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Links 4/8/2010: Motorola Open Sources Droid X, Oracle Fixes Eclipse, and “Open Core is Dead”



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



  • Unruly Customers
    M$, too, had a lot of willing and unwilling customers who have now seen the light and broken out of their jail. Fortunately there is no doubt in most people’s minds that it is legal to migrate to GNU/Linux. They know PCs are somewhat more open than an embedded thingie. That wasn’t always so. I have met people who thought it was against the law to replace the OS, but lately, folks have been installing GNU/Linux on their own or with some help and a few are buying PCs installed with GNU/Linux.




  • Instructionals







  • Desktop Environments



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • how to get more people wikiing?
        Today's blog entry is a simple question:
        What would motivate you to contribute to KDE wikis such as Techbase or Userbase?


        Within the Plasma team, developers put a fair amount of time and effort into writing tutorials, with some more taking shape on our Community wiki pages. We're about to start on content on Userbase, starting with documenting how Actitivies work from a user's point of view in the 4.5 release. Other teams within KDE are doing similarly.






    • GNOME Desktop



      • Red Hat Is The Top GNOME Contributor


      • Ubuntu To Get Ayatana Sound Indicator
        Ubuntu's next version, code-named Maverick Meerkat, is slated for the November release. Mark Shuttleworth once again emphasized the ongoing work on improving the art-work of Ubuntu.

        Ubuntu is planning to add a new sound indicator to enhance the 'music' experience under Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth is toying with the artwork of the indicator.


      • GNOME Commit-Digest Issue 95
        This week… 1817 commits, in 202 projects, by 221 happy hackers (and 396 were translation commits).












  • Distributions





    • Red Hat Family



      • Red Hat appointments to boost APAC growth
        Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, today announced six senior management appointments to boost its Asia-Pacific management team and position the company for growth in the region.








    • Debian Family

      • Debian developer conference under way in New York City
        The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which is popular among embedded Linux developers, and also offers the foundation for Linux distros including Ubuntu Linux, Xandros, and Google's Chrome OS.




      • Canonical/Ubuntu





        • Flavours and Variants

          • Introducing Lubuntu
            A light-weight version of Ubuntu Linux has hit download mirrors everywhere. While it is not yet officially supported by Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular Linux distribution, this version of Ubuntu has in the last three months wormed its way up the Linux charts to become the twelfth most popular version of Linux. The name of this light-weight version of Ubuntu is Lubuntu,


















  • Devices/Embedded





    • Phones





      • Android

        • Motorola Open Sources Droid X
          It appears Motorola may have finally given us what we wanted: the open source software for the Droid X. That's right, now developers can mess around with the 4.3-inch beast even more! This isn't quite as exciting as the 1-Click Root that came to the Droid X just a few days ago, but it's still news. And I'm sure some crazy dev will have Froyo up and running on the Droid X in no time.


        • Droid X: More Athlete Than Aesthete
          With the Droid X, Motorola's slapped a huge hunk of screen onto a stone-cold slab of a phone that still manages to sit comfortably in the hand and in the pocket. It's got processor muscle, sharp screen resolution, and an interface that looks kinda ugly even after you customize it. Those widgets and controls might be worth a little homeliness, though.










    • Sub-notebooks

      • Negroponte's OLPC Offer Shows Staying Power of Open Projects
        Now that is a friendly, charitable letter, and it illustrates something that the many nay-sayers didn't realize when criticizing the OLPC effort: It's extremely common in the open source world for an initial idea to find itself without wings, and then flourish and fly in a metamorphosized new version. It's entirely likely that the OLPC assets are exactly what Indian developers need to deliver a good device at a low price point.










Free Software/Open Source



  • Datamatics Migrates Core Solutions To Ingres
    Within the framework of this partnership, Datamatics has expanded its BSS portfolio and migrated its core solutions to Ingres Database, including its main applications in the 'Order to Cash' sector and 'DSS Document System Solution' for template-based mass document generation.


  • OpenChrom: a cross-platform open source software for the mass spectrometric analysis of chromatographic data
    The software is independent of the operating system, due to the fact that the Rich Client Platform is written in Java. OpenChrom is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL).


  • Facebook Meets Open Source Diaspora
    Since Diaspora is based on Open Source, it will be easier to be scrutinized by authorities and by you to see if it is compromising your data. Another major fact is open source technologies are much more secure than proprietary technology. The simply rule was given by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, "Given enough eyeballs, every bug is shallow." In common man's language. 'If every one in your neighborhood is aware and cautious, criminals can never succeed there. '


  • Pacific Fibre man, open source champ elected to InternetNZ
    Lance Wiggs, Don Christie, and Dave Moskovitz were elected councillors.


  • Corporates have an appetite for open source software, says Deloitte
    Large companies are increasingly using open source software to conduct pilots, according to Deloitte consultant Mark Lillie.

    I met up with Mark today, who is a consultant in Deloitte's technology group. We were talking about the IT market in general and some trends.


  • Metasploit To Get More Powerful Web Attack Features


  • Events

    • SPLASH To Unite Open Source Leaders
      The inaugural SPLASH Conference, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday, August 10, 2010, will unite leaders from Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat to share insights with Australian technology companies.








  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Brief Update — CEO Search
        A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.












  • SaaS







  • Oracle

    • Oracle Demostrates Great Community Support and Fixes Eclipse
      Every once in a while I am reminded of the lunacy of the Internet, especially headline writers. On Monday of this week, Oracle released an update to the Java 1.6 update 21 that fixes a problem in a previous version that broke Eclipse. All the details can be found in the bug or Neil’s good summary. The good news is that Eclipse is no longer broken!!

