Posted in Site News at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Angela George
Summary: What it would take to win the battle for GNU/Linux
Techrights has been relatively quiet recently not due to my other duties. Slowly but surely, with help from volunteers (of which I am one*), the site keeps growing behind the scenes and it attracts more visitors than before (see the Spanish portal of Techrights for example of quiet growth that does not make the front page). If the site does not post many new stories, then it’s because there is not much FUD to counter. Novell is gone, Mono has gone underground, and Free software continue to grow without too much fanfare (it is no longer the underdog; just witness the growth of Apache, the expansion of Android, GNU/Linux approaching 100% market share on the world’s top 500 computers).
The day that Techrights becomes unnecessary is the day that we win. Groklaw argued something along these lines way back in April, correctly noting that now it’s down to software patents, which we must crush by changing popular vote, explaining to people the consequences, and naming the perpetrators. Today too we will focus on the issue of software patents, which is the #1 issue facing Linux/Android and by extension Free software. Let’s put an end to software patents and leave the likes of Microsoft without a cash cow that subsidises lobbyists, bribes, and general misconduct. Freedom breeds better civilisation. █
____ * As of days ago, we no longer run any Ad Bard ads to compensate the Web host, either. The site is running at the expense of our time and our pockets.
Resumen: Los monopolistas como Microsoft, con sede en los Estados Unidos, tratan de traer las patentes de software a través del Atlántico, por lo que Techrights ofrece un resumen de noticias y un resumen general de tendencias a tener en cuenta.
AQUÍ en Techrights que hemos estado cubriendo la situación de las patentes de software en Europa[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Software_Patents_in_Europe] casi desde los albores de este sitio web. Siempre se trataba de las patentes de software y más gente comienza a entender la importancia de este tema cuando se enteran de que Microsoft hace dinero de los teléfonos Android de HTC[http://techrights.org/2011/05/27/linux-swpats-own-cash/]. Además, como un lector nos muestra esta semana[http://www.htc.com/sea/product.aspx], “HTC pagó por las patentes y comenzó a utilizar aspx” ¿Puede alguien verificar esto? La historia de Netcraft no va hacia atrás[http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.htc.com]. Que ya sabemos acerca de la presión de Microsoft en Intel para utilizar Windows en sus servidores, porque hemos encontrado documentos internos al respecto[http://techrights.org/2009/01/12/bill-gates-jihad-vs-linux/]. Microsoft está incluyendo este tipo de acuerdos, por lo que los acuerdos condicionada a la migración y relaciones públicas para Microsoft.
De todos modos, para aprender acerca de grupos de presión de Microsoft por las patentes de software en Europa, hay que estar familiarizado con los poderes que utilizan para la presión, por ejemplo, Asociación para la Tecnología “Competitiva” ACT[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Association_for_Competitive_Technology]. Microsoft tiene maneras de tratar de presentarse como “europeo” y también el uso ‘Euro-lavado’ a las empresas que impulsan su programa allí. Hemos cubierto en su mayoría estos en 2008 y 2009, por lo que aconsejamos a los lectores a mirar hacia atrás (nos esforzamos para disminuir la repetición). Está claro que Microsoft es un componente importante de este problema, otros que son Siemens y Nokia. No debería ser sorprendente que quienes están a favor de las patentes de software son los gigantes. Los monopolios de patentes hacen que los gigantes sean más fuertes y las únicas entidades pequeñas a las que tal sistema podría ser de utilidad son los trolls de patentes y “empresas especializadas en los llamados” abogados de propiedad intelectual”.
El año pasado en los Estados Unidos, Bilski y su colega rompió el sistema de los EE.UU. por la legitimación de las patentes de software aún más, al menos sobre la base de un análisis de personas (no concluyente). Se lo llevaron todo el camino hasta la SCOTUS (Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos), cuyas resoluciones sobre el tema de las patentes han sido bastantes terribles[http://techrights.org/2011/06/02/scotus-vs-freedom-labour/] recientemente[http://techrights.org/2011/06/10/fine-affecting-ooxml/]. SCOTUS no se merece un respeto ciego porque las leyes también son relativas y dependen de los principios que se adopte en una cultura civilizada. No hay justicia absoluta o la definición de “civilizados”, la tendencia es ‘incorporado’.
La Patente Bilski[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Bilski_Case] fue clasificado como perteneciente a la categoría de negocios y los métodos de este nuevo informe[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576373461579770054.html] del Wall Street Journal dice que las patentes sobre estas estrategias fiscales (emulando a lápiz y papel métodos) pronto podría ser declaradas ilegales:
La Patente de EE.UU. número 7.698.194 no es una ingeniosa máquina nueva o un tratamiento de gran avance médico. Es un método de análisis de los impuestos asociados a planes de ahorro para la universidad.
Es también una de las 144 estrategias fiscales patentado y 162 solicitudes pendientes, a partir de finales de mayo, los preparadores de impuestos que dicen que han cargado su trabajo e hizo más difícil para que los ciudadanos pagan sus impuestos.
Grupos de consumidores y fiscales han impulsado desde el año 2007 para obtener este tipo de patentes prohibidos, y sus esfuerzos están a punto de llegar a buen término este mes. La Cámara de Representantes tiene previsto votar cuando regrese de su receso de esta semana en una importante revisión del sistema de patentes que efectivamente prohíbe patentar las estrategias fiscales.
Aunque no hay esperanza de que la USPTO se reforme (de acuerdo con reacción negativa del público), las cosas no están mejorando en Europa. Recientemente, por ejemplo, la señora Wilcox decidió dar paso a un esquema [1[http://techrights.org/2011/06/01/wilcox-should-learn-from-eu/], 2[http://techrights.org/2011/05/31/nyls-idea-re-swpats-in-uk/], 3[http://techrights.org/2011/05/31/patent-monopolies-in-the-eu/]] que pueden ayudar a legitimar / cambiar la norma de patentes de los EE.UU. (incluso en Europa) y para citar[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/06/peer-to-patent] a la clase de falacias que se repiten: [a través de Benjamin Henrion[http://twitter.com/zoobab/statuses/78455225215762433]]: la baronesa Wilcox, la ministro de la propiedad intelectual, dijo: “El piloto dará a los expertos la oportunidad de formular observaciones sobre las solicitudes de patentes y compartir su experiencia vital antes de que las patentes se conceden. También significa que las invenciones ya conocidas en la comunidad en general se filtran con mayor facilidad. Peer To patente es un paso adelante para apoyar el crecimiento mediante el refuerzo de la base de patentes en el que las empresas innovadoras de crecimiento”.
Las empresas innovadoras en realidad no requieren patentes. Busque en Google para un ejemplo reciente. Mientras tanto, en Europa también tenemos la preocupación por el lobby de RAND (Licencias “Razonables y No-Discriminatorias”) a la Comisión [1[http://techrights.org/2011/06/01/reputation-uspto-disintegrating/], 2[http://techrights.org/2011/06/09/needing-neelie-back/]]. Benjamin destaca esta nueva página que indica más de lo mismo. RAND no es compatible con el software libre, pero la Comisión está a la vigilancia de RAND, no obstante, tras la presión de los grupos frontales de Microsoft. Esto se refiere a la primera cuestión que hemos cubierto. Lo más importante, sin embargo, es la tendencia actual de la patente de la UE, que pretende hacer de los litigios de mayor escala más fácil y también puede propagarse las patentes de software de tal forma que trascienden las fronteras con la mera firma de un documento/s (tratado que sobrepasa la ley mediante una ‘hack’). Considere el hecho de que en los Estados Unidos una patente que era propiedad[http://techrights.org/2011/06/02/lodsys-and-intellectual-ventures/] del troll de patentes de Microsoft (Intellectual Ventures[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Intellectual_Ventures]) es objeto de un litigio[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/lodsys_hit_with_pantent_invalidation_suit/] que buscan su anulación. Al mismo tiempo vemos que las empresas se convierten un montón de patentes maduras para ser recolectado por los trolls[http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Nortel+patent+bonanza/4916085/story.html]. Para ellos, las patentes son sólo medios para llevar a juicio, con abogados especializados en patentes. En lugar de crear una industria que innova, patentes amplian una industria que litiga. Considere la posibilidad de esta empresa que es un “especialista en patentes de software, derechos de autor y secretos comerciales.” El artículo fuente está aquí (Nueva York blogs Times[http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/the-story-under-mrs-landmans-umbrella/]). ¿Qué valor en realidad pueden empresas como estas traer a la economía? Aquí está en su contexto:
Andrew Schulman no lo era. Él es un lector de Lens en San Francisco, un fotógrafo y – más importante para los propósitos de este post – un abogado especializado en patentes de software, derechos de autor y secretos comerciales.
¿Ahora quieren patentar paraguas también? Ni siquiera es una idea aún sin explorar previamente. Hace una década escribí en mi PDA una idea que tenía de un paraguas. Muchos de las llamadas “invenciones” solicitan patentes en que no sólo se ha pensado de antes, pero se han aplicado también. Todo este asunto de las patentes sólo añade complejidad al sistema y frena su avance.
Para resumir algunos de los puntos clave, Europa se enfrenta a nuevas amenazas de grupos de presión (por ejemplo, para RAND), la llamada “unificación” (que en realidad puede ser la importación de las patentes de software), y un intento de inicio de la premisa de que el problema es “calidad” de las patentes en lugar de su tipo (por ejemplo, de impuestos sobre el software). Todos debemos mantenernos vigilantes. Es posible que las patentes de software se mueren en los Estados Unidos -ojalá- antes de que puedan extenderse a otros países como un tipo de virus. █
Software updates are one of the main areas of IT, mainly because of continuous security and enhancement updates. Microsoft usually releases a huge number of security updates each month, and even though they get criticised for this, GNU/Linux has a high number of updates as well, particularly Fedora which is treated as beta or cutting edge versions of free and open source software.
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Also, the RPM system can provide a complete list of packages installed with the command “rpm -qa”. And, logs of the RPM installation process are always logged to /var/log/messages. Reporting could be set up to pull this data, however to date I have not discovered a central system for producing these types of reports. This is where the Kace/Dell Kbox steps in and uses a running agent on each client to gather data into a central SQL database.
Alexander Swen is a true Linux evangelist. Since 1996, when he started using Linux-Mandrake on his home computers, he’s been happily converting friends and family to the OS—even getting his parents on board. “I think everyone should use Linux,” he says. “And I want to help promote it any way I can.”
But Alexander wasn’t always a Linux man. In fact, even as he built up his Linux empire at home, he continued to work as a Windows admin up until 2004, when he finally realized he had to make a change. “I had become more and more frustrated by the instability,” he says. “And when a surprise update ended up ruining a working system, I decided that I had to move away from my Windows career—and start working as a Linux admin.”
Under the hood, a Chromebook is a Linux system, customized by Google that runs the Chrome browser as its interface. That’s your desktop–a browser. It’s efficient and I use Chrome exclusively as my browser anyway. So, it’s a natural fit for someone who uses Linux, the Chrome browser and has a keen interest in the Cloud.
IHS iSuppli published the results of a teardown of the 3G version of Samsung’s Chrome OS-based Series 5 Chromebook — which began shipping today for $500 — and estimates the solidly-built notebook cost $334.32 to build. Meanwhile, an eWEEK review of the Wi-Fi only Series 5 was similarly impressed with the hardware, but questioned whether Chrome OS would find many takers.
If you want a Windows laptop, get a Windows laptop. But, if you want an easy-to-use, Web-based laptop, consider getting a Chromebook. So long as you realize that the Samsung Series 5 and its brother from another company, the Acer Chromebook, is not a full-featured Windows or Linux notebook computer you’ll be fine.
So it is that I’m pretty happy with my brand new Samsung Series 5 3G even though CNET gave it a just “ok” rating pending software improvements. While neither Chromebook will be generally available until June 15th, I was able to get my hands on one a week early. I’ve been working with mine for several days now and this is what I’ve found.
The first few Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung feature a clean, clutter free design. Solid black, or black with a white top, and no stickers. A refreshing change from “Intel Inside” and “Made for Windows” stickers that accompany most PC laptops. The Chromebooks look good. The Chromebooks are small and light, and claim battery life between six and eight and a half hours of continual use. They come with standard ports and a webcam, but what is most interesting about the machines is what not listed. Google doesn’t draw attention to the tiny, and extremely fast, SSD hard drive, or the the amount of RAM in the machine, an intentional dismissal of their importance. Plainly said, it doesn’t matter, Chromebooks have speed where it matters, and are meant for only one thing.
With Intel’s top brass bad-mouthing ARM-based servers, upstart server chip maker Calxeda can’t let Intel do all the talking. It has to put together an ecosystem of hardware and software partners who believe there’s a place for a low-power, 32-bit ARM-based server platform in the data center.
To that end, Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, is launching the “trailblazer initiative” – a team of 10 software companies that will support upcoming servers based on Calxeda’s impending ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs
The Calxeda ARM super friends include Autonomic Resources, Canonical, Caringo, Couchbase, Datastax, Eucalyptus Systems, Gluster, Momentum SI, Opscode, and Pervasive.
Canonical is of course, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, which is now first in line as the server operating system of choice for Calxeda ARM-based servers.
Officials with Calxeda, the startup that’s building ARM-based chips for low-power data center servers, announced a “Trailblazer” program designed to create an ecosystem around its technology. But, while Calxeda touted support from Ubuntu Linux sponsor Canonical, among other companies, there’s been no hint from Microsoft that it will create a server edition of its ARM-based “Windows 8.”
Has it really been twenty years? Yes, yes, it has been twenty years since Linus Torvalds announced that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” Twenty years of Linux later, The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, has announced the program for this year’s LinuxCon North America taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
The Linux Foundation has announced its program and schedule for this year’s LinuxCon North America event taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
LinuxCon is the world’s leading conference addressing all matters Linux for the global business and technical communities. LinuxCon includes in-depth technical content for developers and operations personnel, as well as business and legal insight from the industry’s leaders.
The Catalyst 11.6 for Linux build isn’t particularly exciting. Release notes for the 11.6 driver haven’t been made publicly available yet, but if they do emerge, they’ll basically say there’s installer/uninstaller improvements, support for reading the highest available memory clock from AMDCCCLE, and some other minor changes / bug-fixes. That’s about it.
The Boxee development team has announced that it will be bringing the open source version of the Boxee media centre back in line with the version of the software that it has been developing for the Boxee Box by D-Link. For the past eight months, the “downloadable” version of the software – which can run on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Apple TV – has languished at version 0.92 with no updates, while the developers concentrated on the Boxee Box development where the firmware version has seen new features added and bugs fixed.
In May, the company delivered version 1.1 of the firmware version of Boxee, and now, in a post on the Boxee blog, CEO & Co-founder Avner Ronen says that the team hope to have new builds of the open source software available “this fall”. These new builds will include the features that current Boxee Box owners already have, including an updated browser, improved audio and video playback and support for even more content providers.
I didn’t include here applications like GIMP or Krita since they are full-fledged image manipulation applications, not just simple painting programs, nor Scribus or Inkscape since they serve different purposes. This article overviews 7 8 simple drawing applications for both KDE and GNOME.
Oftentimes reminder applications live as add-on apps to much more complex software programs. Email-Reminder is a standalone app that does one thing and does it well. Its way of reminding you of your tasks is by sending you an email at the appointed time. That’s rendered even more effective if you happen to carry email access at all times via a smartphone.
Apache Traffic Server, the high performance caching HTTP/1.1 proxy server, has been updated to version 3.0.0 and is now a 64 bit application. In benchmarks, Apache Traffic Server 3.0.0 has been able to handle 200,000 requests per second, which the developers say is a 277% improvement over version 2.0.
The worst part? Adobe doesn’t even have the gall to respond to their users about the lack of updates.
Flash isn’t the only thing Adobe plans to screw it’s desktop Linux users on though. As of version 2.7 Adobe’s Air technology will no longer support desktop Linux. At least the developers at Adobe labs have the spine to tell us the are dropping support for the Linux desktop with Air instead of just leaving us wondering.
Given the recent popularity of standards-driven HTML5 applications on a variety of platforms, including Windows, iOS, and Linux distributions, it seems pretty silly for Adobe, makers of Flash, to tick off even one set of platform users.
Yet, as Caitlyn Martin pointed out last week, that’s exactly what they may have done. It seems that Abobe’s Flash Player is still not available for 64-bit Linux users, despite promises in 2010 to serve this particular platform.
To Adobe’s credit, Martin’s initial column did illicit a promise from Adobe that they would indeed be getting out a 64-bit Linux product “later this year.” But, really, are we still living in an age where platforms like this have to cajole proprietary vendors to get with the program?
Apparently so. In terms of 64-bit Linux specifically, it used to be a small minority of a small-to-begin-with platform base. But now, as users buy new machines, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to get 32-bit machines. Most new users of any OS want that 64-bit functionality they paid for.
Danger’s fate casts a long shadow today as Microsoft prepares to consummate its $8 billion purchase of the new hotness, Skype, a Luxembourg-based Internet phone service. Although Danger and Skype are decidedly different companies, there are parallels. Both are hyper focused on consumers, and both have a strong startup culture. The similarities make Microsoft’s experience with Danger all the more relevant to its pending assimilation of Skype.
OpenClonk is free and open source successor of German shareware game series Clonk. Clonk, which dates back to 1994 with its first game on MS DOS has quite a dedicated fan following and an extremely popular game modding/extension system.
Maybe I’m discovering boiled water here, but today I stumbled upon a little game. I downloaded it because it was very small, so even if it was bad, I wouldn’t have wasted too much time and space with the download. Its name is Gravitation, and it was released in 2008 (wow! that says how much into gaming I am these days!
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager: cross platform, available as portable and installable software for Windows (9x, 2k, XP, Vista) and Linux x86 and x86-64.
PeaZip is a desktop neutral application.
Here are some more extensions designed to provide a classic style GNOME desktop for GNOME Shell (for the previous GNOME2-like desktop extensions, see this post). The first two extensions are called Reflection and Window List and are created for a Linux distribution called Guadalinex:
After more than 5 months of daily development following the release of 4.2 AV Linux 5.0 is here. This release balances the rock-solid reliability of Debian’s stable ‘Squeeze’ release and fortifies it with some carefully selected Sid and Custom packages to make it a state-of-the-art Multimedia Content Creation Powerhouse. This release will usher in a less frequent annual release cycle and shift the focus from Linux Audio/Video software testing to reliable Linux Audio/Video PRODUCTION. If you are someone who’d rather create content than experiment with alpha/beta software then this release is for you.
It’s that time of the month again. The most noticeable change is Rox now handles the desktop icons and feh displays the desktop wallpaper. These seemed like the best light weight choices in preparation for the new PCManFM when it’s released as stable. Parted was upgraded to 3.0, but GParted is still linked against LibParted 2.4 for now. All fonts should look good in Firefox if you use a language other than US English. A few other useful programs were added like ZFS Fuse, Lilo Setup, Rox Filer, and FixParts.
The theme for v3.7 is improved integrity and interoperability. Tiny Core remains true to size. Currently at 10.3MB! Yet now adds NTFS read support. And seamless NTFS read-write support via extension or installation options. Improved integrity is achieved by better warning messages to prevent misuse of unsupported file systems. Also new are Starter Packs. As installation is typically a one time event. Therefore the GUI installation program and all necessary support extensions are now conviently packaged into a starter pack, install.gz. Same is offered with grub4dos.gz. This has the option to install inside an existing NTFS partition. Our network.gz starter pack, provides all the tools typically needed to get connected, including a tiny wifi manager. And, finally, combining multiple boot images together with starter packs, we offer multicore.iso. This bootable CD image, provides the easiest way yet to install, get connected, and get online.
By most accounts, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware are both solid successes. But can two newer initiatives — namely, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and OpenShift — also gain critical mass, particularly among cloud computing partners? Here are The VAR Guy’s early educated guesses.
For those who are late to the Red Hat story, the company is on track to become the first $1 billion open source specialist within the next year or so. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has successfully pushed beyond traditional servers and is gaining momentum on cloud-centric servers, while JBoss middleware has caught on with sophisticated IT consultants.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $41.30 with current price action closing at just $42.26 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.
Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to announced today that the Fedora 13 (Goddard) Linux distribution will reach end of life (EOL) next Friday, on June 24th, 2011.
Dubbed Goddard, the Fedora 13 operating system was released on May 25th, 2010. It was powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32 and it introduced features such as enhanced init system, topology awareness, color management, SystemTap static probes, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, Nvidia 3D support, and KDE SC 4.4.
At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, last month in Hungary, I was leading a session on application containing and gathered ideas on how to improve the safety of our user’s desktop while still making it easy for app developers.
News on Ubuntu is getting better by the day. The first half of May saw Canonical joining GENIVI Alliance, the reference platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) for opensource products. Canonical will also introduce a new GENIVI compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix.
Other options include Pinguy OS 11.04 and Linux Mint 11 “Katya” GNOME, which I know work well with Hulu and AV by AIM but which won’t be supported for as long.
Imagination Technologies announced it is licensing a new version of its Meta core IP for Linux- and Android-based mobile devices. The Metaflow family of processors combines the Linux-ready Meta Series2 processor IP with the company’s Ensigma UCCP IP for Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and analog and digital TV and radio, says the company.
Known primarily for its Powervr graphics processor intellectual property (IP), Imagination Technologies has been steadily advancing its long-time, Linux-ready, programmable RISC Meta core IP. In November 2009, the U.K.-based firm announced it had begun licensing a Meta Series2 core IP, adding digital signal processor (DSP) functions, support for hardware multi-threaded execution, and hard real-time capabilities.
TiVo Inc. announced a new version of its Linux-based DVR/IP set-top box (STB) called the TiVo Premiere Q — said to enable recording four streams at once while simultaneously transmitting three HD streams to other devices via a LAN. The company also announced its first non-DVR STB, the TiVo Preview, which can be used as a thin client multi-room extension for other TiVo devices.
