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07.11.12

Links 11/7/2012: digiKam 2.7.0, Jolla Rises

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Teaching the open source way: An interview with Sameer Verma

    Dr. Sameer Verma first learned about open source software when a college friend gave him a weekend crash course in Linux. Now a professor of information systems in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, Verma has taken those lessons to heart—and is teaching his own students the open source way.

    Recently, we talked with Verma about the challenge of open source pedagogy, about integrating open source technologies and values into the college classroom, about the benefits of learning open source project management, and about his work with One Laptop Per Child.

  • Apache Lucene/Solr making gains in enterprise search

    Open source hasn’t made huge inroads in web search but Apache’s Lucene/Solr platform is beginning to make gains in enterprise search, particularly in light of the acquisition binge of proprietary giants.

  • Cultivating A Culture of Free

    Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is based on a principle: Software Freedom. It is given away under a license that allows you to do with the software as you please. You can modify it, redistribute it, and never pay a penny for it so long as you abide by the terms of the license. This model has worked very well for FOSS. But this model doesn’t work for everything.

  • Syoncloud Released Syoncloud Logs 0.3 Log Processing Software as an Open Source
  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Nutch(tm) v2.0
  • Open source Java projects: TomEE

    Apache TomEE aims to provide application developers with a best-of-breed technology stack that can be deployed to a simple and lightweight Java EE container. In this return to the Open source Java projects series, author Steven Haines introduces TomEE, explains how it differs from Tomcat, and helps you set it up in your development environment. He then walks through the process of configuring TomEE to integrate resources such as database connection pools and JMS destinations — bread and butter for today’s enterprise apps.

  • Events

    • GUADEC 2012 Program Published

      The Gnome Foundation has announced the schedule for GUADEC to be held from July 26 to August 1st in Coruña, Spain this year. The event will consist of over 46 talks, with 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Lew Moorman: Open Cloud Key to Modern Networking
    • Interview: Whamcloud Wins FastForward Contract for Exascale R&D

      Today Whamcloud announced that the company has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is set up to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing. To learn more, I caught up with Eric Barton, Whamcloud’s CTO.

    • Beyond MapReduce: Hadoop hangs on

      Hadoop is all the rage in enterprise computing, and has become the poster child for the big-data movement. But just as the enterprise consolidates around Hadoop, the web world, including Google – which originated the technology ideas behind Hadoop – is moving on to real-time, ad-hoc analytics that batch-oriented Hadoop can’t match.

    • Stealthy Big Switch plugs into OpenStack clouds

      Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.

  • AbiWord/LibreOffice

    • First Peek at LibreOffice Android port Prototype

      That LibreOffice continues to respond to requirements of end-users became truly evident when news of it being developed for Android OS arrived a few months ago. And now with screen shot of the progress made so far being released by its developers, LibreOffice’s progress is good to note.

      In the developers own words, the screen shot only “look like – well, that gives a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet.”; However, despite the lackadaisical images of the screen shot, the host of features that will finally come through for an Android OS are evident.

    • AbiWord is ready to work with you

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Jaspersoft 4.7 Adds Interactivity to Open Source Business Intelligence

      New Big Data analysis lands in Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence suite as data caching accelerates information delivery.

      The whole point of using business intelligence applications is to get better insight out of data, a task made easier by better engaging end users. Given this, the ability to visualize and interact with data is a key focus for open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft in its latest 4.7 release out today.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Gnucash For Android Released

      If you use Gnucash on your PC to track your expenses and accounts, here is great news for you. Now you will be able to do the same from any Android powered device. This application has been ported to Android and should run on Android version 2.2 and above.

  • Project Releases

    • TeX Live 2012 released

      Over the weekend, the TeX Users Group (TUG) released a new 2012 edition of the TeX Live distribution. New features this year include many detailed improvements. For instance, the MetaPost program can now be called by default when compiling a file in the \write18 primitive’s restricted execution mode. Output files from the pdftex TeX extension and the dvips driver can now be larger than 2GB, and dvips automatically embeds the 35 default PostScript fonts in the output file to ensure that typesetting is consistent on all systems.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Richard Fontana blows hot and cold on GPLv3 fork

      A lack of clarity on the part of Red Hat open source licensing and patent counsel Richard Fontana as to whether he has, or has not, created a fork of the GPLv3 free software licence has led to well-known free software advocate Bradley Kuhn dissociating himself from the project.

    • Copyleft.next and the Future of GNU General Public Licenses

      “I am puzzled as to why this might be thought a newsworthy story at all,” says Richard Fontana, talking about his new licensing project, Copyleft.next (formerly, GPL.next). “Copyleft.next is just a toy research project, motivated initially by a mere desire on my part to learn more about using Git.”

      Fontana is perhaps being mildly disingenuous. Although the importance of Copyleft.next has been greatly exaggerated, he is not ruling out the possibility that it might play a role in the development of future versions of copyleft licenses such as the GPL family of licenses.

      If nothing else, the project seems to reflect the critique of GPL licenses that Fontana has been quietly making for some months now, which deserves wider recognition and discussion.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Introducing the ARM 64-bit Architecture

      ARM announced a few days ago, on July 6th, that they posted a set of Linux kernel patches, implementing support for the AArch64 architecture, also known as the ARM 64-bit architecture.

      The initial support for the ARMv8 64-bit architecture has been added by ARM in the Linux kernel via a set of 36 patches.

  • Finance

    • Satyajit Das: Mr. Smith Goes to Leaves Wall Street

      In his 1933 inauguration address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the “callow and selfish wrongdoing” in banking and business. Roosevelt told the crowd of over 100,000 that attended that the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion”. Some 80 years later, the money changers have not “fled their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. “Ancient truths” have not been restored to that temple. Something corrupt and rotten continues to fester at the heart of high finance, economic life and, indirectly, modern society.

    • City of London Corporation: a lesson in lobbying

      For almost 1,000 years, the City of London Corporation has resisted virtually every attempt by monarchs, governments or the people to rein in its vast wealth and influence. From the murder of peasant revolt leader Wat Tyler by the lord mayor of London and his men in 1381, to the dispatching from the City to Northern Ireland of rural refugees forced off their land in 17th-century land reforms, the corporation has long been a guiding hand in British history.

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • CETA, the Zombie ACTA, Must Face the Same Fate

        A leaked version of the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) contains the worst parts of ACTA. The EU Commission appears to be once again trying to bypass the democratic process in order to impose ruthless repression online. Commissioner De Gucht cannot ignore the decision of the EU Parliament on ACTA. CETA must be cancelled altogether (or its repressive ACTA parts must be scrapped), or face the same fate as ACTA in the Parliament.

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