      The irony however is that the issue just yesterday shows up on Ed Burnette’s ZDNet blog ‘Oracle Rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse‘ and the pillar of all Internet lunacy, slashdot Oracle Java Company Change Beaks Eclipse . Credit to Ed for actually reporting and testing the fix.








  • CMS

    • Building a Website – Smart and Easy


      Joomla! – One of the pioneers of the open source CMS software programs, constantly up dating their options, and thousands of programmers world wide offer all sorts of special apps.

      Drupal – Drupal is an amazing piece of technical engineering, simple to use and lots of options to make wonderful websites.

      Wordpress – Wordpress is not so much a website application but more in the form of a blog, many different options are offered and all the templates look really beautiful.








  • Business

    • Nagios Enterprises Gains Over 200 Nagios XI Customers In First Half Of 2010
      Nagios Enterprises gained more than 200 Nagios XI customers in the first half of 2010, setting the stage to become one of the fastest-growing Open Source technology companies in the market. Interest in Nagios continues to gain strength as more companies around the world look to deploy effective IT infrastructure monitoring to ensure operational continuity and minimize the business impact of IT outages.




    • Semi-Open Source

      • Open Core is Dead
        I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:

        Open core is dead.

        At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.










  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague 2010
      This GNU Hackers Meeting took place on Saturday 24 July and Sunday 25 July. We organised a hacking space on Monday 26 July and Tuesday 27 July and encouraged people to stay for the extra days. The main GUADEC conference was on Wednesday 28 - Friday 30. This meeting featured a workshop on GNUnet, free secure networking and decentralised applications.








  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open science is, to some, humanity’s best hope
      Jackson says open science will speed innovation in the same way the open source code movement revolutionized Internet applications. He also wants transhumanists to support the thousands of backyard tinkerers, known as citizen scientists, who are already studying microbes, mapping genomes, and seeking cures for diseases. He calls himself a citizen scientist. At Humanity+, he described the LavaAmp — a pocket-size device for amateur DNA researchers — he is helping to develop.

      Jackson recently hosted the Open Science Summit in Berkeley, Calif., which again highlighted the importance of sharing data. One of the speakers was Alexander Wait Zaranek, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School who is working to build bridges between open-science organizations, citizen scientists, and industry.


    • CacheFlowe releases open-source robot vocal software to welcome our digital overlords




    • Open Access/Content

      • Open source book publishing gets a boost
        One that I found rather amusing was via FLOSS Manuals (a project I've written about before - a group effort to get good manuals written for all the amazing FLOSS out there). The Amsterdam-based foundation has been working on another project: Booki.cc. Booki's a new book production platform, which takes the same concept as FLOSS Manuals - collaborative online book writing - and expands it beyond the realm of just manuals.












  • Programming

    • Global Tech Company Contegix to Sponsor Open Source Language Project Clojure
      Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure and hosting services, announced their agreement to provide sponsorship to Clojure development language project.


    • Open-source 'R' gets Hadoop integration
      Lately, you can't talk about business without talking about "big data," which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.








Leftovers

  • Consumers v Intel
    What bugs me about government regulation of monopolists is that while after a decade or so of investigation, complaints and courts, the consumer is usually left out of the picture and the monopoly gets to keep its ill-gotten gains by paying off the government and other businesses. Previously Intel paid AMD to go away instead of compensating them for the many years when major portions of the market were closed for no other reason than that Intel bribed OEMs to avoid AMD. Who knows how much AMD’s business could have grown in those years?


  • New wave of evictions threatens Gypsies
    Human rights campaigners have condemned a wave of evictions and court actions against Gypsies and Irish Travellers which they say are threatening to extinguish a whole way of life.

    Dozens of families face the prospect of being pushed off plots of land they own and forced to move back into illegal "side-of-the road" and wasteland camping. Children will be unable to go to school and the elderly and infirm unable to access health services, say the campaigners.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change


      Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was cancelled as sentries wilted in traditional woollen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians – many drunk – drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.








  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Facial recognition technology and CCTV - a potent mix
      You may have noticed recent television advertisements plugging holiday cameras with facial recognition technology good enough to pick out your loved ones in crowds and keep them in focus in holiday snaps.


    • More spys in the skies


    • Surveillance Commissioner issues whitewash report
      I've written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking - these operations are now part of our nation's everyday life.


    • UAE to block BlackBerry web features


      The United Arab Emirates is to block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because of national security concerns.

      The move could prevent thousands of users from accessing email and the internet on the handsets starting in October, putting the federation's reputation as a business-friendly commercial and tourism hub at risk.


    • Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant
      A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its "volunteers," researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.








  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Game copiers for Nintendo DS ruled illegal in UK
      A High Court has ruled that devices that allow gamers to play pirated video games are illegal in the UK.

      The ruling specifically targets a range of popular devices which can be used to store and play copied games on the Nintedo DS handheld console.




    • Copyrights

      • UK music industry revenues up 4.7% to €£3.9bn in 2009
        This morning, PRS for Music is launching its annual Adding Up The Music Industry report, which puts numbers to recorded music, live music and B2B music revenues in the UK.


      • Dear Jeff Zucker, Whether You Like It Or Not, Content Will Stay Free
        Sorry, Jeff, but you don't get to decide that. The technology and the market have already decided that the content is or will be free online. It might not be authorized. It might not be legal. But the content is free. "Should" has nothing to do with it, because the technology and the market don't care about "should." Yes, this sucks for those who only understand how to run a business when they're a gatekeeper who controls things, but it doesn't mean there aren't really good businesses built on free content. NBC should know this, since an awful lot of its history was built on exactly that... And I don't recall Zucker's predecessors whining about that darn "free" broadcast TV.












Clip of the Day



Tux in the ring



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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock