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Links 9/2/2013: Linux Said to Have Won, LibreOffice 4.0 Arrives





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Beyond Cost-Cutting: Why Open Source Software Is Gaining Traction on Wall Street
    Financial firms need to take an active role in adopting and governing OSS's broader usage, according to Black Duck Software's CEO.


  • BitRock's BitNami enables OS X to run popular open source CMS's
    OS X has a massive following of web developers who constantly used Linux based web server stacks to run their CMS stacks - it's actually a pretty common trend at the moment. Within Apple's OS X App Store, users can now find four of the most popular CMS's that run inside BitNami - Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and a generic MAMP stack (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP).


  • Time for the financial industry to contribute more to open source projects


  • Open source pioneers next generation chat and forums
    Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: "Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be".


  • Netflix Promises To Make Its Open Source Cloud Management Tools More Portable
    Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.



  • Events



  • Web Browsers



    • Chrome

      • Switching to Chrom(ium)
        For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.






  • SaaS/Big Data



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0


    • LibreOffice Gets A Brand New Home
      The team has revamped the LibreOffice.org, bidding goodbye to the 'boring' and aged design. The new design is jazzy and reflects how aggressive the 'new' LibreOffice community is, shedding the old brand image it inherited from the doomed OpenOffice. This change also gives a hint that the UI of this popular open source office suite may also get the same make-over


    • LibreOffice 4.0 Has Arrived


    • LibreOffice 4: A new, better open-source office suite
      LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.


    • Highlights of LibreOffice 4.0
      With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.


    • LibreOffice 4 released


    • LibreOffice 4 Sweeter Than Ever
      I love the new LibreOffice 4 even though I’ve only kissed her once.


    • New LibreOffice turns up the heat on Microsoft
      Today saw the release of a landmark update of LibreOffice, the community successor to OpenOffice.org that's developed by TDF (The Document Foundation) and its global volunteer community. LibreOffice version 4 looks fresh, includes new enterprise features, and offers improved performance.

      TDF is a nonprofit that allows a wide range of corporate sponsors to join with individual volunteers to build, localize, and test LibreOffice. I spent some time with core developer Michael Meeks of Suse to understand the highlights of the new release.


  • CMS

    • Good or Bad? The Verdict on Open Source CMS
      We’re going to tip our hand here at the start by admitting that the question is unanswerable. The answer depends on who you are and why you’re asking. This is sort of like the question, “What’s better — chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?” There’s no right answer. It all depends on whom you’re asking. Unfortunately, the open vs. closed debate engenders more negative emotions than choosing ice cream flavors.




  • BSD

    • What the future holds for PC-BSD
      PC-BSD is a multi-purpose distribution of FreeBSD. The last stable release is PC-BSD 9.1. Development and releases tend to be slow and infrequent, and it does not get as much press coverage as Linux distributions.

      I have been reviewing its major releases since this website was launched, though I’m yet to review the last stable edition.




  • Licensing

    • Law Review Helps to Keep Your Practices on the FOSS Fairway
      Not only are open source applications and platforms continuing to raise their profiles, but many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. All of which means that it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators.




  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Next Generation of Open Source Smart Grid
      Open source software -- code that’s free for anyone to use, as long as they share what they’re doing with it -- plays a small, but growing, role in the smart grid. Examples include OpenADR, a Berkeley Labs-California Energy Commission-backed standard for automating demand response, and OpenPDC, a Tennessee Valley Authority’s Hadoop-based data management tool for transmission grid synchrophasor data.


    • The Death Star Ain’t Dead Yet: Open Source Death Star Has A Kickstarter
      A White House petition to build the death star from Star Wars received the 25,000 necessary signatures to warrant an official response. The official White House response was essentially a no, citing the estimated $852 quadrillion dollar cost of building a death star as the reason. Hey, that’s only 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP and a redonkulous amount of steel. No biggie.


    • Open Data



    • Open Access/Content

      • Darrell Issa Praises Aaron Swartz, Internet Freedom At Memorial
        One of the staunchest Republicans in Congress, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attended a Capitol Hill memorial on Monday for progressive activist Aaron Swartz, praising the fallen Internet icon's political courage and saying he has common ground with much of Swartz's legacy.

        "He and I probably would have found ourselves at odds with lots of decisions, but never with the question of whether information was in fact a human right," Issa said at the memorial.

        Swartz, who was one of the earliest minds behind Reddit, took his own life in January after fighting federal hacking charges for two years. He had long been an advocate for both an open Internet and the democratization of knowledge. Prosecutors pursued him for downloading millions of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR, but Swartz had devoted much of his activist energy to liberating information. At age 14, he helped develop the Creative Commons license, an alternative to copyright that allows works to be shared freely, so long as they are not used for profit. The license is used heavily by Flickr and many other websites. Later, Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public.


      • ‘Open source’ texts best for poor students




    • Open Hardware







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