05.12.12
Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An accumulation of news about software patents, patent parasites, and patent trolls
THE parasites who are patent lawyers continue to give misguided (but self-serving) advice. They wants programmers to think that patent applications — not automatically-acquired copyrights — are needed for funding from VCs and the likes of them.
Companies like MOSAID make a living (for some lawyers) by litigation alone. Having recently gotten some patents from Microsoft and Nokia, MOSAID may soon be suing companies that already pay Microsoft for Android. B&N complained about MOSAID, but Microsoft paid B&N a considerably expensive/meaningful bribe for its silence. Meanwhile, as this report reveals, Nokia patents are being used against Android companies with a weak patent portfolio:
Nokia just announced that it’s suing HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic for patent infringement in the US and Germany. All told, there are 45 patent in the various lawsuits, covering what Nokia says are proprietary technologies — i.e., not industry standards. Specifically, Nokia’s patents cover hardware features like antennas, radios, and power management, as well as software features like multitasking, navigation, app stores, retrieving email attachments on mobile, “conversational” message display, dynamic menus, and certain types of data encryption.
HTC and Viewsonic — unlike Motorola and Samsung — haven’t many patents. So it is clear who will be harmed the most by such a system.
“Software patents [are] destroying business of SMEs in Germany,” says OPENTIA and it has become rather obvious that all this patent nonsense is just serving giants and their lawyers. Vivek Wadhwa, a critic of software patents (who regrets applying for some in the past), alleges that patent trolls are destroying jobs. As he put it in the Washington Post:
Where are the jobs? Ask the patent trolls.
President Obama has been touting patents as a way to create jobs and increase U.S. competitiveness. “These are jobs and businesses of the future just waiting to be created,” he said of patent applications last September, “somewhere in that stack of applications could be the next technological breakthrough, the next miracle drug, the next idea that will launch the next Fortune 500 company.”
The President is mistaken—at least when it comes to the patent system as it relates to software patents. These patents—and the patent system—aren’t creating innovation, they are inhibiting it and, by extension, job creation. Why? Because the breakthroughs aren’t in the patents, they are in the way ideas are commercialized and marketed. Because of flaws in the patent system and government leaders’ misunderstandings, there is an arms race of sorts happening in the tech industry that is sapping billions out of the economy and crushing technology startups. This system is enriching patent trolls—companies that buy patents in order to extort money from innovators. These trolls are like a modern day mafia. Given this, I argue software patents need to be eliminated or curtailed.
In order to re-ignite the economy several steps have to be taken other than regulation. Some obviously bad ideas like software patents, for example, must go. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Comparing one’s opposition to Unabomber
Summary: Microsoft funds an AstroTurf which compares particular people to mass murderers
THOSE who challenge Microsoft in response to its many crimes probably know too darn well how far the company goes to daemonise and intimidate the lone messengers. One of the company’s employees, working without disclosure in a so-called “TE” role (AstroTurf), was once harassing me in this Web site. See older posts such as:
Microsoft’s Wong decided to compare me to Unabomber and publicly insult me until I filed a complaint to the FTC. In a new E-mail titled “Charles Manson, the Unabomber…and you?” (dated 5/11/12 7:38 PM) Mike Palamuso from the League of Conservation Voters wrote:
Tell Microsoft, Comcast and other corporate donors to stop funding the
Heartland Institute's offensive, climate-denier propaganda:
http://action.lcv.org/site/R?i=kkLMsFUXoSE0Z-yr8zOZ9A .
[snip],
Have you heard what they're calling us? Serial killers and terrorists.
I know it seems like a joke, but this was actually put up on a
billboard last week in Chicago. The Heartland Institute, a leading
anti-science think tank, launched a campaign with images like this -
implying that if you believe global warming is happening, then you are
no different than the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, or mass
murderer Charles Manson.
If you find this as outrageous as I do, sign our petition urging the
Heartland Institute's corporate donors, including Microsoft and
Comcast, to end their funding today:
http://action.lcv.org/site/R?i=G8Fr2S5UeLFQHO3-Vrm4YQ .
For years, the Heartland Institute has been producing climate-denying
propaganda to benefit Big Oil and Dirty Coal. But this goes too far.
In their press release, they actually said that "people who still
believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of
society... they are murderers, tyrants, and madmen." This kind of
inflammatory, hateful rhetoric is offensive to the millions of
Americans who support common-sense solutions to the climate crisis.
