07.01.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Schools rebooting with Linux system

  In early 2008, School District No. 33 trustees voted to replace virtually all 1,200-or-so computers Chilliwack elementary school students were using for a cost about $600,000.

  The major challenge, beyond replacing the equipment, has been making sure the students and staff know how to use the new gear–more specifically the new computers’ operating system.

• Desktop Linux…building the future

  If you fall into the camp that believes that Linux/Free Software is at war with proprietary software for the future, there’s good news…or fairly good news if you are a cynic. Look at what’s being done.

  June 22 through June 27th…2009.

  The HeliOS Project built transported and placed 16 Linux Computers in and around Austin.

• Linux Outlaws 98 – It’s Business Time

  This time on a very special Linux Outlaws, Dan and Fab are actually in one room together and besides being silly and having a lot of fun talk about shitty beer, Moblin, German Internet censorship, Opera Unite, Valve possibly releasing native Linux games, Nvidia prefering Windows CE to Android and much, much more.

• Mandriva and Arkeia Software Deliver Seamless Backup for Linux

  Arkeia Software, a worldwide provider of backup and disaster recovery software and Mandriva (EURONEXT: MLMAN) the leading European Linux publisher, today announced the optimized integration of Arkeia Network Backup with Mandriva Enterprise Server and a deepened partnership to bring enterprise backup to Linux environments.

• Events

  • Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando Coming to the Resort!

    The Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando will be held at the lavish Radisson Resort Orlando-Celebration in Kissimmee/Orlando Florida on October 24th 2009, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Rooms are a mere $82.00 a night which gives guest the run of the hotel. Genral attendance to the show is $20.

  • Ohio Linux Fest [September 25-26] – Back to the Future of Linux!

    Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio Linux community continues its forward march and is gaining momentum every year. Each year brings a new group of speakers and generates more excitement—2009 will be no exception! The seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest will be on September 25-26, 2009 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus, Ohio.

  • FISL 10 is over .. WOW!

    I am on my way back from FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and what a great conference it was. The president of Brazil stopped in on Friday and addressed the crowd saying how important free software was and that “Free software prevailed [in Brazil] and we don’t need to buy anymore only what Microsoft wants to sell”. Hopefully Brazil will become even more of an example of how governments can and should adopt open source software.

• Desktop

  • Do I need to type commands to use Linux?

    Guess what? You don’t

    The command line is a powerful tool. With a few keystrokes (or by using scripts or shortcuts), you can perform tasks in one or two steps that can take multiple sets in a graphical user interface. For some tasks, the command line is just a faster and more efficient way of doing things. If you want more information, check this out.

  • Omatek Unveils World’s Smallest Desktop PC

    The global technological stage received a boost yesterday in Lagos with the launch of Omatek handtop Personal Computer (PC).

    Disclosing that it is the world’s smallest PC, the Group Managing Director of Omatek Computers Limited, Engr. Mrs. Florence Seriki, said it was in continuation of the company’s trail blazing efforts on the global technological stage.

• Server

  • Ubuntu heads to the clouds

    On July 1, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu in partnership with Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud infrastructure firm, will be launching Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services.

• Kernel Space

  • Intel’s Unreleased GPU Gets New Shader Compiler, Etc

    Earlier this month we reported on Linux support for a new, unreleased Intel IGP after several commits hit the Intel driver’s X.Org DDX driver (xf86-video-intel).

  • X Server 1.6.2 RC2 Brings More Bug Fixes

    Coming out soon after this will be the start of X Server 1.7 development releases, with the latest schedule having it planned for an August release.

• Applications

  • Miro 2.0 – Watch TV Podcasts and Videos in HD

    Miro is an open-source and cost-free application for watching Internet TV in high definition quality. It’s available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

  • Transmission BitTorrent Client – Lightweight Alternative to Deluge

    Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don’t need all those whistles and bells.

  • Deluge: for All Your Torrent Needs

    Using torrents has become quite an everyday routine for most of us. Though eating up all your bandwidth in one bite, they surely can take the load off traffic-heavy servers. How? Each of us becomes a peer that “seeds” tiny bits of the download, leading to exponentially growing speed and availability. Most of the times, people associate the word “torrent” with piracy, which certainly doesn’t come as a surprise, but there are a lot of other legal uses of this great technology.

  • Control your bandwidth with Trickle

  • 6 Burning Applications for Linux

    There are not many burning tools in the Linux world compared to the Windows world, but what is most important that all burning tools for Linux are free of charge, open-source and work very well. Here are 6 burning tools to make your app search less exhausting:

  • 5 Top of the Line Twitter Desktop Clients for Linux

    If you’ve been using Twitter through its website, I recommend that you use a desktop client instead to further enhance your tweeting experience. Since Twitter has become immensely popular, there are tons and tons of available desktop applications that support this great micro-blogging service. So I’m here to assist you on narrowing down the choices, and hope to somehow give you an idea on picking the one that suits you best.

  • JAG

    JAG, a free software arcade-puzzle 2D game, has been released for Linux. The aim of JAG is to break all of the target pieces on each level before time runs out.

• KDE4

  • KDE 4.3 RC1 Release Announcement

    KDE Community Ships Release Candidate of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements

    July 1st, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC1, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.

  • let’s play a game!

    Let’s a play a game of “Spot the New Feature”! Here’s a screenshot, submitted by our own Helio, that shows a new feature in Plasma that will debut in KDE 4.4…

  • KDE’s Seigo gives sneak peek at version 4.3

    Core KDE developer Aaron Seigo posted a much-anticipated screencast of the upcoming 4.3 release.

    This snapshot is approaching the final release (due in a month) and comes after more than 2300 bugs (including duplicates) were closed.

  • Krusader 2.0 Review – First Stable KDE4 Release

    Krusader is a twin-panel file manager for KDE which has been around for around seven years and was always a good alternative to Konqueror since KDE3 days. Its interface resembles the one of the popular file manager Midnight Commander for the console. Codenamed ‘Mars Pathfinder’, 2.0 is the first KDE4 stable release, bringing lots of new features and coming with the entire interface ported to Qt4 libraries.

• Distributions

  • Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 released

  • Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 Offers Xfce, USB Install, EPEL Extra Packages, and more than 600 updates

    This release offers an updated kernel v2.6.29 for 64-bit systems, OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.0.6 and IBM Cell SDK v3.1.0.1, as well as the next generation of ps3vram for fast, temporary file storage or swap using PS3 video RAM. With this release, ps3vram is up to 50% faster than in YDL 6.1 and is automatically enabled as swap.

  • Sabayon Linux Gnome 4.2 Released

    Sabayon 4.2 will catch you: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, GNOME, multimedia applications and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time? We’ve got it. XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Center) 9.04 is what you’ve ever wanted to build up a fantastic HTPC or Internet Multimedia Box, so what’s better than having it ready to use? Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!

  • Puppy Linux 4.2 – Super Fast Linux – Quick Review and Screenshots

    We reviewed the June 2009 release v.4.2 of Puppy Linux, which comes in a 110 MB file download from their website, or from accepted mirrors. The iso file is then burnt to CD and runs as a Live CD. After installing the Live CD into RAM, I experienced my HP Laptop (2GB RAM) run faster than I’ve ever seen with any other OS or Linux Distro.

  • 10th Anniversary of Gentoo

    NeddySeagoon and I have been trying to figure out the official 10th anniverary date of Gentoo, and here are the dates I’ve figured out so far…

  • PCLinuxOS

    • Mini Release Explosion!!!

      Just released are two ‘mini’ editions of PCLinuxOS. You will know them by their names MiniMe and Zen Gnome Mini.

    • PCLinuxOS Quarterly ISO updates available.

      There has been an explosion of activity going on over here at PCLinuxOS. The quarterly ISO updates for PCLinuxOS 2009.2 and PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.2 are now available featuring a fully updated iso with the latest applications from the PCLinuxOS repositories.

  • Red Hat

    • InfoJobs.net Selects Red Hat and JBoss Solutions For Critical Business Platform

    • Red Hat Stories: Don’t call them videos

      It’s not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat’s new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.

    • Fog Computing

      • Red Hat Announces Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program to Enable Wider Enterprise Cloud Adoption

        The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds.

      • Red Hat inks cloud partnership with Amazon

        As the dominant supplier of commercial Linux operating systems, a key player in middleware, and a wannabe with a pretty good shot at being a force in server virtualization, Red Hat would seem to be a shoo-in as a player in cloud computing. But for the moment, Amazon’s EC2 sets the pace in commercial cloud computing, and that means being Amazon’s friend is particularly important to companies like Red Hat that want to make money from clouds.

      • Red Hat seeks to certify the cloud (Q&A)

        Evans: Red Hat is firmly positioned to take on CIOs’ core concerns with security and interoperability. With JBoss, RHEL, and our virtualization offerings, Red Hat already provides the trusted low-level infrastructure, or “substrate” as I’ve called it, upon which many CIOs depend. Given that we believe most cloud-computing involvement, at least initially, will be in private clouds, it’s important that CIOs feel they can trust their cloud infrastructure. Red Hat delivers that trust.

      • Red Hat and Amazon: Time to Certify Cloud Partners

        Red Hat has launched a cloud partner and certification program, and Amazon is the first to join. The VAR Guy is hardly surprised. This is a sign of things to come from Red Hat — and another indication of Amazon Web Services’ growing influence over next-generation solutions providers. What’s in store for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss open source partners? Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

    • Fedora

      • Recognize the Real Promise of Hosted Desktop Virtualization

        In the case of Red Hat’s hosted desktop virtualization solution, this is achieved through the use of Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), sVirt and the KVM hypervisor. This combination of open source technologies provides a level of isolation equivalent to that which exists in physical deployments, and in doing so dramatically increases the security of virtual desktops and the hypervisors on which they reside.

