05.19.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch
Compiz the compositing window management system for X11.
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Just a quick note for those who didn’t listen to the last podcast recording (naughty, naughty): on Friday 20th of May, at 15:00 British Summer Time, the team behind Linux Format magazine and TuxRadar will be on IRC for chat japes galore.
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Kernel Space
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The latest Linux kernel offers drivers for AMD’s current high-end graphics chips and ipsets that simplify firewall implementation and maintenance. The Ext4 file system and the block layer are now said to work faster and offer improved scalability. Hundreds of new or improved drivers enhance the kernel’s hardware support.
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Graphics Stack
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This morning I wrote about the troublesome experience of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Ubuntu 11.04 as the packages found in the Natty repository are outdated and contain only the initial “SNB” support. In the mainline upstream code, Sandy Bridge is supported much better, offers faster performance, and possesses other new features (e.g. VA-API encode), except in the past week the Intel SNB Linux code temporarily broke hard.
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This morning after writing Intel Sandy Bridge On Ubuntu 11.04 Is Still Troubling, I proceeded to build the latest Mesa / Linux kernel / libdrm / DDX Git stack to see where the latest Intel SNB code is at and how it’s running for the popular Core i5 2500K processor. Before leaving three weeks ago, everything was running great, but to much surprise, this morning it was a broken mess. Intel just regressed hard in their Sandy Bridge support for the about-to-be-released Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Whoops!
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Applications
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Eveinstaller is great tool similar to Ubuntu Tweak, it lets you install the basic applications in Ubuntu 11.04 and LinuxMint with a simple click, also using this tools, you can add Medibuntu, getdeb , Playdeb repositories , or install elementary theme, Mint theme…, for Desktop, install also with a simple click Gnome3, Unity 2D, Unity 3D and more.
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Midori’s handling of CSS fonts and shadow rendering are improved – important when viewing OMG! Ubuntu!, for example. The browser user agent string – these are unique identifiers that help a web page detect browser version so it can, if needed, adjust the page accordingly – have been tweaked so that pages like Facebook no longer think Midori is a mobile browser.
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Those of us who have been using Linux for a long time all know the joy of silly programs like xeyes. One of my favorites, however, is good old xsnow. Whether you love the cold weather or live in Florida and like to ski on occasion, xsnow will add some winter fun to your desktop. The xsnow program has been around forever and is surely available for your distribution.
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Instructionals/Technical
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recently i had problems with the deployment of an experimental ‘shinken‘ [1], a monitoring tool, on gentoo. most of the installation was ‘straightforward’. but i had a problem with livestatus in combination to ‘thruk‘ [2].
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Wine
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CodeWeavers, Inc., which provides the celebrated CrossOver software enabling Mac and Linux users to run Windows software on their computers without the need of a Microsoft license, this week marks its 15th birthday by releasing its birther video and offering its new CrossOver Bundle product at a price that corresponds with the day of the month.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Currently in GNOME there is some tension as we move into the post 3.0 world about the scope and direction of the project.
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A recent proposal be PulseAudio and systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering to add systemd raised concerns that GNOME might drop support for non-Linux platforms.
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What is my general feeling of Chakra Linux? Honestly, I expected more from famous and long-existing distributive. More in terms of included software. More stability. Just more… Yes, there are couple of nice findings in Chakra which make this system almost unique (at least among those which I saw), but they are not so important for me to think about switching to Chakra Linux.
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I had been wanting to try some Slackware based distro for some time. Why? If you say you like Linux and haven’t tried Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux alive (yes! Ubuntu is NOT the oldest, for the record! 
), you are missing your roots. Not enough reason, you say? Well, let me add that Slackware must have its magic touch if it has been able to stand the test of time since 1993. Yes, kids; Slackware may be older than some of you; then learn from the experienced and become better!
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In general terms, Kongoni looks like a good distro. I liked it in spite that it does not come with any office suite.
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My only problem was now to boot Zenwalk. I tried several solutions I found online, but none of them made GRUB stand up and invite Zenwalk to the dancing floor. So, I resorted to Mandriva Control Center. I opened the boot manager and tried to add the entry manually. Again, I was not sure of what I was doing, but I had to give it a try. I added a new Linux entry cutting and pasting info for tag, append, and image from lilo.config. Then, I clicked “advanced” and changed network profile to “default” and copy/pasted the info for initrd.
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New Releases
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We have of course been following BackTrack since the very early days, way back in 2006 when it was just known as BackTrack – A merger between WHAX and Auditor. They’ve come a long way and BackTrack is now a very polished and well rounded security distro, most of the others have dropped off the map leaving BackTrack as the giant in the security LiveCD space.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia project has announced the availability of last development release of Mageia. This is believed to be the last release candidate opening the windows for the fist stable release of the GNU/Linux-based operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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CORPORATE LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 with numerous security updates and patches.
Red Hat released its popular RHEL 6 distribution back in November 2010 and typically the firm operates on a six month update schedule for current release tracks. So it is no big surprise that Red Hat has announced RHEL 6.1 in May, which brings out patches and security fixes and, according to Red Hat, maintains application compatibility and certification.
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When Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said in 2008 he planned to get the company to $1bn in annual sales by 2011, up from $500m at the time, there were those who scoffed. But as the open source vendor just closed its fourth quarter with sales of $244.8m, up 25%, it’s almost certain he will achieve his ambition, even if the firm’s first billion-dollar year will actually be its fiscal 2012, not 2011. Who’s counting?
As Whitehurst said at the time of the recent earnings announcement: “With record bookings and billings in the fourth quarter, we are on a run rate to become the first pure-play open source company to achieve a billion dollars in revenues next fiscal year, a milestone achievement for Red Hat and the open source community.”
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you’re a native English speaker like me, you may not think very often about what it takes to make software available in a language you understand. For the rest of the world, however, translation is a big deal — especially in the open source ecosystem, where few projects have the resources to pay professional translators. Luckily, recent changes in Launchpad have made it easier for developers to integrate translations into Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters more than you might think.
In the open source world, where programmers dot the planet, English tends to serve as a lingua franca among the people writing the code. This practice may work well enough for developers who need to communicate with one another, but it’s not a solution for users who cannot or prefer not to use their software in a language that is not their native tongue.
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While we have had an early Ubuntu 11.10 release schedule (along with one for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) going back to last May, the official release schedule for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Oncelot” is now available.
The official Ubuntu 11.10 release schedule is available from the Ubuntu Wiki with the various release dates.
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I have tried and tested Ubuntu 11.04 during its development cycle and also after the final release and I really liked Unity 2D. It was the first shell that I did not felt the need for major customization.
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Some may even laugh at the fact that even the Ubuntu community find Unity too simple, although let us be very clear about what is too simple about Unity. It is the usability and functionality that is too simple.
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Some of you who have been following this blog for a while may remember my post from 2009 where I was lamenting my lack of decent Linux-friendly MP3 player options out there to replace my aging Archos device.
Well, I still haven’t found one. However, thanks to Rockbox and a used device I bought from a friend, I have a stopgap that will hopefully last me until the portable music player electronics market sorts itself out.
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Computers have long been a rather expensive luxury for those who could afford them. Desktops have drastically fallen in price, but with a cost of roughly $300.00 for a modest machine the price is still nothing to laugh at. Laptops have fallen in price as well, but $500.00 is still a lot of money. Worldwide, our economies are not in the best shape. Along with coffee, people tighten their technology budget. It’s a natural reaction. Food, water, gasoline, car maintenance, and home maintenance are far more important in the survival sense. The tightening of that budget may negatively impact children who are interested in technology. It’s also rather obvious that there are parts of the world that are not quite as well off as others. Luckily, their are some very bright, very clever people in the world. It just so happens that a few of them love technology and Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK based charity that has found a solution to this problem.
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Phones
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Android
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Verizon and Motorola have announced the second-generation Android-powered DROID X2, designed for the consumer who does everything on their smartphone.
The DROID X2, boasts Verizon Wireless’ first dual-core 1GHz processor for fast webpage loading and Adobe Flash Player.
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Of the companies that court developers, it’s difficult to conceive of one that’s more generous with hardware than Google. Just as they once handed out free handsets to stimulate Android application development, Google, as expected issued free Samsung tablets to all five thousand attendees of their annual developer conference. Then they handed out free Verizon LTE mifi devices with three months of free service. And a few weeks from now, they’ll be shipping out free Chromebooks as well.
Whether you believe this largesse is good form or bad on Google’s part – and opinons vary on the subject – it’s a strategy that has shown results for them in the past. Last April, there were 38,000 applications in the Android Market. At present, there are over 200,000. The free hardware creates longer term issues with expectations, as attendees have obviously come to expect free kit. But in the short term, it’s clear that seeding the market in this fashion is likely to produce the desired effect: more applications.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Today, Dell’s Technology Strategist, Doug Anson announced that a Chromium OS build for the Mini 10v netbook is available for download from their website.
Chromium OS is the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS. Like Chrome OS, it is a minimalist operating system with just a browser – Chromium browser. Chrome OS and Chromium OS are quite similar to each other except for a few things like verified boot.
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just because they don’t do everything the same way that a brand new PC running that other OS will do?
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Chromebook is built for internet-freaks who spend most of their time on the web so that they can experience the web, truly and completely without having to worry about ordinary computer headaches. Google Chromebook is based on ChromeOS, a web-based Operating System entirely relying on cloud computing. The revolutionary Chromebooks seek to completely transform our current (somewhat inflexible) computing habits, in an exciting new way. Nevertheless there are some risks and apprehensions associated with this new paradigm of computing.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (May 17th) the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development version for the upcoming Google Chrome 13 web browser, for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.
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Mozilla
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Update: May 17 was widely believed to be the launch day of Firefox 5 Beta. However, it turns out that Mozilla did not plan yesterday as the launch day, but as the day for the source code merge. The merge apparently happened, but the public release is still hiding in Mozilla’s FTP servers.
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CMS
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HTML5 is about to rock our world. There are books written about why that is the case, but simply put, it can provide a much better user experience on both desktop and mobile devices, and could lead to a convergence between native applications and the mobile web.
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Business
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We’ve already seen mounting evidence that the numerous benefits of open source software are making a big impression on businesses far and wide, and this week saw the release of yet more data corroborating that fact.
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I just spent a few days at CMS Expo, a conference full of WCM open sourcers which I enjoyed very much. But I had a message for them during my keynote which I would like to share here as well: Open source web content management needs to change if it wants to maintain relevance in the enterprise in the next five years.
While this is more a call-to-action than a prediction, it seems to fly directly in the face of predictions by many industry voices, all of which tend to indicate a rise in the popularity of open source WCM in the enterprise. In fact, these points do not conflict, but allow me to explain.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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May 14, 2011 (Bayonne, NJ). We are distributing today a 1.0 release of the GNU SIP protocol provisioning and peer-to-peer call server, GNU SIP Witch. GNU SIP Witch is developed within GNU Telephony and has been selected for use in the GNU Free Call project. This will provide a stable release that we will support for existing applications while we actively develop GNU Free Call services.
GNU SIP Witch is available as part of the GNU project. Stable releases will also power a web site later this summer to provide initial worldwide secure calling services for free directly to the general public for use in conjunction with any ZRTP enabled standards compliant softphone applications and SIP devices. GNU SIP Witch can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with existing VoIP infrastructure, for private institutions and national governments.
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Personally, I blame Richard Stallman. It’s an affliction that affects geeks on our side of the proverbial aisle: The “G” factor, where a normally silent letter gets pressed into phonetic service, well, for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s there (and from an engineering standpoint, why would it be there if it wasn’t going to be used?), and secondly, because we’re used to the fact that GNU and GNOME have the “g” — how can I put this? — unsilent, and we’ve been trained, or brainwashed, into putting the “g” in there where it doesn’t belong.
It’s bad enough the little guys in the garden are guh-nomes — even after the recent movie “Guh-nomeo and Juliet” — but there are other places where this arises.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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When I was in grade school, right here in the United States of America, I was taught that our country was the “land of opportunity”. My teachers told me that my country was special, because anyone with a good idea and a drive to do good work could make a living, and be successful too. They called it the “American Dream”.
What was the cornerstone to the “American Dream”? It was equality — everyone had the same chance in our society to choose their own way. I could have any career I wanted, and if I worked hard, I would be successful.
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Security
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs has lost its luster. The firm earned a best-in-class reputation for its history of profitability and navigating upheaval. But it seems less assured lately. In fact, Goldman is in danger of looking downright average.
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After reading Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule the World by William D. Cohan, I can no longer defend Goldman Sachs and the status quo on Wall Street.
As Congress and the media were debating the controversial and populist-tinged Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation bill, my first inclination was to defend Wall Street and traders overall. I didn’t like Dodd-Frank’s Volcker Rule, which divests proprietary trading and alternative investments (hedge funds and private equity) from Wall Street (commercial) banks. I believed the bill was similar to reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act separating investment banking and trading from commercial banking.
I argued that banks need trading profits — where the main profits have been the last decade — to offset losses on lending, especially during a recession. But now I agree with Chairman Volcker. We can’t be certain Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein and other sleuths won’t steal client inside information to front run, compete, and trade against their clients and the public’s interests. The Chinese Wall is the biggest myth and lie on Wall Street.