Luckily, public outcry forced the Heartland Institute to take these
billboards down after just 24 hours. Yet, they are still not
apologizing for this deceitful campaign and will keep feeding the same
rhetoric to the media, members of Congress, and even our schools
unless we take action now.
Our partners at Forecast the Facts have been busy organizing a rapid
response from activists, which has already convinced some major
corporations like State Farm to pull their funding from the Heartland
Institute this week. Now they've asked for our help in adding
thousands more voices of activists like you to the call on other
corporations to end their funding to the Heartland Institute.
Will you sign our petition to Microsoft, Comcast, and the other
corporate funders of the Heartland Institute today?
http://action.lcv.org/site/R?i=eMaVmZ25VA6-XVKdtcDGvA
It's time for any corporation that cares about its reputation to stop
funding climate-denying groups like the Heartland Institute. With
enough people behind us, we can make that happen. So please take
action, and then share it via email, Facebook and Twitter.
Only together can we set the record straight on climate change and
ensure a clean energy future. We'll get back to you soon with updates
on the campaign as it progresses.
Thanks,
Mike Palamuso
Vice President, Communications
League of Conservation Voters
Here we have merely one more example where Microsoft funds predatory bodies that do this type of things. We mentioned more in the past. The AstroTurfing must stop and the anti-social element at Microsoft should be brought to justice. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Microsoft at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Consultants: These guys are your best bets as moderators. Get a well-known consultant on your side early, but don’t let him publish anything blatantly pro-Microsoft. Then, get him to propose himself to the conference organizers as a moderator, whenever a panel opportunity comes up.”
–Microsoft, internal document
Summary: A ‘mole’ funded by Open Source-hostile interests is revealed for what it is by a government Web site
TECHRIGHTS mentioned quite recently a "controlled opposition" approach which Microsoft uses to infiltrate and subvert panels. Here is a UK government site complaining about what Microsoft is doing:
e aware of our recently re-launched consultation on which we have been soliciting your views since 9th February 2012. One of our first discussion roundtables held on the 4th of April (Competition and European Interaction) was facilitated by Dr Andrew Hopkirk who blogged about the event for Computer Weekly and who was engaged by Cabinet Office as an independent facilitator on a pro-bono basis.
But guess who paid him? As André Rebentisch puts it:
The UK cabinet office washes its dirty laundry in the open. They accuse the facilitator of their controversial round table on open standards, Dr. Hopkirk, of a conflict of interest: an advisory role for an American software manufacturer which is an outspoken opponent of open standard policies.
Hopkirk is a backstabber, a deceiver, and a manipulator. May he be banned from panels for trying to subvert them for secret paymasters. Based on what we heard through the grapevine, Hopkirk did this before. It’s not an isolated incident. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Java, Microsoft at 8:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Microsoft boosters from Miguel de Icaza’s company find new ways to disrupt Android promotion and promote Microsoft .NET instead
Fernando Cassia reminds us that “de Icaza is hell bent on destroying Java since he started his .Net clone”
He links to this new article which relates to Xamarin‘s attempt to sabotage Android with Microsoft .NET (or Mono):
A company has substantially ported Google’s Java-based Android software to use C# and the .NET framework, a move that could be the first step towards creating an Android-like operating system that avoids legal entanglements with Oracle.
When will the Microsoft fans from Xamarin realise that the Free software community does not care for their work? All they do is damage Free software and a lot of Microsoft promotion. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Competition? Do not want.
Summary: Mozilla complains about Microsoft’s scheme to block rival Web browsers despite antitrust actions
SEVERAL days ago Mozilla complained that Microsoft was blocking it again. “Mozilla issued a statement Wednesday,” said one report, “expressing concern about some of the technical restrictions that Microsoft is imposing on its ARM port of Windows 8. Microsoft’s policies will effectively prevent Mozilla and others from bringing their Web browsers to the Windows 8 desktop on ARM systems.”
Using UEFI [1, 2, 3], Microsoft sought to do the same to Linux on ARM [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is the original complaint and some analysis:
Mozilla and Google are both crying foul because Microsoft is restricting Firefox and Chrome from running natively on Windows RT–the only version of Windows 8 that will run on ARM devices.
Even the WSJ covered it:
The company behind the Firefox Web browser says Microsoft Corp. is hindering its ability to distribute the software on some devices being designed for the next version of the Windows operating system.
Mozilla Corp.’s contention focuses on future tablets and personal computers that exploit chip designs licensed from ARM Holdings PLC—which are being supported for the first time in the next version of Microsoft’s flagship Windows software.
Microsoft is impeding on mobile devices any form of competition provided Microsoft gets leeway. We must really learn from Korea what happens when browser monoculture is allowed [1, 2]. This latest article explains:
The trouble is ActiveX is only supported on one platform: Microsoft Windows. As a result, when the South Korean government made the technology mandatory for online e-commerce, the entire South Korean Internet sector become enslaved to Internet Explorer
The importance of this is that monopoly breeds abuse. Mozilla’s complaint should be fully supported, not downplayed. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents at 8:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News updates about Android/Google defence in the face of aggression and market distortion from Microsoft and from Oracle
THE wide range of bribe types includes gentle bribe [1, 2, 3, 4] and lobbying.
Not every bribe is being referred to as such; this is the art of buying influence short of classical bribery. Sometimes it is being painted with the “just politics” or “just business” brush.
“Sometimes it is being painted with the “just politics” or “just business” brush.”We recently alluded to the Barnes & Noble deal, about which Jay Lyman writes: “with the deal in place, Barnes & Noble is no longer putting pressure on Microsoft to explain exactly where it asserted IP rights over Android.”
This is a trick that Microsoft pulled before. It’s like buying terror, paying the reluctant victim some money to stop fighting against extortion and thus paving the way to more of it. As the same source put it, “Microsoft has bought a share of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader business.”
Nice way to pass a bribe — “buying a share”. Barnes & Noble was important in this battle for Android freedom (gratis) and Microsoft has just neutralised it. It may make “business sense” for both sides to make such a transaction, but it’s akin to a bribe that helps Microsoft further distort the market.
As SJVN put it:
So, did Microsoft do the deal just because they realized that if their anti-Android patents would be ruled to be FUD? No, but it did have a heck of a lot to do with it. As Alison Frankel, senior writer at The American Lawyer, commented, “Microsoft paid B&N, the patent defendant, a sum of money that exceeded the marketplace value of its investment. How often does a patent plaintiff pay the defendant in a settlement? Especially when that defendant is on the ropes and urgently searching for a strategic investor?”
I know the answer to that one: Never.
Yes, but it’s a bribe. The “b” word oughtn’t be a taboo.
On another front, APIs in Android are leading to copyright madness. “Irrespective of my opinion on the subject,” writes one analyst, “what will the impact be should APIs prove copyrightable? It is likely to be extensive, cascading and a lesson in unintended consequences. Even parties with no intention of asserting their intellectual property rights concerning APIs – think authors of permissively licensed programming languages, as one example – will presumably be required to commit to non-enforcement, contractually. And obviously those parties wishing to realize another revenue stream, limit competition or both will ramp up legal actions around unlicensed usage of the APIs in question. It’s difficult to fully predict the downstream effects, but given the accelerating servicification of the world, a decision in favor of copyrightable APIs is likely to be at least as damaging as the patent system is today.”
Here is what Simon Phipps wrote while the Microsoft boosters used it against Android. Joe Mullin said that headaches loom, whereas the FSF issued this statement and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols mocked the case, calling it a “Dead lawsuit walking”:
Oracle’s case is as dead now as when it began. Like SCO with its insane attacks against IBM and Linux, Oracle doesn’t have a leg to stand on in its Google litigation.
Later on SJVN remarked on this whole copyright nonsense and the Against Monopoly Web site used it to show how outdated copyright law is becoming. To quote:
The courts continue to get to make copyright and patent law. The latest involves Oracle which is suing Google over Oracle’s Application Programming Interface (API) as well as other lesser elements.
It has become more apparent that copyrights law — not just patent law — is an impediment to software freedom and programming in general. Tech dinosaurs use those antiquated laws to hold back progress. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Dracut is a new system to generate, in the same way for all Gnu/Linux distributions, the special programs and files that make Linux boot.
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I came across the GNU/Linux-libre almost by accident and have enjoyed taking Trisquel and Parabola gnulinux for a test drive. I found both communities friendly and helpful.
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OSHackers is a website that aims to count GNU/Linux users and place them geographically using their Linux distribution as the marker. You can visit OSHackers and put yourself on the map, and you can search for people that use Linux around your area.
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Optimus has already long been causing issues for those not after Linux pre-loads but installing Linux by themselves on laptops with an integrated Intel GPU and discrete NVIDIA GPU. AMD’s technology is also in a similar sour spot, but at least it’s less popular than NVIDIA’s hybrid technology.
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For the last few weeks I’ve been working on an experimental new print spooler called printerd. It was designed in collaboration with Richard Hughes and it aims to be a modern print spooler for Linux.
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Desktop
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Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, hasn’t been happy with the direction his formerly favorite Linux desktop interface, GNOME, has gone. In fact, Torvalds downright hates GNOME 3.x. He’ll get no argument from me. I hate GNOME 3.x too. Recently though, Torvalds has start toying with Google’s new Chrome operating system’s Aura interface and, guess what, he kind of likes it.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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A variety of distributions now let systemd, rather than sysvinit, take care of bringing the system up. The newest of the three big init system promises to speed up booting and requires no explicit system service dependency configuration; as a side-effect, it also eliminates some distribution-specific peculiarities.
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Linux is compatible with more hardware than any other OS bar none. That certainly includes Windows. Try installing Windows 7 on some random laptop from scratch and see how much is missing or unsupported without third party drivers. My experience doing Linux installs for my customers is that a lot of off the shelf hardware “just works” and the rest needs proprietary drivers downloaded to make it work, just like Windows. There is, indeed, some hardware that doesn’t work with Linux and years ago that was a real issue. The fact is that more and more manufacturers are supporting Linux well and other drivers have been adequately reverse engineered.
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Linux 3.4 includes a whole host of changes to drivers for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics chips. The new kernel, expected to be released later this month, also contains a new USB DisplayLink driver and lays the foundations for better support for hybrid graphics technologies such as NVIDIA’s Optimus.
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Graphics Stack
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Here’s an interesting look at the state of the Ubuntu bug count as it concerns Linux graphics driver issues.
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Here’s some other interesting notes from the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit this week in Oakland.
- The Compiz compositing window manager will move from using OpenGL 2.x to using OpenGL ES. The porting of Compiz to OpenGL ES (GLES) was originally done by Linaro and will now be used within Ubuntu. While designed for the benefit of mobile users, the Linux desktop graphics drivers — including those using Mesa/Gallium3D — do support OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0. This change in moving from GL to GLES for Unity’s compositing window manager may initially cause some pain with broken plug-ins, etc. Notes here.
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Applications
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Still haven’t found a task manager that fits your needs? Perhaps you should take a look at Nitro. It doesn’t offer any revolutionary functionality, and the current version doesn’t even allow you to sync data across different platforms and devices (although this feature is in the works). But this no-frills task management tool offers all the basic features that can help you to keep tabs on your tasks and to-dos with a minimum of effort. For each task, you can specify priority and deadline, and color codes make it easier to identify the urgency of each task. Tasks in Nitro can be organized into lists, and the application features a few built-in date-based smart lists which can help you to keep tabs on your tasks. You can easily move tasks between lists and rearrange them using the mouse, and the search feature allows you to find tasks that match specified criteria.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Last month I wrote about a new GLSL back-end for the Doom 3 engine by Oliver McFadden. This week he’s now shared his work done to bring OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL support to this game engine.
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Electronic Arts are delivering two games into Ubuntu, Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima. They are currently available in the Ubuntu Software Center.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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When Calligra 2.4 was released there was a flurry of interest resulting in a number of articles in the press and blog posts. Some of these were regular reviews of higher and lower quality. One of them, which I think was one of the better ones, was this one by Påvel (in Swedish). In the review he says that Calligra has a good foundation, he likes it but there are obvious problems with it. I find that an honest and true assessment, especially since it is obvious that he has really tried it and been bitten by some bugs. (Some of these bugs are already fixed in 2.4.2, most of the rest will be gone in 2.5.)
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Our good friends over at opentablets.org have posted a video from aseigo’s blog demoing the beginnings of the Make-Play-Live content store. No word yet on whether that name is official, but it does drape itself quite dramatically across the application’s login screen.
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Today is a day in which I find myself passing through many doorway as all sorts of milestones for our little project are coming up at once.
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, we’ll be shipping the Vivaldi tablet computer with 1GB of RAM .. and today I can tell you even more good news: we’ve doubled the internal storage to 8GB as well. We’ll be settling on the USA pricing shortly as well, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised with where that lands.
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With Unity, Cinnamon, and Gnome 3 getting all the buzz, it’s easy to overlook other interesting projects that attempt to rethink the traditional desktop metaphor. Case in point, the KDE Plasma Netbook interface. Despite its moniker, the KDE’s alternative interface is not limited to netbooks, although it’s designed for devices with small screens. KDE’s alternative interface has been around for a while, but I only recently started using it as a primary environment on my trusty ASUS Eee PC 1005HA netbook, and I grew fond of it for a number of reasons.
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LaKademy brought together 19 Latin American participants, including developers, translators, designers and promoters. The full report has more information about major LaKademy outcomes related to artwork, localization, promotion, and developing.
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Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka “toscalix”) recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell has been criticized for lacking many familiar features found in GNOME 2, but you can add them yourself with extensions. If you’ve installed GNOME Shell and didn’t like it, don’t write it off until you try some extensions.
If you’re using Ubuntu, check out our guide to installing GNOME Shell and getting started. GNOME Shell is the default desktop on Fedora and should be available in most distribution’s package repositories.
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Ubuntu systems team has forked Gnome Control Center as Ubuntu Control Center which will be used in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards.
Bilal Akhtar, a young Ubuntu developer writes, “Gnome-contacts will be installed by default, clutter will be on the CD, totem will be updated to the latest version, and Ubuntu 12.10 should ship with a near-complete GNOME 3.6 stack (sans Shell, of course, and control-center).”
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Distro is short for distribution which in the software world mainly means Linux and BSD these days.
Now, as good as the existing distros are (I use a bunch of different versions of Fedora Linux including fc1, f10 and f14, and also Vector Linux Classic and OpenBSD) they all have one irritating problem in that their software repositories disappear. OpenBSD 4.7 disappeared recently and Fedora Core 1 disappeared ages ago.
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Internet is the the “Alpha and Omega” of our daily experience with computers, dominating, enriching and engulfing everything we do. This is the case with almost everyone around the world, but somewhere out there, there are computers that are not connected to the internet for some reason that we will not analyse in this article. What would be the ideal GNU/Linux distribution for such systems? Are there any linux distributions that can cover almost every need of an off-line user? Yes there are!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The release candidate for Mageia 2 was released earlier today along with the note that the final release date had been changed. The changes are hard to see in the release notes, but perhaps prospective users might want to pay more attention to the errata list.
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In a corteous and somewhat longer-than-usual post, Jean Manuel Croset has communicated with the Mandriva community again to inform some details of the situation (always mentioning that he is unable to disclose as much information as he would like) and to throw a new date on the table. This time, it is the third week of May, the moment in which the company will unveil its roadmap.
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Red Hat Family
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The announcement Tuesday of a new partnership between Dell and Red Hat could mark a further expansion of open-source software use in the enterprise.
OEM customers looking to Dell for custom products will now have additional open-source options. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss join SUSE as standard choices for Dell OEM.
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For a long time, corporate IT was managed by IT professionals. Such management had a lot of drawbacks. IT professionals are not easy people to get along with, they have strong opinions, talk to other people like children who don’t understand simple things. Unfortunately, they are usually right. Their strong opinions are based on knowledge and experience. And other people really don’t understand how IT works.
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CEO and President James Whitehurst sold Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) shares for $6.78 million, according to an SEC filing.
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It had $209 billion of assets on its balance sheet, and $128 billion of that was in the form of goodwill and other intangible assets. Goodwill is simply the difference between the price paid for a company during an acquisition and the net assets of the acquired company. The $128 billion of goodwill in this case was created when AOL and Time Warner merged in 2000.
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As it prepares for battle against VMware on the cloud front, Red Hat announced today that it will launch later this year its fee-based PaaS service with support and will begin shipping this summer integrated PaaS solutions that enterprises can deploy on premise that give its developers freedom to innovate while allowing IT to manage how apps are developed and deployed
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Fedora
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Fedora 17′s grub2 screen won’t be the ugly black and white thing you saw in Fedora 16. The reason for the ugliness in Fedora 16′s grub splash is that it was the first release we used grub2 and there were some missing files that prevented the theme from working at all. We punted on it because grub’s splash is not shown by default and we had higher-priority issues to work on for Fedora 16.
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This week Dave Le Sage, Suz, and I discuss Fedora 17, the upcoming release of the Free and Open Source Llinux computer operating system Fedora.
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The Fedora Project is still trying to clarify its process of naming major releases, a process that has been met with calls for revision within the Fedora community.
To address the problem, Fedora Advisory Board member Toshio Kuratomi is working to build a new naming process that will avoid some of the pitfalls of the most-recent naming concerns.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Discussed on Monday during the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit were the plans to introduce a new sound theme to the Quantal Quetzel.
Through a community-driven submission process, they’ve narrowed down the sound theme they’re looking for but are still trying to make it sound “more human and less robotic.” With Ubuntu 12.10 they’re also looking at the ability to customize sound themes and briefly discussed at UDS-Q was the ability to have a LightDM start-up sound.
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As part of his keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the Ubuntu project’s first open hardware device. The Canonical created VGA Switch (VGAS-01) allows the disconnection of a VGA display from a system with the push of a button.
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This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is going on in Oakland, California, and Mark Shuttleworth and others have been filing some interesting reports coming out of the conference. According to Shuttleworth, today will be “Cloud Day” at the meeting, with speakers including Richard Kaufmann, CTO of HP Cloud, Randy Bias of Cloud Scaling, and Mark Collier of Rackspace. Perhaps the most interesting points coming out of the summit so far, though, have to do with new market share claims for Ubuntu.
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Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, proudly announced earlier yesterday, May 7th, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, USA, the goals for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 operating system.
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Ubuntu 12.04 has already received first post release Unity update and its only second week since final Ubuntu 12.04 was released.
This release, specifically Unity 5.12 brings numerous fixes and optimizations including improved HUD and multi-monitor support, compiz fixes, dash improvements, music/video lens fixes and many more.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week, Dell announced an effort they’re calling Project Sputnik. The basic idea was Dell’s latest and greatest XPS hardware pre-provisioned with developer infrastructure: a developer laptop, in other words. As Barton George discussed, this was in part – full disclosure – an idea of mine. One of the questions we’re fielding from the media following this announcement is why? What’s the point of a developer laptop? I cannot speak for Dell on their motivations or the project logistics, but there are two primary reasons I believe a developer laptop program broadly makes sense.
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Ubuntu Friendly — the Canonical-spawned initiative for the community to try to provide information on computer hardware that’s “friendly” to run Ubuntu Linux — is not being actively maintained.
Just months after it launched, Canonical QA engineers are more or less letting Ubuntu Friendly stand still and wanting to hand the work off to others. Ubuntu Friendly basically came down to a hardware database that listed computer systems and their components known to be compatible with Ubuntu. Ubuntu Friendly never really took off as a community success and evidently have too much on their table to maintain, so a session on Tuesday was held where they were kicking around some ideas or how to make it a success. They want to “hand the project to better hands.”
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In a UDS session for Gnome 3 stack in Ubuntu 12.10, Canonical discussed about future plans of Unity interface.
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For reasons mentioned in yesterday’s blog item, I’m not at the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Oakland. Oh, I could go up there and attend — it’s only 80 miles from the cozy confines of the Felton redwoods — but I value my life and I’d like to keep it, thank you very much.
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In the name of security, Ubuntu developers are looking at ways to lock-down or verify the way third-party Debian packages are handled on Ubuntu Linux.
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Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It’s peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it’s still too limited and too confining, at least for some experienced Linux users.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has pulled out all the stops with Ubuntu 12.04 to get enterprises to give its Linux operating system a go, and on the whole it succeeds, even if some features might put off traditional users.
Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 is known as Precise Pangolin and it is the firm’s fourth long term support (LTS) release with extended support for both desktop and server distributions for five years. As part of Canonical’s push into the enterprise, Ubuntu 12.04 rolls up the big changes seen in the four Ubuntu releases since Ubuntu 10.04 rather than introducing new ones, and the result is an operating system that feels more complete than other recent Ubuntu Linux releases.
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In a UDS session today, Canonical discussed plans to implement Wayland Tech Preview in Quantal.
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- When it comes to the kernel side, as mentioned already, for Ubuntu 12.10 they are looking at shipping with the Linux 3.5 kernel or possibly Linux 3.6 depending upon the features and schedule.
- They’re undecided whether to ship X.Org Server 1.12 or 1.13 in Ubuntu 12.10. X.Org Server 1.13 should be out in early September and will feature more input improvements, GLX_ARB_create_context support, and various other enhancements. Shipping xorg-server 1.13 comes down to there being NVIDIA/AMD binary blob support in time, whether the 1.13 changes end up being too invasive (namely if Airlie’s DDX driver rework is merged), and their bug count.
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Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) is out. By now there are a zillion reviews of it already, but I wanted to take a little more time to use it before writing one of my own. Before I get into this review, I want to be clear that I’m not going to be reviewing Unity. By now most people know what it is, and either like it or don’t. There really isn’t any point in complaining about it any more. If you hate it then do not use Ubuntu, just find another distro.
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Last year plans began to surface for Ubuntu TV — a version of the popular Linux distribution intended to be deployed by television manufacturers — and during the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week there was much talk about the Ubuntu TV plans.
Back in January at CES I checked out the interesting Ubuntu TV prototype, which did use a modified version of Unity and was looking interesting. Ubuntu TV though has yet to ship.
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Ten years ago, just ahead of a trip into space, Mark Shuttleworth took out an insurance policy on his reproductive future. “I put a couple swimmers on ice,” he says. “There was going to be a gamma ray source about a foot from my balls under my seat on the Soyuz. So I made a deposit in a secret location before I flew.”
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Today, we released the latest version of the Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix, based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Most businesses deploying Ubuntu on corporate desktops perform a similar set of tasks – from removing consumer-focused applications and integrating with existing infrastructure, to installing commercial software for application virtualisation.
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While things are coming to a close in Oakland at the last day of UDS-Q, there was an interesting session that concerns the future of third-party driver installation on Ubuntu 12.10 and future releases.
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If you were hoping that Ubuntu 12.10 would mark the switch from Upstart to systemd for its init daemon, there was no surprise announcement and the Ubuntu developers are continuing to push for the advancement of Upstart.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most of the machines I use are laptops or tablets, but I also have a desktop that I use for recording my music. On that desktop, though, I have two different hard drives split in three (roughly 250GB) partitions, something that allows me to have different distros installed on it. Since late 2010, that machine had Ubuntu 10.10, PCLinuxOS KDE and Ubuntu Studio 9.04 spread across those three partions available. It was about time I went for a change, for a number of reasons, including the fact that Ubuntu 10.10 recently went out of support (needless to say, so did Ubuntu Studio 9.04). On top of that, PCLinuxOS had been stuck on KDE SC 4.6.5 for about a year, so I wanted a fresh update on all my partitions to get fully supported distros and up to date applications and features.
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Thanks to growing user-interest, it looks like there is going to be a GNOME Shell flavor of Ubuntu to satisfy those who aren’t fond of the direction of Canonical’s Unity desktop.
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Canonical announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10, that they plan to stay with the good ol’ EXT4 filesystem for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) distribution.
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Following the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I took the plunge and upgraded my main work PC from Ubuntu 11.10. Up until the release I had been running the 12.04 beta on a second machine. Although I can switch to GNOME 2 (Classic) quite happily on this system, for some reason — yet to be resolved — I can’t do this on my work PC. So I decided it was time to scrutinise the latest version of Unity running on the latest version of the OS. Some of the observations that follow relate to new features and some to features already present in Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier versions.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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For years, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative drew major headlines even as promises made by the initiative’s organizers were routinely missed. The original idea behind OLPC was to create $100 computers that could arrive in the hands of poor kids all around the world. Too bad that $100 price point was never achieved, and other problems arose.
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Willow Garage sets its open-source software free to attract software developers and help make robots commonplace, but detractors say giving the software away is bad for business.
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Nvidia Corp. said Wednesday (May 9) that LLVM, a popular open source compiler, now supports Nvida GPUs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Fourteen years ago, as a lawyer for Netscape, Mitchell Baker created the open source license that made Netscape’s code free. It was a fateful event for both Baker and the web: Baker ended up leading a small skunkworks project called Mozilla that was eventually spun out into a standalone foundation devoted to making the web better generally, and to offering an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer specifically. With its Firefox browser, Mozilla is now bigger and more influential than ever, and Baker still serves as its chair.
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Firefox 13 is going to be pretty grand. I’ve been using the beta for a while now and it’s faster than the few previous versions that we’ve seen. What makes Firefox 13 the speediest release of the browser to date? A host of improvements thanks to Project Speedy.
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Open Source Suites
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In 2010, Libre Office, a new fork of OpenOffice was created. The main goal was to return control of the premiere free office suite to the community and creating new processes that would reinvigorate its development. By all accounts, it succeeded. Developers are getting behind the project, as are companies, and it seems that there’s something of a feature gap opening up between the two projects.
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Today the Apache OpenOffice Project announced the availability of their inaugural release of Apache OpenOffice, version 3.4. Apache obtained the rights and code to OpenOffice last year and have now ‘vetted” and built “a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants.” But some are wondering if anyone cares?
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Last week I spoke briefly with Jürgen Schmidt about the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release, and he was able to give us a little insight into what was involved in getting this release out, and what’s coming in future versions. (Official Release Announcement)
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Sixteen months after its last release. OpenOffice.org has released version 3.4, its first as an Apache Incubator project. The release was covered matter of factly by The H (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Apache-OpenOffice-3-4-0-debuts-1570353.html), and with a dash of skepticism by Brian Proffitt (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Apache-OpenOffice-3-4-0-debuts-1570353.html). A week ago, it was even trash-talked by LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks (http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html), whose eagerness to discredit it was just a bit too obvious.
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While the news about the ongoing Oracle-Google trial in the US has been holding my attention, there have been a sequence of news releases about desktop productivity showing up over the last few weeks. It’s all too good to miss, so here are summaries in the order the news broke:
* First, Calligra Suite is starting to look interesting. They have released version 2.4.1 of Calligra Suite, and it’s a fine step forward. With its roots in the K Desktop Environment (KDE) it’s only realistically available for GNU/Linux at present, but there’s an experimental Windows build and talk of a future mac build. The user interface is clear and appealing and there’s support for the important Open Document Format (ODF) file format. It’s available online. The project has also announced it’s Google Summer of Code student activities, which will add useful new capabilities when they are ready.
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Once upon a time there was KOffice, all full of unrealized potential. And then it was forked as Calligra Suite. The first release of Calligra was on April 11, 2012. Is this a contender, or another niche productivity suite?
It’s a tough row to hoe, building an office suite. The applications are complex, even without thinking about interoperability. Microsoft Office is the tail that has long wagged the office suite dog, with all of its flaws and lard and barriers to interoperability and portable data. If an office suite doesn’t have MS Office compatibility it’s going to appeal to a limited audience. But times change, and now the Open Document Format (ODF) is nearly universal, which (theoretically) means that we can open our files in any application that supports ODF. And thus even the most stubborn titan of lock-in must eventually succumb, and now even MS Office claims ODF support.
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Open source desktop productivity suites are experiencing an injection of enthusiasm, as recent burst of news releases confirms
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Here the issue. What makes a document? The physical form? The logical frame? Sheer convention? So, too, the “office” document. A generation has come to expect of a suite those things that are found in the prevailing application. But that assemblage is, however useful, nevertheless rather arbitrary. It was also spawned by the desires of white-collar workers in large corporations, not by the needs and desires of those outside of the corporate walls. Times have changed. Today, and even more so, tomorrow, virtually all people will have access to some form of a computer, and they will be wanting to create, edit, distribute their works. The number of those coming to this 21st century table is not small, it’s in the billions.
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CMS
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When it comes to CMSs, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are the three leading names today. All three are open source software, and are free to use and customise. Each has its own community and user base, as well as a well-maintained repository of themes/templates and plugins/extensions. And all three have their pros and cons.
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Business
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Some are dead, some are thriving, and many have repositioned for cloud computing, Big Data and other buzz words. Here’s a belated update from The VAR Guy in alphabetical order…
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There’s no denying the incendiary nature of the topic of desktop Linux, which tends to gets rehashed in heated detail every so often both on these pages and beyond.
What some may not remember, however, is that there’s another recurring Linux subject that can be equally controversial. It hasn’t appeared in some time, but apparently some slow fires have been burning all along, because they just flared up anew.
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Reports state that Stallman was admitted to the hospital, but has since been discharged. Reports from Spain say Stallman was most likely suffering from symptoms of high blood pressure. The short note on www.fsf.org states that “he did not have a heart attack, as has been reported in some places.”
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Standards/Consortia
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Nearly a decade after that original discussion at OSI – which itself was in the context of fairly established thinking – the UK Government seems to think this is still an open, undecided question. Why is that? It appears to be because industry bodies with a deep interest in protecting their existing, proprietary interests in the UK Government have lobbied that Government to re-open the issue. Moreover, during a change of leadership the responsible individuals in the Government decided to give those incumbents a second chance.
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Censorship
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Silly parents! Are you all up in arms and legs about your little dumpling watching pornography online, like the subjects of this recent Guardian article? Well, I can’t sympathize. Worse yet, I am here to destroy all hopes that you will ever have for (a) an all-wholesome web, or (b) getting your kids to practice wholesome viewing habits.
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