The OpenFOAM acquisition brings the entire OpenCFD team onto SGI's payroll along with a commitment to continue the development of the software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Despite Microsoft and SCO, Zemlin says that Linux is the "largest force in computing," because of freedom. Linux, says Zemlin, is larger than one product or one company and it's not just the technology. "Sharing works," says Zemlin.
"It's not about the $10 billion invested in Linux... It's about something all of you have taught the rest of the world, there are 100s of bestselling books that chronicle what you have accomplished... that you can better yourself while bettering others. That no one of us is smarter than all of us. You have shared this with the world, and that is an incredible accomplishment."
Thanks to Linux, says Zemlin, "the world is not a scary, black and white, place where the wicked witch rules, it's a colorful place... thanks to all of you."
Vancouver. LinuxCon 2011 officially kicked off this AM as the celebration of the 20th anniversay of Linux begins. One of the first things that attendees will see at the show is the 20th Anniversary of Linux showcase loaded with all kinds of Linux memorabilia and a timeline of history. The items range from a book about TurboLinux (remember them?) to an iconic Red Hat (donated by Red Hat, who else?).
What would the world be like without Linux? That's the question posed by Jim Zemlin in the opening keynote for LinuxCon North America 2011. At first glance, it might seem like a world without Linux would be much the same — but if you think about it (as Zemlin has) things would be a lot different.
The Linux Foundation's annual LinuxCon North America event kicks off today in Vancouver, B.C., and its primary focus this year is the 20th anniversary of the free and open source operating system.
In another episode of Open Ballot, TuxRadar is now asking its readers "Does Tux help or hinder Linux?" They concede that penguins are cute, but is Tux a good mascot for an operating system? "Would a more conventional logo make us look more professional?"
Well, I think Linus Torvalds' view is germane to the debate. According to Wikipedia, he chose the penguin as the mascot after being nipped by a penguin at a zoo and contracting penguinitis. Wikipedia writes, "Torvalds was looking for something fun and sympathetic to associate with Linux, and a slightly fat penguin sitting down after having had a great meal perfectly fit the bill."
CA Technologies (the company formerly known as Computer Associates) has announced a new version release of its CA VM: Manager Suite for Linux on IBM System z and a new capability for CA Solve Operations Automation.
Targeting Linux on the mainframe with this product, CA maintains that this is a fast-growing segment of the data management market. More specifically, CA is directing this product at enterprise Linux application developers looking to "optimize management of their Linux apps and resources" in mainframe and hybrid computing environments.
Linux, with the massive usability leaps it has made over the years, is inching closer towards becoming the perfect Windows and Mac replacement. However, there are some areas in which Linux still lags behind the two bigwigs.
A few years ago, watching a video was just limited to the PC or DVD. But now, all kinds of gadgets have sprung up which allow you to watch the same video anywhere you want to. As convenient as it may seem, the average gadget-blessed Linux user usually runs against a stonewall while getting that video to work on his or her device (s).
In my recent King of KDistros poll, several readers wanted me to include Mandriva in the comparison, claiming it had become a KDE exclusive distro and that it was doing a great job with its latest release, Mandriva 2011. Having tested Mandriva 2010 not so long ago and feeling disappointed by its apparent lack of progress, I decided to leave Mandriva out of the poll. I felt PCLinuxOS already somewhat represented the heart of Mandriva, but I have to admit I was not aware of the latest changes and progress at Mandriva camp.
Intrigued by those recommendations, I decided to download Mandriva 2011 RC2, the last of the release candidates, which with the exception of a few bug fixes, should not differ much from the latest official release. I must admit Mandriva 2011 pleasantly surprised me, showcasing a lot of refreshing ideas and quite an impressive amount of customization that is not usually found in KDE releases.
As a Linux vendor, Red Hat obviously wants its customers to run its technologies on Linux. In the case of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management system, customers to date have had to run the system on Microsoft Windows.
The cloud vendor combines the power of hardware and software virtualisation in its operating system.
Cloud software and virtualisation company Joyent announced it has ported an open-source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor to its operating system (OS).
As a result, Joyent is claiming to be the first to have developed its own OS hypervisor in five years, to rival those of VMware and Citrix.
The addition of KVM capability will enable Joyent users to run other OSs on top of its SmartOS, which basically turns a server into a multi-tenant application hosting platform.
Google and Facebook owe their success largely to Linux — not the technology per se, but to the cheap innovation and mass collaboration it enables, Red Hat’s CEO says.
Yes, free, as in freedom, but also free as in free beer, said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.
LinuxCon 2011 kicked off this morning with a retrospective from Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, on the accomplishments of Linux in its first twenty years. Self-professed geek and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose Linux use started with Slackware in the late 90s, followed by Fedora, followed Zemlin with a keynote addressing the next 20 years of Linux.
World’s leading open so€urce software company Red Hat targets to double busin€ess in India this year. The firm is expanding its ch€annel presence, deepening re€lationships with leading sy€stem integrators and lau€nc€hing new products in ev€olving technologies including virtualisation and clo€ud, senior firm official said.
im Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, just delivered a terrific opening keynote presentation for LinuxCon. Whitehurst isn’t just a businessman, he’s also a geek. He used Linux and open source before joining Red Hat, and the opportunity to be CEO of the world’s most successful open source company was a dream come true for him. After a quick summary of some of the major milestones Linux has seen over the last twenty years, he jumped into the heart of his keynote: what’s next? Whitehurst wasted no time in answering this question: “I have no idea.”
Jim Whitehurst took the stage at the LinuxCon conference today to provide a view of where he sees Linux going. Whitehurst stressed that while the technology is important it's the collaborative user-driven innovation that will make the most impact in the future.
Whitehurst told the LinuxCon audience that the general view of Linux coming from analyst groups is that Linux has done a solid job and is a viable alternative to tradional stacks. He noted that to him, that doesn't tell the whole story.
Every year since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released we've published a risk report where we look at the state of security of the distribution. We investigate the key vulnerabilities, metrics on vulnerability counts, and how users could have been exploited by them. The Six Years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 report (PDF) covering Feb 2005-2011 was published today.
But at least one company must be looking at the impending doom and smiling ear to ear: Red Hat. Quarter after quarter, through good times and bad, Red Hat delivers excellent performance.
Mark Shuttleworth, has dedicated a blog posting to the new features that the developers plan to integrate into the distribution's Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.10. Most of the changes affect the Dash, where "places" will increasingly be replaced by "lenses" and "scopes".
If there’s one thing that I like to do it’s tweak my Ubuntu system. Nothing too drastic. Just modifying the look and feel of my desktop, fiddling with how certain settings, that sort of thing. I don’t do it too often, and when I do … well, let’s just say it beats working!
Hewlett-Packard is currently working to bring its WebOS mobile operating system to cars and appliances, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
According to the Journal, HP can see a world where many of the products consumers currently use in the home or while on the road will have touch screens that connect to the Web and deliver WebOS functionality.
The WebOS-based HP Pre 3 smartphone is now available in Europe, and will "soon" be arriving in the U.S., says HP. Meanwhile, HP TouchPad sales are sluggish despite 20 percent price cuts on the tablets, and HP is now trying to push WebOS into cars and kitchen appliances, say two separate reports.
Wind River has updated its Linux distro with a graphics stack based on GTK, X.Org, the Qt framework, and Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite. Wind River Linux 4, Update Pack 2 offers Linux Standard Base (LSB) certification, Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 registration, and Intel Atom and Texas Instruments AM3x Sitara and OMAP35x processor optimization, the company says.
Google Chief Executive Larry Page, however, said Motorola will remain a separate unit while Google maintains Android away and entirely neutral from the acquistion.
Version 0.9 of the open source financial analytics software OpenGamma is now available to download. The application, which is written in Java, is aimed at financial services companies. It queries data from a number of sources, such as Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters, and uses it to generate risk analyses and other reports.
While I was there recently I pondered the possibility of small amounts of residual radiation in the area. I quickly forgot the thought until I ran across a post by Jeff Keyzer (mightyohm.com) about an open source geiger counter he designed.
Well, who could resist the chance to build a geiger counter and run it around looking for bad stuff at the former sight of a nuclear power plant. Not me. Here at Screaming Circuits, we specialize in surface mount, so I thought it would make sense to re-layout the PCB for SMT components. Which I did. That's the cool thing about open source. (one of the cool things) The design files are accessible.