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Recently convicted hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam might have been right about Rajat Gupta, the esteemed financier who allegedly fed Galleon inside information from the Goldman Sachs board. During the trial, the jury heard a wiretap of Rajaratnam saying that the reason Gupta left Goldman’s board for a gig at a private equity company was because:
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Goldman Sachs has lost its luster. The firm earned a best-in-class reputation for its history of profitability and navigating upheaval. But it seems less assured lately. In fact, Goldman is in danger of looking downright average.
It’s not the first time. Goldman has been sent reeling by shocks from Penn Central’s bankruptcy in 1970 to Russia’s default in 1998. But the Goldman advantage comes from an ability not only to climb off the canvas but to thrive in the face of adversity.
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At long last, there may be a serious investigation into the mortgage mess — the kind that results in clarity as well as big fines and maybe even accountability.
Gretchen Morgenson reported in The Times on Tuesday that Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, wants to discuss mortgage operations during the housing bubble with executives of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He has also requested documents and information from the banks, examined material given to his predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, and studied issues raised in lawsuits against the banks.
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The day of reckoning is fast approaching for the nation’s biggest banks.
Several high-profile investigations, including one by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and another by the Justice Department, could hit banks with massive penalties for their role in the mortgage meltdown.
Sources told The Post that Schneiderman will launch an investigation in the next few weeks into Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with other financial players down the road.
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Could it be that some of the management missteps that dogged Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) through the financial crisis resulted from the firm’s long but awkward transition from a private partnership to a publically traded company? After going public, the partnership culture slowly diminished even as the transparency demands on Goldman Sachs and all public companies increased.
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Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate investigative subcommittee, said there was “real hope” law enforcement authorities would act on his panel’s report accusing Goldman Sachs of misleading investors and Congress.
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Matt Taibbi argues forcefully in Rolling Stone this month that, following indicting Senate hearings, executives at Goldman Sachs deserve to go on criminal trial for their part in the financial crisis.
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Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer who labeled Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” in one of the defining stories of the financial collapse, has written another article on the Wall Street firm.
This one is potentially more devastating.
Taibbi argues that Goldman Sachs executives lied when they testified in front of Congress in the aftermath of the crisis. Unlike other commentators who grouse about how Wall Street execs should be tossed in jail, Taibbi actually provides specifics. He takes quotes from some of the Goldman execs who testified, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and CFO David Viniar, and then juxtaposes them with what he believes to be the truth at the time.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is seeking money to bankroll fledgling hedge funds, its second attempt since 2008 to break into a business now dominated by Blackstone Group LP, according to three people with knowledge of the plan.
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In a break with Wall Street tradition, the Rochedale Securities research analyst issued a very rare sell rating last week — on Goldman Sachs, no less.
Analysts live or die by their access to corporate managements, and corporate managements, like the army in Catch-22, want to be liked. And they like to have their analysts embedded. Like journalists covering a war by traveling with the U.S. army, the analyst at the CEO’s table gets a ringside seat on the corporate story. And also like the reporter, the analyst only gets to see what his hosts want to show him.
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Censorship
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UPDATE: Great news. We don’t always see eye-to-eye with Google, but we’re on the same team this time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just came out swinging against PROTECT IP, saying, “I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems.” And then he went even further.
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ORIGINAL: We knew that members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill — which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter — but we never expected it to be this atrocious. Last year’s bill has been renamed the “PROTECT IP” Act and it is far worse than its predecessor. A summary of it is posted below.
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Privacy
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The opinion was published by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. The Article 29 group is part of the justice division of the European Union, and is formed by a representative in charge of data protection (privacy) in each EU member state. When the Article 29 group puts out an opinion, its recommendations can be followed by either individual EU states or the EU itself.
The conclusions of the opinion aren’t law; they become law only if the EU itself or EU member states choose to pursue the recommendations in the opinion. The group has been influential in the past. It was the Article 29 group, for example, that ultimately set limits on how long search engines should be retaining their search data.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A major new independent report to the UK Prime Minister on his country’s intellectual property laws is out. Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth could hardly make its position clearer: the UK has lost its way when it comes to copyright policy.
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Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a “disastrous precedent” for freedom of speech.
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On the substance, the experience of the past five years has been marked by the central role of the Prime Minister on all key policy decisions. On copyright, it was Prime Minister Harper that mandated the digital lock approach in both Bills C-61 and C-32. On telecom, it was Harper that shuffled Maxime Bernier out and Jim Prentice in to facilitate a spectrum auction that was far more interventionist (set aside, roaming) than Bernier wanted. On Internet access, it was the PMO – not Clement – that first confirmed the desire for change on usage based billing.
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This is from Access Copyright’s “new and improved” (and, as of now, even less informative than before) website.
Access Copyright is an aggressive Canadian copyright collective that, despite its name, effectively restricts and charges for “access” to literary and artistic works.
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On 20 April, Brazil’s Ministry of Culture announced the schedule (in Portuguese) for the country’s copyright law reform. It will be accepting comments on the draft bill until the 30th of May. Between 1 June and 14 July, the Ministry will implement modifications into the draft bill, send it to the federal government’s Inter-Ministerial Group on Intellectual Property (GIPI) for its assessment, suggestions, and amendments. Finally, on the 15th of July, the Minister of Culture will send the final version to the President’s Office – which will then be responsible for forwarding it to Congress.
NASA Space shuttle endeavour launch amazing view from plane window
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 1:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: SUSE is maintaining Mono intrusions and AttachMSFT maintains its proprietary software status by shelving SUSE
EARLIER this month Glyn Moody thought that SUSE would be sold. It still can happen. Right now AttachMSFT is separating SUSE from the company, detaching it and putting it in Germany. An AttachMSFT executive “Takes Control of SUSE Linux” following the departure of key people like Rex. The new manager is not FOSS-savvy as AttachMSFT is a proprietary software company (with the intention of keeping that way). Is he a liquidator? The editor of The H (pro-SUSE publication) believes that the new manager is “very prominent”, but this does not say much about his commitment to freedom (if any). That’s the currency in a lot of the GNU/Linux world. To quote the piece:
Attachmate’s SUSE division has confirmed, as The H reported three weeks ago, that Nils Brauckmann is the new head of the freshly created business unit which will be headquartered in Nuremberg. For the first time, The H talked with Brauckmann about his new position and how the changes in the SUSE division will affect openSUSE. The H pointed out to Brauckmann that there was only one mention of openSUSE in the press release on SUSE and that might be taken to mean that the open source version of SUSE Linux was being downgraded.
Here is the press release about the shakeup at management level (lots of coverage ensued [1, 2]), which probably leaves quite a few Novell/SUSE managers out of work. Here is another article about Nils Brauckmann — one that says AttachMSFT is a “legacy software lover”:
Legacy software lover Attachmate has put one of its own long-time executives in charge of what was formerly Novell’s SUSE Linux operation and will focus that unit on serving Linux customers and growing Linux business.
Attachmate has tapped Nils Brauckman, formerly vice president of sales and marketing for the company’s EMEA region, to be president and general manager of the SUSE business unit. Markus Rex, who was a vice president of engineering at the original SUSE Linux AG back in the late 1990s and who became the company’s chief technology officer and eventually was general manager of Novell’s Open Platform Solutions group, which included the SUSE Linux and related businesses, left Novell as it was being acquired by Attachmate; Brauckmann did not know what Rex’s employment plans were.
Here is a sister site remarking on what it calls out by writing:
Sweeping changes blow through Novell’s board
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Bob Flynn will lead the firm as president and general manager and oversee its move back to its Utah headquarters. Joining him are Dave Wilkes, who is VP for engineering, and Eric Varness, who is VP for product management and marketing. We’ll expect to hear a lot from him.
Novell’s friend, Joe the VAR Guy, is optimistic:
SUSE is a new business unit focused on Linux. Nils Brauckmann, a 20-year industry veteran with both Attachmate and Novell heritage, leads the SUSE organization. The VAR Guy’s Spin: According to SEC documents, Attachmate originally did not bid on SUSE as part of the proposed Novell acquisition. So The VAR Guy will be watching to see how Attachmate manages the SUSE business going forward. This could definitely be a growth unit…
So, as expected, SUSE is being separated from the rest [1, 2] and the news about it [1, 2] does not really deny the possibility that SUSE will get sold. The project/product still makes the big mistake of supporting Mono, whose patent protection expires for Novell Inc. within half a year.
“Mono is part of the SUSE Linux business,” Brauckmann said.
Brauckmann commented that the goal of the SUSE Linux business is to innovate in the areas that matter to customers.
“So what you saw happening in the last few weeks is we were starting to adjust our investments in Mono to be better aligned with our business,” Brauckmann said. “Unfortunately that resulted in some layoffs.”
Though Attachmate has laid off a number of Mono developers, Brauckmann said that SUSE Linux will continue to support Mono.
The worst thing about it is that it helps contaminate other GNU/Linux distributions because it develops around the GNOME desktop (here is Uwe’s take on SUSE Manager). It’s not a OpenSUSE/volunteer work, this is the activity of paid developers a lot of the time.
In other news, Novell (AttachMSFT) has more proprietary software for SUSE. It does not seem like AttachMSFT has any intention of directly supporting Free/open source software. Bad sign… █
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Posted in BSD, FUD, GPL, Microsoft at 12:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Free/open source software which can be converted into proprietary is said to be preferred by enterprises, based on proprietary data from a proprietary software firm headed by a Microsoft veteran
We have seen it all before. Microsoft-friendly firms like Black Duck (created by a Microsoft guy) tell us that the GPL is in trouble while saying good things about Microsoft’s replacements for the GPL after a special Microsoft arrangement; Meanwhile, OpenLogic, which is headed by a Microsoft guy, continues telling us that GPL violations are so very commonplace, scary, etc. and now they say that enterprises do not like the GPL (they try to soften the FUD using a comparison). Here is their latest press release which advocates more BSD-style licensing over GPL. “So considerations around choosing an open source license that will further open source adoption remain important,” they say. They also sell FUD around licensing. Another such company, Protecode, has this new press release about its proprietary software. The whole thing just doesn’t smell like Free software at all; rather, it is proprietary and it continues to portray the GPL as a threat to businesses, which it obviously is not. Many of the most popular packages out there (WordPress, Drupal, Linux, etc.) are GPL-licensed and it is working pretty well for everyone.
The BSD-style licences are mostly useful for one type of business: proprietary. Several years ago, code that I wrote and published under the GPL (and got about 100,000 downloads) was relicensed “BSD” without my permission really. I was given the option to either not publish it or relicense it as BSD. Now it can be exploited by companies whose behaviour I do not endorse — companies that harm my freedom (using my code that I wrote). Remember that Apple and Microsoft exploited a lot of BSD-licensed code, which became proprietary. They don’t really like to talk about it, unless they spin that as “supporting” open source (or “leveraging”, but never “exploiting” or “ripping off”). What ever happened to KHTML? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Windows at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Usage trends, notably mobility and compactness, drive hardware changes, which in turn leave Microsoft Windows in the innovator’s dilemma, inevitably resulting in its demise
ARM has been causing Intel a lot of trouble. AMD too cannot be enjoying it. A lot of the devices sold today (largely Linux-based) no longer run on this aging architecture of theirs. Vista 8 has been hailed as the mythical operating system that would run on ARM, but just to explain how much of a vapourware/hype it really is, consider the fact that Vista 8 has no useful plans for third-party developers. The monocultural and binary culture of Microsoft is killing its business and this one news article says: “You won’t see the desktop version of Photoshop or Firefox or Chrome or World of Warcraft on your Windows 8 ARM device, either — not unless there’s enough adoption to justify the expense of compiling an entirely new build; and who knows whether ARM chips are powerful enough to run applications that are usually found on x86 computers?”
To clarify, it’s a proprietary software issue, as the source code is not available. Debian, by contrast, does not have such a problem.
Will from our IRC channels wrote that “Windows on ARM will not run legacy software: Microsoft has promised their Office suite on ARM, but nothing more. Ok, so explain to me why anyone would chose Windows on ARM, which will NOT have any of the legacy software that keeps Windows on life support these days, over some version of Linux on ARM, in which you have a wealth of free software only a recompile away?”
Here is another article about this:
Microsoft may be porting Windows 8 to the ARM architecture, but the general manager of Intel’s software and services group insists she’s not losing any sleep over a bruising battle in a more-competitive arena. At least when it comes to PCs.
Speaking on Tuesday at Intel’s Investor Meeting 2011 in Santa Clara, California, Renée James pointed out that the next version of Windows – popularly known as Windows 8 – will be available in versions for both x86 and ARM. There will be a “Windows 8 traditional”, she said, that will run on x86 chips and handle “legacy applications”, meaning existing x86-based Windows apps, and there will be a separate version of the OS that runs on ARM. Windows 8 traditional, she explained, will include a “Windows 7 mode”.
Mr. Pogson says that Microsoft is dying because the lock-in is dying. People can now buy Android devices.
The monopoly has relied on retail lock-in for decades. It’s gone. It’s dead. These small, not-so-cheap computers are flying off retail shelves as fast as they can be stocked and there is increasing growth rate…
Suffice to say, Microsoft has resorted to patent litigation against Linux because it cannot conceive or imagine any other ways to win (which it won’t). █
“Gates’s refusal to adopt Adobe’s technology had something to do with money—Gates was not feeling cash rich in 1984—but it had even more to do with Gates’s persistent delusion that Windows be like the Mac.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux on a stick promises to revolutionise low-cost computing
Linux has a reputation for being available in many shapes and sizes, but now there is a version of Linux that promises to beat all-comers on both size and price. The new Linux PC, created by UK game developer David Braben, is not much larger than a thumb, but packs enough power to replace a lightweight laptop.
