestone Celebration in 2007 on the Consortium wiki. I invite the community to log onto the wiki and add additional events and items (I obviously have to cover 2008-2011 still as well), or if you are note comfortable editing the wiki, simply send me an e-mail (scarson at ocwconsortium dot org) with your items and I will add them in.
-
Open Hardware
Members of the open source hardware community publicly issued a list of standards that define a specific piece of hardware as open source. Among the signatures on the document were MIT Media Lab and Arduino lead software developer David Mellis, Adafruit founder Limor Fried, Creative Commons VP of Science John Wilbanks, and Wired editor and DIY Drones founder Chris Anderson.
There are eleven tenets to the open source hardware definition.
-
Programming
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has a famous quote, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In the open source world, it is taken for granted that you want to open your work to the world quickly for the very simple reason that if you do, you make it possible for others to help you make it better faster (and you find the bugs).
-
Standards/Consortia
lpOD -- languages & platforms OpenDocument. Definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard. Development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages. of a top-down oriented API.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Links 25/07/2025: NOAA Cuts Endanger Lives, "Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis"
- Links for the day
- YouTube is a Spamfarm, Slopfarm, and Clickfarm (a Lot of Numbers There Are Fake)
- Those who don't fake look unpopular and unimportant
-
- Links 25/07/2025: Slop Blunders and China Has Code of Conduct for Lawmakers in HK
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/07/2025: Some Books and Babies and Capital
- Links for the day
- They Try to Lecture Us on Ethics
- They even removed "master" from Microsoft GitHub
- The Future of the Web is One Rendering Engine or 'Flavours' of Chrome
- The future of the Web does not look bright at all
- Best Sites Are Not Optimised for Any Browser, They Work Equally Well With All of Them
- Red Hat (IBM) is making rubbish sites
- We Don't Do JavaScript and Pages Are Small
- Thankfully Gemini Protocol has nothing like JavaScript
- 'Tech' is Not Technology
- Some people use terms like 'Old Tech'
- IBM's Debt Rose by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in the Past 6 Months Alone
- The "hey hi" circus is coming to an end
- Yes, Master
- Gaslighting by actual racists
- Microsoft Bribes and Buys Politicians to Tell Europe What to Do About Free Software (Which It's Attacking)
- Microsoft: we speak for the thing that we are attacking! Follow the money...
- Making Backups Quickly and Reliably
- Backups are imperative, more so in an age of uncertainty, unpredictable weather, and worsening standards (quality of products going down while prices go up)
- Techrights Investigation: Estimating the Point in Time LinuxIac Turned Into LLM Slop (Part of the Time)
- Bobby Borisov got lazy
- 10th Month, Ten Weeks From Now, at Ten AM
- In Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 24, 2025
- A Nadella Memo Distracts From Microsoft's Cheapening Of the Workforce
- Right now the "MSM" (mainstream media) is flooded/overwhelmed by garbage pieces that relay lies for Nadella
- Vanishing Faces of GNU/Linux
- Free software projects do not depend on any one person or company to still exist
- Microsoft Says It Lost 400 Million Windows Users, Now It's Waiting for GNU/Linux to Stop Booting on 'Old' PCs
- When it comes to Windows, Microsoft is fully aware of the issue and statements it made earlier this summer suggest it lost 400 million Windows users
- Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, linuxsecurity.com, LinuxIac, and More
- Also: The Register's Microsoft agenda (new editor)
- Gemini Links 25/07/2025: Gemtext Aware Titan Editor and Gemini Protocol Comeback
- Links for the day
- Links 24/07/2025: Convicted Felon Quits UNESCO, "Vibe Coding Goes Wrong", and Signalgate Gets Worse
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/07/2025: Forgejo Woes and Smolnet Directory Week
- Links for the day
- Misinformation is Not Intelligence
- It's low-grade plagiarism and it fails to show any signs of intelligence
- Links 24/07/2025: Storage Tapes Still Kicking, Windows TCO 'on Steroids' (Microsoft-Induced Catastrophes)
- Links for the day
- Bobby Borisov (LinuxIac) Has Apparently Begun Experimenting With LLM Slop, So We Cannot Trust LinuxIac Anymore
- So did LinuxIac become a slopfarm? Maybe not yet, but it's getting there
- Informa TechTarget's ITProToday is Becoming a Slopfarm Generated by Microsoft Chatbots
- Busted.
- 'Tech' Gimmicks Are for Advertising, Not for Usability
- In the case of Microsoft, they latched onto slop
- BetaNews Sacked Brian Fagioli and Deleted His Comments, But He Still Tries to Use the "BetaNews" Brand for Self-Affirmation
- Fagioli takes the work of other people
- [Meme] Hard to Be a Better Person?
- Sooner or later they'll realise that for each pound I spend they need to spend about 1,000 times more
- The LLM Con Artists Are Highly Destructive
- Who will ever be held accountable for this scam?
- Too Bribed by Microsoft to Move to Free Software?
- Microsoft lies and Microsoft bribery (in politics)
- New US Editor for The Register is a Microsoft Booster
- "Avram Piltch has served as US editor for The Register since July 2025."
- Microsoft Hiring European Politicians is Another Form of Bribery; There Should be a European Investigation
- When Microsoft bribed people in Europe for OOXML (there's no denying this!) a European government delegate said that Microsoft operated like a cult
- Reda Demanded That FSF Removes Its Founder, Now Reda Works Directly for Microsoft
- A sellout and a traitor, first working for GAFAM, now Microsoft
- PCLinuxOS is Raising Money to Support Development After Fire Incident at the Host
- PCLinuxOS has not had announcements lately
- Speed of the Site Should be Better Now
- The "bot attacks" impact the speed of the sister site too
- Getting More From AnalogNowhere
- Recently we used many images from AnalogNowhere
- Microsoft, Microsofters and 'Secure' Boot Shills Already Storming the LWN Report About Expiring Certificate, Shooting the Messenger
- LWN has clearly stuck a nerve
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 23, 2025
- Disable "Secure" Boot Today (the Only Better Time to Do So Was Yesterday)
- Don't trust anything Red Hat tells you about security
- Links 23/07/2025: Windows Killed Company After 150+ Years, US Government Mimics Russia's Attacks on the Media
- Links for the day
- Freedom Generally Wins at the End, History Shows (But It's Constantly Attacked, Too)
- At the moment people realise "Linux" (e.g. Android) isn't enough to guarantee any freedoms
- Over 3 Months Later Brett Wilson LLP Still Unable to Recruit a Media Lawyer?
- "Immediate start", but not found... still unfilled
- “Inhumane” and “Disgusting” Mass Layoff Execution, According to Microsoft Staff
- The workers are looking for other places to work
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Slogan for Its 40th Anniversary
- The freedoms are what's most important
- Microsoft is Trying to "Pull a Nokia" on GNU/Linux as Desktop/Laptop Platform
- We all remember that rather well, don't we?
- LLM Slopfarms gbhackers.com, "Cyber Press" and CyberSecurityNews Are Drowning Google News (and Shame on Google for Feeding and Facilitating Them)
- All are run by the same people
- Links 23/07/2025: Droplets GUI Patent Monopoly Challenge, Nokia Leverages Illegal Patent Court Against Rivals
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Community in Geminispace and Challenges With Old Computers
- Links for the day
- Links 23/07/2025: Slop Patents Tackled, Slop Copyright Misuses Tackled by Politicians
- Links for the day
- Our Three Lawsuits Against Microsofters Are About to Become a Lot More Relevant to GNU/Linux
- The Master will easily understand why Garrett has been attacking me since 2012
- Links 23/07/2025: Retreating From Transparency on Jeffrey Epstein, We No Longer Have Press Freedom
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Piano and Food
- Links for the day
- New and Old
- On Ageism in Tech
- Slop Is Not Intelligence and It Does Not Enhance Productivity
- Like voice dictation, which cannot tell the difference between "sheet" and "shit"
- EPO Crimes Are Spreading to the British Court System
- Society is now paying the price for failing to tackle crimes at the EPO
- It's Time to Dump SharePoint and Here's What to Use Instead
- Nextcloud, ownCloud, Bookstack, MediaWiki, and MediaGoblin
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 22, 2025
- Brett Wilson LLP Has Gone Silent
- Sometimes silence says more than nothing at all
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Planet Ubuntu, and LinuxTechLab
- some slopfarms show no remorse and they don't value their reputation at all
- Links 23/07/2025: Book Bans, Storms, and Kangaroo Court for Patents Commits More Unlawful Acts of Overreach
- Links for the day