The last update Audioboo will make to the Android codebase will be to enable support for blind users. It will then release the code in its entirety under a standard, free to use MIT license to enable others to tweak and reuse the components.
A couple weeks ago, Dell turned Crowbar toward another open source product in Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. That partnership involves an entire package that includes a Dell hardware architecture and services, as well as the Cloudera Enterprise management software.
Google's Chrome browser version 13 is stable, featuring Instant Pages predictive search technology, print preview for Windows and Linux machines, as well as a better omnibox. Also featuring: 30 bug fixes.
Firefox users may have had trouble accessing JPMorgan Chase's website chase.com today when the bank experienced problems with an outdated security certificate.
According to a Chase spokesman, the Firefox certificate was updated on the bank's servers in about 45 minutes, resolving the issue.
The first reason is speed, although that point is debatable. According to Mozilla, startup times with Firefox 6 are better than its predecessor, especially if a user is using Firefox's Panorama feature. Panorama allows users to organize tabs into groups. Having Firefox launch several groups on startup has been a sure-fire way to bog down that process in the past.
The vacation season is hitting continental Europe right now. Some of us in the more Nordic parts of Europe have already spent our vacation for this year and are back in business. Wondering what I’ve missed in the past weeks I looked through the blogosphere. The launch of the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) caught my eye as it has close ties to the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
I read Simon Phipps’s blog about the OCI with interest. He says, “The Open Cloud Initiative aims to reinterpret the principles of software freedom for a new generation of computing, just as OSI did at the end of the 90’s.”
Since OpenStack's launch on July 19, 2010, which included 25 contributing member companies, OpenStack quickly ballooned to include 80 participating companies and 217 developers. Participating companies include major players like Cisco, Citrix, Dell and others; and startups like Piston Cloud Computing, Nephoscale and Sonian.
The OpenSFS Lustre community group has contracted Lustre services firm Whamcloud in a multi-year deal to add new functionality. Lustre is an open source storage filesystem that has its origins at Sun and migrated to Oracle after the acquisition. Whamcloud and OpenSFS have not disclosed the financial terms of the deal.
There are a lot of options available to IBM i shops looking for a software package that allows them to run a website on their favorite box. But one class of tools that seems to be gaining lots of traction these days is the group of open source, PHP-based content management systems (CMS). The big three in this category include Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, and you might be surprised to learn about some of the prominent IBM i industry websites that are using these systems.
Acquia (news, site), provider of Drupal services and support has announced that it is introducing two new Drupal service offerings and that it has acquired two companies.
Open source business intelligence is growing faster than the rest of the BI market, according to a recent study.
According to a report on OSOR.eu, the EU's Open Source Observatory and Repository, an IT procurement tender issued by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) explicitly bans the use of open source software in any offer made in response. The tender concerns the development of an "Information System of Romanian Criminal Records (Rocris)", with a budget of approximately 2.85 million euros.
The Romanian ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) says that internal and European interoperability requirements are forcing it to ban the use of open source software in the building of a system to manage criminal records.
Cities are experimenting with releasing more public data, engaging with citizens on social networks, adopting open source software, and finding ways to use new technologies to work with their citizens. They've been doing it through the depth of the Great Recession, amidst aging infrastructure, spiraling costs and flat or falling budgets. In that context, using technology and the Internet to make government work better and cities smarter is no longer a "nice to have" ... it's become a must-have.
I know we concentrate largely on Linux in this blog, but its remit is a lot wider - open source hardware as well as open source software.'Open Source Engineering' in the widest sense...
Intel Cilk Plus has become an open source project. The C and C++ extension adds three keywords that are designed to simplify the development of parallel applications. Applications that are optimised in this way reportedly perform better particularly in multi-core environments.
The Center for Media and Democracy has joined a coalition of environmental, consumer and worker's groups in signing onto a letter of comment by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) plan to obtain information about the presence of nanoscale materials in pesticide products.
As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker pushes austerity as the only solution to reducing the state's deficit spending, it seems as though there are a few exceptions to his idea of "shared sacrifice." S.C. Johnson & Son, one of the state's wealthiest firms, is one of many companies that pays nothing in state income tax -- increasing the burden on citizen taxpayers, according to a new project by the Institute for Wisconsin's Future.