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Unless you’re a hardcore gamer like me, you’ve probably never heard of David John Braben. Even among gaming circles, he’s no Sid Meier.
But he has worked on some mighty impressive titles, including the classic trading sim, “Elite.” In more modern times, he’s worked on “Roller Coaster Tycoon 3” and games based on the lovable Wallace and Gromit.
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Late in 2009, some Dell engineers got the company aboard the Chrome OS bandwagon at a very early stage. The group released a Chromium OS build for Dell’s Mini 9 and Mini 10V netbooks at a time when the only way for others to play with the nascent operating system was to build it from scratch on a 64-bit Linux rig. Now, more than 18 months later, the image has been updated. If you own a Dell Mini 9 or 10V, head on over to the Dell FTP server and download a copy of its May 13th Chromium OS build.
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Desktop
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According to a report from the team behind the web site monitoring service Pingdom, Europe leads the way for desktop Linux. The team analysed data collected from web statistics site StatCounter between February and April and published information about the popularity of desktop Linux in different countries.
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Server
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Over a 12-month period, the Sapiens team will port the current platform for the Allianz Suisse pension system from the mainframe to Linux, and upgrade the database to UDB on Linux.
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Kernel Space
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It seems as time goes by the Linux Kernel is supporting more hardware and delivering more functionality. This is great but it introduces the problem of bloat. Bloat is bad but the fact of the matter is bloat cannot be avoided although it can be reduced.
Distribution vendors are the ones responsible for including more or less bloat in their Kernels and unfortunately the current trend is to simply include as much as possible without any thought whatsoever.
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Applications
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Fortunately, MiniTunes is in very early stages of development and will hopefully gain momentum as more and more people get to know it. I bet it will get better and better, even if it is a great audio player already!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Steel Storm Burning Retribution has largely stayed under the radar despite being released across multiple operating systems. The indie shoot’em-up received some attention for its simultaneous release on Windows, Mac, and Linux (from the Linux community, as you probably guessed), and it’s available on Steam, but it seems that most computer gamers have yet to hear about it. Being someone who never quite forgot Raptor: Call of the Shadows and who has always secretly wanted to see it updated, I was more than happy to give this new game a shot.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Something very interesting and potentially controversial is going on in the GNOME project. In an email to the GNOME mailing list, Jon McCann said that GNOME should focus on supporting on only support for Linux and drop the support for the other operating systems such as BSD, Solaris and Unix.
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Take this one with a pinch of hearty pinch of salt for now, but, in a post to the GNOME Developer Mailing List, Jon McCann – a tour de force in the GNOME world and pioneer of GNOME Shell itself – has urged that GNOME not only become an OS, but forgo keeping support for other non-Linux operating systems such as BSD, Solaris and Unix in the process.
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One of the mailing list messages making the rounds on the Internet today is concerning the GNOME project and whether they should no longer concern themselves with supporting non-Linux operating systems.
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Red Hat Family
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Attendees at last week’s Red Hat Summit said that they are evaluating Red Hat’s latest virtualization products, but production deployments are scarce.
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Red Hat has announced its global customer portal has been recognized as a top support website by the Association of Support Professionals. The 14th Annual Ten Best Web Support Sites competition illustrates the excellence in online support and service.
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Fedora
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Today, it become clear that Fedora 15 will be released on May 24th 
. It is an interesting release, specially as the first official Linux distribution coming with GNOME 3. Besides, it comes with a number of interesting features including (but not limited to): KDE 4.6, systemd, power management enhancements, Robotics Suite, Retrace Server, Better SPICE support, Dynamic Firewall and GDB 7.3. You can find the complete list of new features at Fedora 15′s Feature Page.
I have tried Fedora 15 since its Alpha release, and started using more seriously since the first test compose of the final release. I generally really like this release, however it has a number of issues too because of the arrival of the new GNOME 3. Let’s start with the annoying parts first!
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Several exciting announcements came out of the Fedora project today, the most exciting of which is that the Fedora Go / No-Go meeting resulted in a Go. In addition, the new Contributor Agreement was finalized and posted. A newish community project made its existence widely known as well.
After the Go / No-Go meeting yesterday an announcement went out to the Fedora Developer Announce mailing list that version 15 “is declared GOLD!” A Release Readiness meeting will take place Thursday to make sure the release is coordinated and that all teams are in agreement and ready for the release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Over the last few months there has been some concerned feedback in some parts of the community about how Ubuntu is focused more and more on attracting new users to Ubuntu by providing a streamlined and simplified user experience. Much of this is being achieved with Unity; a new desktop interface delivered in Ubuntu 11.04, which will continue to be refined and improved upon based on user testing and feedback.
One key piece of feedback from some Unity users was a concern around the lack of configurability in Unity, and a feeling that it is a little too simple and does not expose enough of the system, for which many more expert Ubuntu users enjoy.
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As far as Shuttleworth’s comments about the desktop go, Unity–as long as you have the hardware to run it properly–has mostly gotten good reviews and is credited for bringing Ubuntu more in line with other, competitive graphical operating systems.
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Many long term Ubuntu users have been quite critical towards Ubuntu’s new Unity interface. Unity has its share of issues which Canonical is hopeful of rectifying by the next major release, Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. In the mean time, if you are not at all able to adjust with the revamped albeit buggy Unity desktop, there are a bunch of absolutely awesome Ubuntu based distros which runs on other interfaces like KDE, XFCE, LXDE etc. Here is how you install each of them as a different session in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.
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When Intel released their “Sandy Bridge” processors in early January with next-generation graphics, the Linux support was widely criticized as although they had been working on the open-source Linux driver for nearly one year at that time, it wasn’t a pleasurable “out of the box” experience and building open-source graphics drivers on Linux can be a real pain. With Ubuntu 11.04, which was released at the end of April, this “Natty Narwhal” release still largely misses the Sandy Bridge support train.
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Every 6 months the Ubuntu journey starts anew. Those of us entering yet another cycle assume that this all makes sense to the outside world but I like to post up dates on the wall in the office and write a blog post to give those new to the project, and some not so new, a handy reminder of the major milestones in each cycle.
Each release that we create has a cycle with certain key milestones in it. These milestones are broadly agreed before the previous release is even out the door and are almost always an exact copy of what came in the previous release. The schedule for our next release 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot can be found by following this handy link to the Ubuntu wiki.
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What is going to be in Ubuntu 11.10? Conclusions were drawn after much heated discussions and debates at the Ubuntu Developer’s Summit at Budapest. The centre of attraction of these discussions was the status of default applications that should be included and possibly excluded in the new version. Those that were shown the pink slip include Evolution, GMD and PiTiVi. Those which got included are Thunderbird, Chrome and LMD. Certain old warhorses will continue to stand strong in the new version such as LibreOffice. Now the developer community is expected to debate on these in the coming months. Here is our take on the whole thing.
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Jono Bacon has come up with a really interesting ideas, in a blog post called Creating An Ubuntu Power User Community which describes Jono’s passion for creating a community of super power using.
I’m concerned the initiative won’t work without some time and effort put behind the new group to prime the pump. Is there the time to dedicate to this? and importantly is this a Canonical sponsored idea (where Jono will have time during office hours to work on it) or would it be a hobby which may fall by the wayside?
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, joined The GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of an open source In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform.
Canonical has joined to bring its new IVI-focused products to the GENIVI Alliance members and to announce its intention to build a new GENIVI compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix.
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2 months ago, I wrote about my experience with Unity in Natty. At that point, it was far from suiting my use-case, but yet, I somehow felt positive about its future and I kept using it. What was troubling me then was the release schedule. With all the remaining crashers and feature gaps 8 weeks before the long fixed release date, I had serious doubts about the final state of Unity in Natty. Now that it (Natty) has been released, and that developers spent a week at UDS and are now either taking some days off or writing blueprints, it’s a quiet period with almost nothing moving, a good time to see what has been achieved.
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Over my past few years involved in the Ubuntu Community, I have noticed an interesting trend. We are really good at spotting and vocalising problems. This in itself is not a bad thing. In fact it is good to spot problems. It is how we can make our contributions to the Open Source world better. We find the problems.
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Events
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Berlin is a great location for the Linuxtag, it’s always nice to come there. Just have a look at the photo: The boosters are getting hip! Nearly the complete boosters team was there to meet, be available at our booth for questions and take part at the talks. With over 10.000 attendees it’s the biggest event of this kind, and you can be sure to always meet some well known faces of the openSUSE community there.
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On that last note, I’d like to publicly ask Canonical and especially Mark to deeply consider getting rid of the Copyright Assignment for the Software Center. It is a blocking issue for real collaboration and as you consider it Bug #1 to get rid of MS’ majority market share, why not put your money where your mouth is and work with the other distributions to do something about that?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The time for excuses has passed so I’ve walked away from Firefox and found a new love in Google’s Chrome.
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Programming
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Go Language
DDJ: Skipping several decades of work, let’s speak about Go. I was just at the Google I/O Conference, where it was announced that Go will be supported on the Google App Engine. Does that presage a wider adoption of Go within Google, or is it still experimental?
KT: It’s expanding every day and not being forced down anybody’s throat. It’s hard to adopt it to a project inside of Google because of the learning curve. It’s brand new and there aren’t good manuals for it, except what’s on the Web. And then, of course, its label of being experimental, so people are a little afraid. In spite of that, it’s growing very fast inside of Google.
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Science
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A single interneuron controls activity adaptively in 50,000 neurons, enabling consistently sparse codes for odors. Neural codes could in principle take many forms, but in regions forming bottlenecks for information flow (e.g., the optic nerve) or in areas important for memory, sparse codes are highly desirable.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Japan has started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone after the earthquake and tsunami crippled one of the country’s nuclear power plants. 5100 people are being relocated
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Big oil investor, Bill Gates, pushes nuclear power while his home state is polluted by Fukoshima. He would do better cleaning up Hanford.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Trademarks
Byron Sonne leaves courthouse
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, and its affiliate, LPI-Asia Pacific announced new LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) in the region: Beijing Shenghao Boyuan Technology Company of mainland China and Concentrix of the Philippines.
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Step aside, Google Docs, there’s a new JavaScript tour de force in town.
I’m talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser.
The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn’t have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system’s core–2.6.20–runs on the foundation.
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James displayed projections for the server market that show Linux adoption slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share and she made even bolder statements, claiming that most datacenters run Linux, that open source software leads the high performance computing market and that most embedded devices, such as smartphones, run Linux.
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Will 2011 be the year of the Linux desktop? That’s a question some people on the Linux Planet have been asking for a decade, but with new developments in the past week, that dream maybe closer to reality than ever before.
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Server
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BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
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Kernel Space
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It’s been about three weeks since last mentioning the major power consumption problem in the Linux kernel (actually, there’s more than one power regression) and it’s affecting distributions like Ubuntu 11.04. The lack of mentioning the power regression in recent weeks isn’t though because the regressions are addressed, they are still outstanding with the about to be released Linux 2.6.39 kernel.
The power regressions just haven’t been mentioned recently since I’ve been out of the office since late last month due to UDS Budapest, LinuxTag 2011, and beer drinking with Phoronix readers in Bavaria and around Germany. Now that I’m back to the usual workload, I’ve run some more kernel tests to verify the increased power consumption is still there with the latest upstream kernel. Sadly, the issue is still there.
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Applications
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Grab it while it’s hot. Note that you’ll need Zeitgeist 0.8.0 (or later) for it to work. If you’re an Ubuntu user you can get packages for both from our PPA; I’ve also uploaded it to Debian.
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If you’re looking for a simple program that will let you tell your computer “If this happens, do that,” then look no further. In a nutshell, Sentinella lets you monitor your computer’s activity and set limits on what happens so you can automatically execute some function in the background. This approach lets you tap into the working status of your computer’s processors, memory, network interfaces and more.
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Proprietary
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People who focus on minor issues are greatly exercized about the purchase of Skype by Microsoft.
How will this affect the success of Skype’s spyware, they ask? Was it good strategy for one or the other? Did Microsoft pay too much? How does this affect the possible success of this or that other company? Questions whose perspective regards people as nothing more than terrain for these nonhumans to squabble over.
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It’s a lesser known fact, as most don’t talk about it. Most of the free software goodies that you enjoy in your Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux boxes come from the Free Software Foundation — an organization dedicated to keep users free from the clutches of the proprietary companies.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In embedded software programming there’s often the need to use assembly-level instructions to reach all the functionalities of the processing core. But when the developing is done almost exclusively in C, it is sometimes a burden, often an added complexity and possibly a nuisance to code separate assembly files containing the needed functions. Other than that, sometimes the fact that the C code must call the assembly function located in another module is a performance hit that could slow down execution to a level that is not acceptable. The solution that I prefer is using inline assembly inside small C functions, and let the compiler optimize it into my code.
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Wine
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The Wine team has announced the release of development version of Wine, 1.3.20. This release adds the option to clip the mouse inside fullscreen windows.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I used to run a desktop search program called Beagle, to index all my documents, text files, and emails for quick search. It ran unobtrusively in the background.
The KDE 4 developers decided to improve on this, by adding the strigi indexer, integrated with the Nepomuk “semantic desktop.” Alas, “unobtrusive” was not in their mission statement. My desktop spent all day accessing the hard drive, at 100% CPU utilization, and according to the task monitor this activity was all to update Nepomuk’s database. This is probably why my system was so slow.
[...]
Better still, a later comment told me that KDE 3.5 is still alive and well! Since the KDE project dropped 3.5, it was “forked” into a new project called Trinity.
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GNOME Desktop
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Last week I’ve received an email from Bruce Byfield asking a few questions about this project. I’ve replied honestly as I would to anyone, I’ve faced several issues, and it sounded wise to me to hold a bit this. Since the Beta release of Natty that I’m following a technology forum in Portugal (over 150.000 users) and making a few notes on what peoples perceptions are about Unity and Natty.
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That being said, it has to be noted that Arch Linux is not meant for users just migrating to Linux from Windows or MAC OS. That is because Arch Linux is targeted at users or developers who know what they are doing and have at least some experience with Linux.
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A few days ago the Zenwalk project released its Live CD of Zenwalk Linux 7.0. Currently Zenwalk offers the main Xfce edition, a Core edition which foregoes the X windowing system and is intended to be a starting point to building a custom desktop or server system, an edition with Openbox as window manager, an older Gnome version that is still at version 6.4, and the Live CD version of the edition based on the Xfce desktop environment. In this guest post, Bernhard Hoffmann walks us through the Zenwalk Live CD version.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 1 Release Candidate was announced today right on time. Final is expected on June 1, so developers are anxious for final bug reports. They are particularly interested in the upgrade process from Mandriva 2010.x. I tested the upgrade this time, but from Mageia 1 beta 2.
From the beta to the rc, the upgrade process was quick and easy. The installer requires a lot less input than with a full install. As far as I can tell it went off without a hitch. I got a new kernel and new theme. KDE was updated to the latest stable release. NVIDIA drivers were updated and the boot glitch from beta 2 seemed to be cleared up (or rather “nokmsboot” was added to the boot options by default now). All hardware seemed to be supported properly. It could have just been my imagination, but the performance seemed very good, perhaps improved from last release. Even with desktop effects enabled, it just seemed to fly.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that its global customer portal has been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as a top support website in its fourteenth annual “Ten Best Web Support Sites” competition. Red Hat was recognized in the Open Division among five other technology leaders, including Red Hat partners Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard.
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Debian Family
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DebConf10 Final Report is out
The DebConf organization team released the final report of the 2010 Debian Conference, which was held in New York City, USA, at Columbia University. According to the DebConf blog entry, “It’s a 46-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events, funny pictures and so on.” There are two PDF versions of the final report available, which can be downloaded from the DebConf Media website.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Natty aka 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011. The release had several bugs, one being the inability of a user to mount a drive during installation. Which mean that if you are running DLNA servers or if your are using applications which needs access to different partitions during start-up you are in big trouble.
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Canonical considering removing LibreOffice from default CD installer of Ubuntu 11.10
Online sources are reporting that the next edition of Ubuntu might not include LibreOffice by default in the CD installer.
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Flavours and Variants
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As a Linux user I’ve endured a fair amount of jabs on the podcast that I co-host every week. First my microphone sucks, then my levels suck, then my bandwidth sucks. Well, no more. Time to take these freedom-hating fools to school, and what better way to do that than with a 64-bit Linux distribution and a real-time zero latency kernel?
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The 451 Group’s research has previously shown that the benefits of open source software are many and varied and The Future of Open Source Survey highlights the fact that multiple factors are driving the increased adoption of open source software, including freedom from vendor lock-in, greater flexibility and lower cost.
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Sendmail, Inc., the leading provider of message processing appliances and applications for enterprise messaging infrastructures, and the Sendmail Consortium (http://www.sendmail.com/sm/open_source/), today announced the availability of the latest version of the popular sendmail open source MTA (Mail Transport Agent). This new version addresses many of the requests that have been reported by the large community of sendmail open source users and developers around the world.
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Summary: In the past few years, free open source software (FOSS) adoption has enjoyed tremendous growth in the IT industry. In the geospatial arena, growth is evidenced by the popularity of many tools and applications, and the emergence of a vibrant community of developers and users. Ignacio Guerrero, an IT consultant and former software director at Intergraph and Rolta, takes a look at the decision to evaluate and choose FOSS versus proprietary software from the standpoint of a typical GIS program manager.
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North Bridge Venture Partners today announced the results of its annual Future of Open Source Survey. Conducted in partnership with The 451 Group, the 2011 survey involved more than 20 industry collaborators and polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond. The results of the survey, now in its fifth year, reveal that open source is now fully embraced by both the public and private sectors, and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data. Additionally, user confidence in open source continues to grow dramatically, represented by the fact that users are much less concerned with historical impediments to adoption such as licensing or conforming to an organization’s internal policies. Survey responses also show that the future is bright for open source. Emerging technology segments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), private cloud, public cloud, and mobile are driving growth in open source.
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Events
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Filippo Sorbello of the university of Palermo shared his take on how Linux and the mainframe fit together, while Massimiliano Belardi – Sales Specialist at IBM – talked about IBM continued engagement with Linux and providing some case-history details.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Count me among those that have been a bit skeptical about Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle.
You can also (potentially) now tell me that I’m wrong too.
Part of the Mozilla Firefox 5 rapid release cycle involves a regular and routine merge of code from the Aurora development tree to the Beta tree at set intervals.
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SaaS
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Does this mean no-one should use cloud solutions? While there are some extreme voices that assert abstinence, I think that’s an untenable position. Cloud computing offers so many benefits – many resonant with what people have historically sought from software freedom – that it’s sure to be used. Listening to entrepreneurs and investors here at OSBC, there’s no doubt that the future of software has a substantial dimension in the cloud.
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Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance. The flexibility of Linux combined with the seamless scalability of cloud environments provide the perfect framework for processing huge datasets, while eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and custom proprietary software. Nowadays, Hadoop is one of the best choices in open source cloud computing, offering a platform for large scale data crunching.
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C12G Labs announced today the availability of OpenNebulaPro 2.2 for customers and partners with an active subscription to OpenNebula.pro. This is the third major release of the commercially supported, enterprise-ready distribution of the OpenNebula open-source toolkit, which is used by thousands of organizations worldwide.
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Databases
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EnterpriseDB, the largest independent PostgreSQL open source database company, today announced its commitment to support the HP-UX operating environment on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. EnterpriseDB will introduce full support for HP-UX via Postgres Plus Advanced Server in June 2011. A beta version is available for download here.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has announced the development release of VirtualBox. The version 4.0.8 brings numerous bug fixes including enhanced 3D support for Gnome 3. The release fixes a potential crash when resizing the guest window. It also fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15.