Kontron announced a machine-to-machine (M2M) development kit that ships with Wind River Linux 4.1. The Kontron M2M Smart Services Developer Kit incorporates Kontron’s nanoETXexpress-TT computer-on-module — which includes a 1GHz Intel Atom E640T — and offers not only gigabit Ethernet but also wireless interfaces including Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and optional 3G/4G cellular.
Sonos is well known for its broad family of high-quality devices capable of playing audio streamed from a variety of Internet and local sources wirelessly — and synchronously — throughout the home. Sonos’s Linux-powered “ZonePlayers” represent the core of its wireless home audio entertainment architecture, as illustrated in the drawing below.
Wireless carrier T-Mobile has entered the group buying market with its own daily deal offering. Called “More for Me,” the nationwide service aggregates deals from such originators as Living Social and Groupon.
The service is available to anyone who owns an Android handset, T-Mobile spokesperson Anna Friedges told the E-Commerce Times — not just T-Mobile subscribers.
Huawei tipped a “MediaPad” tablet running Android 3.x, said to be due June 20 and to be the company’s smallest and lightest offering. Meanwhile, rival Chinese manufacturer Lenovo will release both consumer and enterprise 10-inch Android tablets, under the IdeaPad and ThinkPad brands respectively, says an industry report.
Samsung and American Airlines announced they will deploy 6,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets for premium class, in-flight entertainment on select flights later this year. The roll-out is designed to help promote Samsung’s Android 3.1 tablet in the enterprise market, according to the company.
Riverbed is known in the market as a leading vendor of WAN optimization hardware solutions. Riverbed is also a leading sponsor of one of the most popular open source network applications, the Wireshark packet and network analyzer.
Riverbed’s involvement with Wireshark comes by way of its acquisition of CACE, a technology vendor whose executive team includes the founder of Wireshark, Gerald Combs. Riverbed’s open source networking credibility however goes back even further than the CACE acquisition. Steve McCanne, the CTO of Riverbed is the co-creator of the tcpdump command line packet analyzer.
The ability to support the myriad of mobile devices in a coherent way is a bugbear for mobilising enterprise applications, but one local start up has leveraged open source components to make it all happen without the need for an on-premise server or native app.
Blink Mobile Interactive, based in Kariong on the NSW Central Coast (north of Sydney), has developed a Cloud service that integrates enterprise applications and presents them in the best form-factor for the user’s device – be it an iOS, Android, Symbian or Windows-based handset.
On the eve of the Chromebooks being released to the public, Google has rolled out the next version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 12.
“Wait,” you say, “Didn’t Google just release a new edition of Chrome last month?” Yes, yes they did: Chrome 11 and now they’re back with another one. If you’re a cynic like me, your first thought might have been: “Is there anything new here besides the number? Is there really anything here that demands it be called a major new release?” The answer to those questions is: Yes. Yes, there are sufficient new features in this model for it to be worth given a new number.
As part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development process the beta development channel has been updated with a Firefox release candidate. For detailed information about the changes please visit:
Mozilla is–and deservedly so–widely recognized for defending open web policies and standards, and now, in conjunction with The Barbarian Group, the company is calling for users everywhere to make their “marks” on the open web concept. Mozilla Mark Up is an online project that asks users everywhere to sign their names and contribute their “marks” to an interactive, graphical collection of yes votes in favor of the open web. It’s a small but nicely executed gesture backing important concepts.
In Part One of Scale Fail, I discussed some of the major issues which prevent web sites and applications from scaling. As was said there, most scalability issues are really management issues. The first article covered a few of the chronic bad decisions — or “anti-patterns” — which companies suffer from, including compulsive trendiness, lack of metrics, “barn door troubleshooting”, and single-process programming. In Part Two, we’ll explore some more general failures of technology management which lead to downtime.
The Document Foundation today announced new advisory board members saying it’s a demonstration of wide corporate support. Florian Effenberger said, “its composition shows that LibreOffice is a vendor-neutral, truly-free office suite, and confirms that The Document Foundation has created a solid base to build upon, for the community, for corporations and enterprises, and for adopters and end-users.”
Members include ” Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation.” Representatives from each will serve for one year providing advice and guidance on future
The much-criticized JCP (Java Community Process), which maps out procedures for amending officially sanctioned Java technologies, is set for a face-lift that includes greater transparency and the possible loss of voting privileges for JCP members who disregard their responsibilities.
New procedures are part of the recently introduced Java Specification Request 348. “This JCR — nicknamed JCP.next — proposes a variety of changes to do with transparency, participation, agility, and governance,” JCP said in a document posted on its website on June 8. The document states that JCP chairman Patrick Curran views full transparency of a JCP expert group operations as the most important change introduced by JSR 348. “Many expert groups carry out their business openly over public mailing lists and publicly viewable issue-trackers, and they make public responses to all comments. JCP.next will elevate those recommended practices to mandatory status. The process of recruiting Expert Group members will also be documented for the public eye, ensuring that all applications are considered in a fair way,” JCP said.
If Executive Committee members of the Java Community Process don’t like how Oracle is handling Java and the JCP, then why don’t they just vote no when big Java issues come up? Business reasons are key, but a recent olive branch from Oracle may have helped turn the tide in Oracle’s favor.
First, let’s look at 13-1 vote that approved the release of Java SE 7 this week and see how each member of the 16-member committee voted.
Web, social, search, mobile, and CMS in a single composite platform
Open source CMS company Jahia has unveiled the commercial release of its Jahia 6.5 CMS. The company is hoping to differentiate the new product on the basis of its ability to bridge web, portal, social, search, mobile user experience, and content management with a single composite platform.
Come and get ‘em! GlusterFS 3.2.1 has just been released – it’s a maintenance release with performance enhancements and bug fixes. Packages are available for RHEL, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and source tarball.
After more than two years of development to Horde open source project has released version 4.0 of its integrated groupware and webmail suites.
Back in April the project announced version 4 of the groupware components, but a further two months of development was done to prepare the integrated groupware suite, which also includes a Webmail Edition.
The first public version of the Wakanda open source platform for developing web applications using just JavaScript has now been made available to software developers by global software group 4D.
If you want to make a website go faster, you’ve got a number of options. One of the best and easiest is to place a proxy caching server in front of a website, that accelerates content delivery.
The open source Varnish Cache is one such technology and is deployed on big name websites, including Facebook and Twitter. Varnish Cache 3.0 was officially released today, expanding the technology with the promise of new modularity for the next generation of web acceleration needs.
Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot to favour Microsoft, with which the systems integrator (SI) has a commercial relationship.
“My opinion is that the large systems integrators would not survive a transition to open source in the public sector, for the simple reason that the savings would be enormous,” Mark Taylor told Computer Weekly. “The loss to their revenue would be massive. Their survival depends on there being no successful open source trials.”
A Computacenter spokesman said Taylor’s statement was “factually incorrect and potentially libellous”. Matt Kenny, client director at Computacenter, said: “If it’s right for the council then we’ll use open source software, if it’s not then we won’t.”
Computacenter later claimed the pilot had not been concluded. “Our commitment to Bristol City Council includes maximising the use of open source if it meets their defined business requirements.”.
When you release code under the GNU General Public License (GPL), you undertake a specific set of obligations. Many of these obligations, such as providing a copyright notice and a copy of the GPL version you are using, are relatively simple. However, the obligation to provide source code with the object code is more complex, because you have several choices about how to fulfill it – and the choice you make can cause ongoing problems, especially if you are not set up to administer it.
Python logo As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May’s Python 2.5.6 and last week’s Python 2.6.7 “security fixes only” releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.