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These days I started to see some questions arise here and there, about why we’re not proceeding as fast as we could with the setup of the legal entity, why we sometimes fail to communicate a vision for the project, etc. These are all good questions. Ultimately, we have to react to them by acting on the issues that are raised. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing fast. I hope (I know) we will soon see several announcements pertaining to the community and the project. We’re working hard at making the foundation a reality, but we’re also working hard at securing the Document Foundation’s financial future and at improving our community processes. Questions that arise about these matters are legitimate, and if you feel we’re not answering them, then it means we’re either swamped or are currently not able to answer them (because of various constraints). But we do read them, we do hear them. And they will be answered, either in writing, or in solid fact, usually expressed by an announcement. You can help make many things a reality by contributing to the LibreOffice project. It’s fun, it’s even exhilarating and it’s a formidable human adventure alongside being technically exciting and challenging.
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Funding
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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate has named the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to lead implementation efforts for the five-year, $10 million Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program. The HOST program will investigate open source and open cyber security methods, models and technologies, and identify viable and sustainable approaches that support national cyber security objectives.
“The strategic objective of the HOST program is to lead efforts of discovery and collaboration, seeding development in open source software and practices that produce a measurable impact for government cyber security systems,” said Joshua Davis, associate division head at GTRI’s Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory and principal investigator for the HOST program. “The collaborative nature of open source and open technologies provide unique technical and economic value and opportunities for government users.”
[...]
Open technologies are not a panacea for all challenges, Davis added. HOST will reach out to government, industry, academic and open source community representatives to learn where and how open technologies have been successfully adopted within public and private systems and where the challenges still remain.
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Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures. Kleiner partner Ellen Pao will be joining Datameer’s board. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.
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BSD
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In order to download the magazine you need to sign up to our newsletter. After clicking the “Download” button, you will be asked to provide your email address. You need to verify your email address using the link from the activation email you will receive.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Libidn2 is a free software implementation of IDNA2008. Libidn2 is part of the GNU Libidn project. Libidn2 is in beta testing, but is believed to provide complete IDNA2008 functionality (i.e., both lookup and register).
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Several Open Source German companies cooperate in the newly launched Open Source Integration Initiative (OSII) in order to develop a modular ‘stack’ solution for open source business solutions. The Initiative is supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and backed by Lisog, the largest open source network in the German-speaking world.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Today we are happy to announce that PLoS ONE has published its 20,000th manuscript! We could not have gotten here today without the help and support of our authors, reviewers, academic editors, and the OA community. Thank you for helping us to achieve this incredible milestone!
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Open Hardware
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Aldebaran Robotics is planning to release a significant proportion of its proprietary source code. This was announced at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the details are still far from clear.
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Programming
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Perl 5.14 is now available, marking the first major release of the open source development language since Perl 5.12 in 2010.
The new release provides improved Unicode support and expands IPv6 capabilities. While Perl 5.14 is now generally available, the release follows 12 incremental releases in the development tree.
“Like Linux, Perl follows the even/odd versioning convention that has an odd minor version number [e.g. '13' in 5.13] indicate it is a development release that will become 5.14,” Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState told InternetNews.com. “There were actually 12 releases [through to 5.13.11] for 5.13 that were used to experiment with, test and harden the new features that became part of 5.14.”
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In the last tutorial we created a file using our text editor and saved a function to it. This file was called trivia.py and in it was the module “trivia”. We then started Python in a console and import()ed the trivia module. Once imported, it created a “namespace” and we could access the askQuestion() function from within the trivia namespace by using a dot – trivia.askQuestion(). In order for the module to work properly we had to include an import statement within the module itself so that everything that the module relied upon was imported within the module. We then manually loaded our data from a pickle file we created and, manually, ran the askQuestion() function on the first question in our data store. Finally we added docstrings to the function and the module.
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Health/Nutrition
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The purging of less-profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has been declining for several years and why the number of Americans without coverage reached a record high of nearly 51 million last year. According to the National Small Business Association, the number of small businesses that provide health insurance to their employees fell from 61 percent in 1993 to 38 percent in 2009.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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After reports this week of security forces in Bahrain torturing detainees, particularly medical personnel, Babylon & Beyond spoke with Mohammed Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights who has been working to document human rights abuses in the capital, Manama, and throughout the Gulf nation with international partners such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Last week I wrote here that Scholastic’s coal curriculum distributed to 66,000 fourth grade teachers, was sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, meaning that it somehow failed to mention any of the downsides of coal production: no negative effects of mining and burning coal, no toxic wastes, no lung disease, no greenhouse houses.
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Finance
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With most Asian stock markets rallying overnight with the Shanghai index at a one week high (Indian Sensex in contrast at a fresh 8 week low), commodity prices are bouncing with copper in particular back above $4 and a touch above its 200 day moving average. With respect to Greece, the rhetoric is getting more heated between the ECB and other EU members over what to do next. ECB member Stark said a Greek debt restructuring “would create a catastrophe” as he believes that it “would wipe out part or all the capital of the Greek banks.”
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The ministers from the 17 nations that use the euro endorsed former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Inteernational, Mario Draghi, 63, to take over as head of the European Central Bankin November, Luxembourg’s Jean- Claude Juncker, who leads the group, told reporters in Brussels late yesterday. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet’s eight-year term ends on Oct. 31.
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In its previous response to us, the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 – hence he was not there when the controversial Greek “debt swaps” were arranged.
We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The efforts of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major websites to tailor our online experiences to our supposed interests can affect our ability to get a view of the world the way it really is.
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Civil Rights
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The fact that they were exempt from from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill never prevented Wisconsin’s firefighters or police from stepping up to protest Walker’s union-busting agenda. Walker said the unions were exempt from the bill not for political reasons but for reasons of public safety (strikes and burning houses are not a good combination), but the police and firefighter’s unions knew that their rights too could soon be on the chopping block.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Canada’s new copyright reform legislation will look a lot like its earlier versions, Conservatives say.
Tory MP Dean Del Mastro said Tuesday the copyright modernization bill the Harper government pledged to pass in its election platform would essentially be a duplicate of the previously introduced and controversial Bill C-32.
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The much-anticipated UK Independent Review of IP and Growth, typically referred to as the Hargreaves report, was released this morning. The report focuses on how intellectual property laws can stifle innovation and urges the UK government to enact reforms that remove legal barriers to economic growth (James Boyle, who served as expert advisor to the review, gives his take here). For example, it notes:
Because IPRs grant a form of monopoly, an overly rigid and inflexible IP framework can act as a barrier to innovation. When a firm has acquired exclusive rights over its innovative technology or content, other firms will be able to learn from that technology or see the content, but may be unable to use them for further innovation unless licensing can be agreed. IPRs can constrain third parties wishing to access or innovate on top of this protected knowledge or content, with potentially serious economic and social costs.
FFXI – Linux gameplay through Wine (Shadow Lord)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Interesting choice of blog theme
Check out Microsoft’s OSS blog theme:
We’ve added the Zune bit for comparison.
Microsoft must be hoping that Linux and FOSS will suffer the same fate as Zune. █
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