Recently, we covered some of the extensive results from the Eclipse Community Survey and Open Source Developer Report, which contains lots of data about open source trends. In this year’s survey, as has been seen in similar surveys recently, mobile applications and cloud computing are clearly on users’ and developers’ minds. Another set of results from this year’s survey is generating discussion online, though, and raising questions about whether the many new organizations and businesses adopting open source software are also giving back to the projects they benefit from. In many cases, it appears that they are not giving back.
Ever wonder what happens to the premiums you pay for your health insurance?
You might be surprised to learn that more and more of the dollars you pay for coverage are being sucked into a kind of black hole.
It doesn’t really disappear, of course. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good — unless, of course, you believe it is to your advantage that it ultimately winds up in the bank accounts of a few investors and insurance company executives, including those who have to power to deny coverage for potentially life-saving care.
If you’ve been paying attention to what health insurance company CEOs have been saying to Wall Street over the past several months, you will know that they are spending more and more of their firms’ cash — which comes from you, of course — to “repurchase” their firms’ stock. And Wall Street absolutely loves that.
The transfer of Medicaid policymaking authority in the committee’s budget bill raises serious constitutional concerns, just as the similar provisions in the budget repair did. By giving so much authority to an unelected official, both versions of this unprecedented transfer of lawmaking authority limit the ability of Wisconsin citizens to have a role in the process. However, in contrast to Act 10, the new bill goes much further in eliminating public involvement since it allows the sweeping grant of authority to be exercised by the DHS Secretary without so much as a single public hearing.
WikiLeaks has released a statement marking six months since Julian Assange was put under house arrest, setting out his defence against sexual assault claims.
“The last thing Haiti needs now is an earthquake,” said a May 25, 2005, cable, written two weeks after a 4.3 magnitude tremor shook Port-au-Prince. No injuries were reported, and damage was minor. But the cable warned that “a more severe earthquake would be catastrophic, as the government of Haiti is unprepared to handle a natural disaster of any magnitude,” adding that such an event would compound problems of political instability, poverty and environmental degradation.
In December 2010 Sweden issued two international warrants for Julian Assange’s arrest. He has been detained without charge since. This is a guide to the events, investigations and court proceedings that are connected with his extradition.
This guide is the first to map out the legal aspects of the UK extradition cases, the controversies surrounding the Swedish investigation, and societal and political reactions in Sweden.
The June 8 – June 10 episodes of MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show featured a three-part series titled “Firewater?” It pondered whether drilling for methane gas is a path toward a prosperous “clean energy” future for the United States, or if, to the contrary, the harms of methane gas drilling, caused by a process called fracking, nullify these oft-repeated industry claims.
While three recent scientific reports — one by Duke University, one by Cornell University, and one by the Post Carbon Institute — point to the latter, Ratigan’s series portrayed the issue as still up for debate, with both sides’ claims having equal merit.
Back in 2005 it was clear to a number of observers that China’s trailing rate of coal consumption was so strong, that its demand was on course to double by the end of the decade. As of 2010, this is precisely what’s happened. From a jump between 2002-2003, around 850 Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent), China is now consuming 1713.5 Mtoe as of last year, according to the BP Statistical Review. | see: China Coal Consumption in Mtoe 2000-2010.
The above chart shows the latest proportions of primary energy sources, as reported by the BP Statistical Review. You can see that Renewables now appear in the data, and account for 1.32% of total world supply of energy.
There are two big stories in the 2010 data from BP Statistical Review. The first I have already addressed: the colossal growth in coal consumption–predictably in non-OECD–but also the surprising strength in OECD coal demand.
CRUDE-OIL prices shot up on June 8th—Brent crude to a one-month high of $118.59 per barrel—after OPEC representatives meeting in Vienna were unable to reach an agreement on production quotas. Many had expected an increase in quotas as members with spare production capacity, led by Saudi Arabia, pushed to avoid a price spike that may dampen long-term demand. As figures released in BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy” show, global oil production has struggled to keep up with increased demand recently, particularly from Asia. In China alone consumption has risen by over 4m barrels per day in the past decade, accounting for two-fifths of the global rise. In 2010 consumption exceeded production by over 5m barrels per day for the first year ever, as world oil stocks were run down.
June 13 (Bloomberg) — William Cohan, author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World” and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, talks about Goldman Sachs’s position on mortgage securities before the market’s collapse. Cohan speaks with Erik Schatzker and Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” (William D. Cohan is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Source: Bloomberg)
You didn’t really think Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) would go down without a fight now did you? Of course not. So it should come as little surprise that recently Goldman has started to push back hard against its nemesis, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and his narrative that the firm is the lead villain of the financial crisis.
In its new mission, Goldman has been very careful not to take on Levin directly — after all he remains a very powerful figure in Congress and incurring his further wrath would be plain silly. Instead, the firm has taken its case to the court of public opinion, through a series of orchestrated presentations with members of the mainstream business press and to at least one Wall Street research analyst.
How many bankers, mortgage brokers, and the rest of the well-renumerated hooligans who brought the economy to its knees have been investigated or prosecuted for what appears to be some highly questionable activities? Very few.
Kathleen Gallagher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a good article on the subject earlier this week. As she reported, James Buchen, vice president of government relations for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, called the amendment “the icing on the cake for us be able to go out and sell Wisconsin as manufacturing heaven.”
Among them: first-ever head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Bush Administration from 2003-2005, former Governor of Pennsylvania from 1995-2001, and former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from from 1983-1995.
Upon leaving the DHS in 2005, Ridge started his career as a lobbyist, opening a lobby shop known as Ridge Global, located in Washington, D.C, which he still currently heads. Beyond this stint, though, Ridge is also a paid “consultant” (a.k.a. lobbyist) for the Marcellus Shale Coaltion, a “trade association” in disguise that in reality is a methane gas industry-funded lobbying group.
During the Wisconsin protests against Walker’s collective bargaining bill, Walker received an email from a Republican activist and Indiana prosecutor urging him to employ a “false flag operation” — to pretend that he was injured or attacked by a “union thug” — to discredit the unions. The prosecutor lost his job for recommending such a partisan stunt, but the Wisconsin GOP has apparently not learned its lesson.
Spotify could finally be closing in on a U.S. launch, with three of the major record labels having signed up to provide the service with content, and the fourth and last rumored to be close to doing so. And about time too.
I’ve been writing about Spotify wanting to launch in the U.S. for over two years now. Only six months after I, resident in the U.K., was able to start using the service. Spotify and its CEO Daniel Ek’s stance has been that it’s definitely coming, just when the time is right. And the time hasn’t been right so far. Mainly because the major record labels in the U.S. haven’t been willing to soften their stance on licensing agreements. Until now, possibly.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is currently revamping its technology strategy to bring it up to date with the needs of customers, but Mac and Linux users hoping to use this year’s DIY E-tax software will be once again left out in the cold.
* The OpenSUSE Conference Heats Up
* FreeNAS 8: The FreeBSD Spin on Network Storage
* The Ubuntu Software Center: The Apps Concept for Ubuntu
* Fedora to Switch to BTRFS
* Mageia 2.0 Is Already in the Works
Google’s Chrome OS has been highly anticipated by people all over since its announcement. Manufacturers such as Samsung and Acer are trying their best to be the one company that gets the honor to first release a laptop or a netbook to the market that runs Chrome operating system.
Things are pretty much looking good for the two companies when out of nowhere, Kogan broke the news that they already released a laptop with Chromium OS as its operating system. Kogan is an Australian manufacturer that has been shipping the notebook in Australia and the United Kingdom since June 7 leaving Samsung and Acer to eat its dust.
It was just over 100 days ago that OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland launched from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles. Now that these major releases have been available to the public for over three months, and Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad will be released in just a couple of days, here’s some overview statistics of where our open and collaborative testing platform is at today.
Powertop, a tool for detecting power wasters under Linux, is about to make a generational jump: version 2.0 provides improved diagnostic options and a redesigned user interface. It also offers a simple, manual way of enabling numerous power-saving features that can noticeably extend the battery life of notebooks.
The Linux Foundation announced the final program for LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011. Events include the 20th anniversary of Linux gala celebration, a discussion between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, a keynote by IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and a “20 Years of Linux” panel featuring Jon “maddog” Hall and Eben Moglen.
Boxee swung its focus back to the desktop on Monday with a promise of a major update for the Mac, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows versions of its media front-end app. The new version will bring the reworked browser and content options that have been present on the Boxee Box in recent months. The code would also be more closely in step with the dedicated box in the future.
Last week, we announced that Tux Paint was our Project of the Month for June 2011. Geared at encouraging children to use the computer to create drawings, this project is a fantastic tool for educators and parents for fostering creativity.
i haven’t been making much music in the last week. mostly been coding, hacking, and working on things that will allow me to create music and strange new sounds.
for example, i got madrona labs’ aalto software synthesizer working in linux. they just released the windows port a few days ago, and have already expressed interest in creating a linux port, so i pointed them to the cross-platform, open-source juce framework. meanwhile, i set out to get the windows version running in linux.
As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible. Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best. Let’s take a look at Adobe’s trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.
Driver code for the graphics chip of AMD’s Llano APUs has just made it into Linux 3.0, which could be given version number 3.0.0 after all. Meanwhile, there have been further discussions about the best approach for overlay, aka union, filesystems.
etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It’s quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.
One of the areas where GNU/Linux lacks, is the number of game available on the platform, number of games is limited compared to popular proprietary operating system, however, there are still some pretty interesting and fun games available on the platform like for instance, I had immense fun playing xBill or Tux Racer.
Pioneer is a space adventure game set in the milkyway galaxy at the turn of the 31st century.
The game is open-ended, and you are free to explore the millions of star systems in the game. You can land on planets, slingshot past gas giants, and burn yourself to a crisp flying between binary star systems.
After the overview of 20 best KDE applications, it’s time to have a look at what GNOME has to offer, right? This article overviews 20 of the GNOME applications which are, in my opinion, the best in their category. Only a single application from each category is included, and screenshots are attached. The list is put up in no particular order and at the end of the article I put noteworthy alternatives for each category (only GTK alternative applications).
I was going to tell you good readers about ImagineOS, but it didn’t seem to like my video card. So instead I decided to try out the new ClearOS alpha. ClearOS used to be a server system, but the upcoming 6.1 release will also provide a suitable desktop environment. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise, so I thought it might be interesting.
In Linux World, formatting a Usb Flash Disk is not an easy operation for end-user; in Pardus we always use one sentence: “Make it easy !“. So, we have to find an easy way to formatting a removable disk !
GStreamer maintainer and code god Wim Taymans just posted an update on the the progress of GStreamer 0.11 to the GStreamer development mailing list. For those interested in learning about the new features coming in GStreamer 1.0 this email (along with the previous update) is must read material.
The big reason that NetworkManager 0.9 is slower to connect than NM 0.8 is that we flipped IPv6 addressing on by default. That means that when you connect to a new network and that network supports IPv6 autoconfiguration via router advertisements you’ll get IPv6 connectivity. But if that network doesn’t support IPv6 then you’ll spin for 60 seconds or so waiting for a router advertisement because there’s nothing on the network that listens to the IPv6 autoconf solicitations that the kernel puts out when the link comes up. You can fix that but changing the IPv6 addressing method to “Ignore” in nm-connection-editor if you know your network doesn’t support IPv6.
Why don’t we bring up IPv4 and just wait for IPv6 to happen in the background? That’s a great question; I’m glad I asked it. First, it requires some small changes in NetworkManager’s D-Bus interface to add connected states for both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously so that applications can listen for when each stack’s connectivity is available. That’s trivial. It could be done tomorrow. It’s not a technical problem at all.
Since it is a fork and uses Mandriva 2010 as its base, the system will be very familiar to users. And since Mandriva is very user-friendly, it and Mageia would be easy for users of other distributions to adapt to using. But Mageia’s primary philosophy is rooted in the community. When the founders began the early stages of forking, they invited the community to participate. When they began packaging, they recruited community and even inexperienced maintainers. These “new guys” were giving mentors and taught the “business.” Today Mageia proudly proclaims, “Mageia is about people – the people who make and the people who use Mageia the Linux distribution. We’re completely community based, with everything that implies.” The main thing that implies is that Magiea is “not dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.”
In order to have the best results one should update their system about once a week or so. If you wait too long, sometimes issues can crop up. I’d be disingenuous if I said that updating often didn’t rarely cause breakage as well. Which is precisely why the periodic releases are welcome. It’s been my good fortune that a couple of times in the past the new releases came just about the time I really needed a fresh install.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Evolution Systems, a Sydney, Australia-based full service IT support business, has built its cloud service offering, The Evolution Cloud, on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
Technology markets go through a predictable pattern. First there is discovery, then development of a product, the creation of a market with multiple products, and finally consolidation around a market leader.
Clouds are the first enterprise computing platform to be delivered in the age of open source, so as we enter the third phase (multiplicity), open source bonafides become a selling point.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, the energy pioneer has gained greater stability and faster performance, helping the company reduce its global carbon footprint.
A funny thing happened to Red Hat–the poweful purveyor of support and services surrounding Linux–over the past couple of years as large open source-focused companies such as Novell and Sun Microsystems became acquisition targets for big software companies: It became the only viable, U.S. publicly traded company focused on open source. While many people understand Red Hat’s business in parts, a really big part of the company’s strong performance over the past several years comes from poor economic times, and the cost savings that Red Hat can offer businesses. Now, the company is out with a useful case study illustrating how the savings work.
Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has announced that it has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s not alone. Gap Inc. has standardized on Red Hat’s Linux software and support, as have many other big companies.
The release about Santos was put up on the Red Hat site nearly a month ago. Then, presumably, someone realised that the media should know about it. Perhaps because Santos sales last year were in the region of $2.2 billion.
The funny thing is, there are other companies – Lonely Planet and Specsavers, for example – which have done similar or bigger deals (one can only judge by the details provided) with Red Hat. Presumably again, these deals were finalised after the Santos transaction as they were detailed on Red Hat’s site at a later date.
This is a simple tip but an important one: when you’re installing Debian, take the time required to ensure the machine is connected to the Internet with a wired connection. If you have DHCP available, the debian-installer will use it to configure the network.
KDE is arguably the best-known alternative to the GNOME desktop, and it’s what you’re already used to if you run Kubuntu instead of the standard desktop Ubuntu.
With Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu underwent a major transformation. Gone was the plain and simple GNOME UI, and in came the shell interface with shiny new features. Though Canonical had high hopes from this release, the response Natty received was hugely disappointing. Many users felt that the release was a half-baked one with too many confusing features. However, a few good features did shine through leaving some users thoroughly impressed by Unity. Good or bad, Unity in its current avatar has plenty of room left for improvement. So, here are a few things we think can make Unity a better interface.
I was traveling into San Francisco the other day, and I had an idea I wanted to share. This is very much just an idea, and given I don’t have the time to work on it, I just wanted to share it so if someone else wants to run with it, they can.
Every Wednesday at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern, I do a live Ubuntu Q+A videocast. In pretty much every show someone always asks me about gaming on Ubuntu, and if it is going to be a focus for us. I think gaming is really important for Ubuntu and something we should certainly focus on more in the future. My idea is linked to the importance of gaming, but with a slightly different tack.
Here at SCW, we donate to open source software, created a political demonstration website against Canadian Usage Based Billing, and constantly try to balance the needs of security with our beliefs in freedom and the openness of information. So, we are going to take a break from talking about security, to talk about ubuntu, linux, wine and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).
It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed the first Peppermint OS, and while I liked the first effort on this new project, I’ve been really looking forward to Peppermint Two. Well, my wait was over as of last week, so I was able to kick the tires and get a good feel for it after installing and using it for a few days.
Luxoft and Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a jointly developed, Linux-based reference platform for a DLNA-ready in-car media server, and also demonstrated Luxoft’s Linux-based DashCore and Android-based DroidBuzz IVI software. The “wallet sized” In-Car Media Server and Internet Hotspot is based on a 456MHz ARM9 processor, and offers 64MB SDRAM and 128MB flash, plus Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G connectivity, says Luxoft.
Canonical announced recently that is joining the GENIVI Alliance and that it will create a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) Remix operating system based on the Ubuntu Core sub-set.
Announced by Canonical a couple of days ago, Ubuntu IVI Remix will be an In-Vehicle Infotainment operating system, supporting Intel and ARM processors.
Linux Mint 11 Katya is an excellent release. It has a few issues, but overall, it’s very good. Why, you may ask? What makes it special? Functionality wise, it’s about the same as Julia and comparable to most other popular distributions, more or less, with emphasis on more. It’s a bunch of small things, the attention to details, which make all the difference.
It has been a long time coming, but we can now tell you that the Sakshat Indian tablet has now got the go ahead. We first assumed that the device would cost $35, but that has been increased to $50. However, once you take into consideration the government subsidy the tablet will cost just $24, which makes it Rs. 1,100.
Taking that price into consideration you are now looking at the world’s cheapest tablet – so would make it the Tata Nano of the consumer electronics world. It does seem fitting that India is able to corner both these markets, and it is no surprise. India is an emerging market, and to make things more affordable to all Indian’s these could be just the start.
These are impressive news, because it clearly shows the big players are aware of and watching what goes on the OpenSource/OpenMovie community. It is a very delightful piece of news and I am happy for Colin and the blender project seeing them getting this kind of recognition!
On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance – for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction – I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline. So, on Saturday morning I arrived at NUI in Maynooth, completely out of sync with the local time zone and ready to pack four days worth of activity into two.
Monday morning after a great conference can be a downer, but the conference can keep rolling right here. This past weekend’s Southeast Linuxfest was full of great technical talks, as well as more community-focused ones, many by opensource.com authors.
Once again the SouthEast LinuxFest was a success. Now in its third year, this is a well organized FOSS conference held in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I went for the first time last year when we were a sponsor and had a blast. It was just as good this year.
LINUX DISTRIBUTION Ubuntu will continue to use Firefox as its default web browser at least until version 12.04 is released next year.
Canonical, the vendor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution told The INQUIRER that Firefox will continue to be the default web browser it ships with Ubuntu until at least its 12.04 release. The comments come after Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder said that Google’s Chrome came close to replacing Firefox as the default browser in Ubuntu.
Google’s Chrome browser could replace Firefox in Ubuntu, according to Mark Shuttleworth.
The founder of Ubuntu-backer Canonical said “it’s a real possibility” Chrome could become the default browser in a future iteration of the open-source OS, according to an interview in Network World.
“We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox in 11.10,” he said. That version, called Oneiric Ocelot, is due out in October.
Forking is possible because of the licence under which the code is released; anyone who thinks he/she or a collective can do a better job or wants to introduce customisations that the mainline project is unable or unwilling to, can take a copy of the code and run with it.
When the number one FOSS office suite, OpenOffice.org, was inherited by Oracle as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems, interested coders and those who had been involved prior to the purchase waited for a while before they realised that things were going nowhere.
As you’ve probably heard, the proposal to move OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation was approved by a wide margin. Volunteers interested in helping with this project continued to sign up, even during the 72-hour ballot, giving the project 87 members, as well as 8 experienced Apache mentors, at the end of the vote. The volunteers signed up included an impressive number of programmers from OpenOffice.org, RedOffice and Symphony, as well as QA engineers, translators, education project experts, OOo user forum moderators and admins, marketing project members, documentation leads, etc. The broad range of support for this new project, from volunteers as well as voters, was very encouraging.
Of course, this is not the end of our recruitment effort. In some sense it marks only the beginning. What I wrote about in my previous notes, about the Apache meritocracy remains true. However, now that the proposal has advanced and an Apache “Podling” (a probationary project) has been created, the way to sign up has changed. You should now sign up to the project’s mailing lists directly. For example, an email to ooo-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org will get you onto the project’s main dev mailing list. Anyone interested in participating needs to get onto this list, including those who already earlier expressed interest as “proposed committers” as well as new volunteers.
It’s been several weeks I hadn’t updated this blog. I was quite busy but I really avoided to comment on the latest developments at Apache and OpenOffice.org. Now that the OpenOffice.org project has formally been voted as an Apache project in incubation phase, I feel I can more easily comment on this latest move.
To start with the straight question; what do I think about this? I do have mixed feelings about Oracle moving the OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation. As explained in the Document Foundation’s official press release, this is a missed opportunity to reunite OpenOffice.org to the Document Foundation. By reuniting the two Oracle wouldn’t have accomplished a reconciliation, as there was no real need for this (whatever reconciliation would happen on a personal level) , but it would have brought order and coherence to the free and open source software office suites. Instead, Oracle chose -in a move where resentment and vengeance were not absent- to dump the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Foundation without the Oracle engineers who had been working on it since fifteen years.
Two recent blog posts explained what I think the Drupal development cycle is like; see the Gartner hype cycle and Drupal and the Drupal mood cycle. These thoughts came from living through many major Drupal releases and noticing patterns of developer and user mood as release dates approached and receded. Make sure to read these posts first, before reading this one.
Developers like to release code. “Release early, release often” wrote Eric S. Raymond in his famed essay on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and that philosophy has facilitated the rise of many open-source projects — including Drupal. At the same time, many end users dislike change: they would prefer that software versions stay stable as long as possible, because change means work or cost.
School’s out for summer, but that doesn’t mean the learning ends for teachers or students. Open source education applications offer a great option for students who are looking to get ahead or catch up over the summer. And summer is an ideal time for educators to find out more about some of the free open source tools available to help them in the classroom.
There are several good reasons why educators should try open source software, most notably financial savings. Many, many schools are facing budget cuts in the coming year, and those schools could realize significant savings by switching from proprietary to open source software. In addition, schools with knowledgeable IT staff can adapt open source software so that it meets their needs exactly –something that’s all but impossible with closed source software.
The only reason anyone would want to run a Nightly build of a Mozilla product like Firefox is because they want to help provide a test environment for providing that vital early feedback on a product that’s so fresh it’s completely untested. This early exposure provides the basis on which Firefox, Thunderbird and its brethren migrate towards the first major milestone in a program’s life, the alpha build.
Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications.
The results from the Eclipse Foundation’s annual Community Survey were published last week, with the output in report form available here (PDF warning).
The survey, completed by 624 individuals, was a voluntary response as opposed to a random sample, and therefore from a statistical perspective the results cannot be considered representative. It is, nonetheless, an interesting observational study.
For example, yesterday, after I finished using it, I shut down Microsoft Windows. As usual, it needed to install more updates, so it decided to do so between clicking “Shut Down” and actually shutting down. I figured it shouldn’t take that long, so I closed my laptop lid and went to eat dinner. This wouldn’t be news, except that when I came back, I found that it had gone to sleep in the middle (i.e. it hadn’t actually finished installing updates). That was one annoying thing. Anyway, I woke it up, and it finished installing updates and then properly shut down with no apparent errors.
Today, when I booted back into Microsoft Windows, I got a message saying that Microsoft Windows didn’t shut down properly the last time. WHAT? It’s telling me that it’s my fault that it took so long to install updates that the laptop went to sleep before it could finish, and that what looked to be a fine shutdown process was actually faulty in some magical way, and I’m supposed to blindly believe all that?
Last summer I wrote about Arianna Huffington’s latest book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream and talked about the Great Recession, the Great Bailout, and the Great Cover-Up of financial crimes.
If you want a vision of the world of global repression and bullying that copyright maximalists are striving to create, try this:
A Sheffield student is facing up to five years in jail if convicted in America for a website which provided links to movie clips.
Let’s just look at the component parts of this story.
First, the website was run by a UK national, and hosted in the UK. As the student’s lawyer points out:
“The essential contention is that the correct forum for this trial is in fact here in Britain, where he was at all times.”
So what would the situation be here in the UK? Well, a very similar case involving alleged unauthorised links to copyright material played out a few years ago – the famous OiNK trial. Here’s what happened:
Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.
Aside from the unanimous verdict, what was notable about the trial was that Ellis was accused of “Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry” – not with linking to copyright material. That is probably because the latter seems not to be a criminal offence, and so it was necessary to find some other charge.
Should government officials be equally concerned about Microsoft’s future and take a similar action to try and keep it healthy and Washington-state focused?
Microsoft has already been censored by government officials for hiring H1B workers and offshoring jobs. They got away with their multi billion dollar tax dodge but might not have gotten their $5 billion bridge from a state that’s got big budget problems.
… the manual officially lowers the bar of acceptability when it comes to engaging in surveillance activities, including allowing agents to perform such surveillance on people who are not suspected terrorists without opening an inquiry or officially recording their actions. The new manual also relaxes rules on administering lie detector tests, searching through a person’s trash, and the use of teams to follow targeted individuals
The scandal plagued and privacy busting program was losing one or two million dollars a year and did nothing for safety. GWB laid out all big money for these systems all across the US, hopefully they will follow L.A.
Summary: This quick episode combines many topics ranging from the area of patents to Microsoft trolls
LAST NIGHT’S show covered some of the important issues from the past week or so. It wasn’t released until now because one of my monitors died and as a result my 2.5 months old KDE session needed to be restarted, then I needed to buy a new monitor. Thankfully it’s all back to normal now.
The closing tracks are “Caught in Your Freedom”, “Volcano” by Anti-Pop Consortium, and “The DJ” by DJ Revolution( language warning). 2 are taken from SXSW 2010 (get the torrents legally here).
Resumen: Francia y el Reino Unido están dando lugar de entrada a la agenda americana de los MONOPOLIOS del software; la FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre) y Techrights contrarrestan eso.
ALGO está apesta en Francia y este vez no es Barnier, cuyos trucos para cabildear para las patentes de software hemos escrito en muchos[http://techrights.org/2010/11/06/eu-system-unified-wrt-uspto/] anteriores [http://techrights.org/2010/10/28/community-patent-and-barnier/] posts[http://techrights.org/2009/12/18/eu-commission-for-michel-barnier/] durante el último año[http://techrights.org/2011/05/25/peer-to-patent-in-the-uk/]. Francia va a poner en marcha un troll nacional de patentes denuncia el presidente del FFII[http://slashdot.org/submission/1644266/France-to-launch-a-national-patent-troll] (quién es belga y fluente en francés). Mientras que su demanda liga a 3 páginas en francés, su descripción de Slashdot resume todo como sigue:
[zoobab:] Francia está creando un fondo patrocinado por el estado de patentes, FranceBrevets, su foco primario será patrocinar, adquirir patentes de la licencia en el sector de las TIC (lease patentes de software). El fondo de la patente está en la iniciativa del ministro de la investigación, Valérie Pécresse, el ministerio de la industria, de la energía y de la economía digital, Eric Besson. El objetivo primario del fondo es recoger licencias en esas patentes, que ya se ve en Francia como el troll más grande de patentes del país. Francia también está apoyando la patente unitaria europea, que es considerada por muchos en la tentativa final de validar patentes del software en Europa.
FranceBrevets y la patente unitaria europea: una buena oportunidad para los troll de ptatentes, perjudicaría la UE en su totalidad, él observa por separado[http://twitter.com/zoobab/statuses/79638481646788608], explicando [http://twitter.com/zoobab/statuses/79631182966435840] que Francia está creando un fondo para invertir pesadamente en patentes de software (la prioridad es tecnología de información y de comunicación) ; ¿absolutamente desconcertante, no? Lleva a más ambigüedad e incertidumbre para los desarrolladores europeos. Symbian (Nokia) validó una patente del software en el Reino Unido hace algunos años[http://techrights.org/2008/10/09/symbian-breaks-ukipo/] y Alemania hizo cosas peores con un acto con FAT de Microsoft[http://techrights.org/2010/04/23/contradicting-epo-rules/]. Como una persona observó[http://www.iposgoode.ca/2011/06/peer-to-patent-in-the-uk-lost-in-translation/], con respecto a la decisión de Wilcox [1[http://techrights.org/2011/06/01/wilcox-should-learn-from-eu/], 2[http://techrights.org/2011/06/10/transporting-software-patents-to-eu/], 3[http://techrights.org/2011/05/31/nyls-idea-re-swpats-in-uk/], 4[http://techrights.org/2011/05/31/patent-monopolies-in-the-eu/]], el programa piloto Peer to Patent BRITÁNICO comenzará como lo hicieron los E.E.U.U., sin embargo; se centrarán solamente en tecnologías del ordenador. Citación Techrights que dice:
No todos están emocionados por este focus, particularmente hay muchos opuestos a las patentes del software en principio. Por lo menos un grupo discute que no debamos legitimar patentes del software con programas tales como Peer To Patent, para [quienes] el problema es la calidad de las patentes, no las patentes del software en general. Este discusión pudiera probarse especialmente problemático la adaptación del modelo original de los E.E.U.U. a los estados europeos, como el Reino Unido. El artículo 52 de la convención de patente europea (EPC) excluye los programas para las computadoras como tema patentable. La ley BRITÁNICA sobre el tema es confusa, por lo menos; la jurisprudencia reciente parece haber establecido que los programas de computadora que hacen una contribución técnica son patentables – lo qué ésto exige es sin embargo exactamente confuso.
¿Qué está pasando en Europa? Parece estar bajo el mismo ataque americano (traído por los MONOPOLISTAS con ayuda del gobierno) como Nueva Zelandia[http://techrights.org/2011/06/13/intel-for-swpats/] lo está. Como una persona, lo notó en respuesta a twitter[https://twitter.com/nza1/status/80227020465909760]: Usted sabe que nuestro gobierno amistoso con las MULTI-NACIONALES-hará lo que estas le pidan. #PapasFritasConEso? █