      • Linux virtualisation hypervisor KVM hits release 87

        The native Linux virtualisation hypervisor Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has reached milestone 87 and now integrates the qemu emulator into a single package.

        Scores of changes have occurred since the 86 release last month, and with the merge of qemu upstream brings better tuning and visibility of the live migration process, the setting of qcow2 (qemu disk image format) cluster size is now allowed, qcow2 optimisations, and networking improvements.

      • Big Thanks To The SELinux Team

        I started using Fedora back in the Fedora 8 days. I’ve always tried to run SELinux in enforcing mode and back in the Fedora 8-9 days that seemed to mean I’d have some SELinux issue every few days. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was annoying and very tempting to turn it off completely.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Super Talent launches line of flash disk modules

    It seems like these would also make an ideal way to embed a Linux OS on a small form factor board for that carputer or NAS appliance you’ve been thinking about building. Super Talent is currently shipping units but didn’t disclose pricing.

  • Myka’s Linux-based BitTorrent box great home theater PC for lazy people

    With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo’s was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.

    Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn’t carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you’re a little bit lazy…you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.

  • Blackmagic Design Releases Linux SDK for DeckLink, Multibridge and Intensity

    Blackmagic Design Inc. has released support for software developers who want to use DeckLink, Intensity and Multibridge products on the Linux platform. Support includes the software driver and an SDK for developers, and can be downloaded now from the Blackmagic Design web site, free of charge.

  • Palm Pre sold 300,000 in June

    THE PALM PRE smartphone seems to be selling very well, according to Charter Equity Research.

    By ringing up a few of its mates in the channel, the analyst outfit has worked out that sales into the channel in June were more than 300,000 units.

Free Software/Open Source

• The New MySQL Server Release Model

  When I joined MySQL back in June of 2005, one of the first “MySQL Truths” I learned and repeated often when discussing MySQL with others was “release early, release often.” If you’ve been using MySQL for any length of time, you know what that statement means – it meant that MySQL was: (1) dedicated to getting new features and enhancements into the hands of its community so the software’s quality could be validated; (2) eager to take early feedback on those features so the input could rapidly be incorporated back into the product allowing everyone to benefit; (3) committed to very frequent releases of the software so helpful new features and/or external contributions that were ready for action could quickly be put into play and not sit idle on the shelf. And if you’ve been around Open Source for a while now, you know this is the spirit in which most providers of Open Source software operate.

• Helping corporations leverage the Web, using open source and the cloud

  Open source for our company is also really huge. We release all the source code that we have to the general public and the communities we work in. We make a concerted effort to do that.

  All of what we use is open source. We’re a completely Ruby-on-Rails engineering team. The bigger idea of sharing and collaborating, we push that hard. It’s a distinct quality: are you willing to money into investing money and people’s salaries into something that might not make you money right away?

• When is Open Source not Enough?

  Because of the fast evolution of Continuous Integration (CI), the first generation of enablement tools proliferated at lightning speed. Open source CI tools became widely used due to the ease in which an engineer could install it and start tackling the initial CI challenges that he faced. Once proven effective, these apps (particularly Cruise Control) spread like wildfire among other build engineers, and in most cases, development shops began ‘sewing’ several instances together.

• ICANN CEO Affirms Free, Open Internet

  Beckstrom said he has faith the Internet, which has shown resiliency as an open source of information. “The importance of the Internet as a free-flowing source of information is being underscored right now by the events in Iran,” said Beckstrom in a statement after being named to the psotion. “It shows the power of human expression through a free and open Net.”

• 2009 Blender F1 Challenge Results

  Hello all. The 2009 Blender F1 Challenge has concluded and the results are in…

  ZORDAN defends his Title as the Blender F1 Champion!

• Daytop Enhances Client Intake Program and Ensures HIPAA Compliance With Open Source ProcessMaker

  Colosa’s open source business process management (BPM) software, ProcessMaker, that enables enterprises and public organizations to automate paper-based workflow processes, has been selected by Daytop-NJ to automate its core workflow processes and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

• Nuxeo Expands Its Open Source ECM Footprint in EMEA

  The world is not enough. Following the recent opening of its U.S. office, the open source ECM vendor Nuxeo (news, site) keeps expanding its global reach with a new partnership announced today.

• KnowledgeTree

  • Document Management Software Provider KnowledgeTree® Opens its North American Headquarters

    KnowledgeTree, a leading provider of commercial open source document management software, today announced the company has opened its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained significant worldwide traction and is now focusing on building its US operations.

  • Former rPath, Red Hat exec to lead software firm’s Raleigh headquarters, plans to hire 20 sales people

    Tim Spink, a former executive at rPath and Red Hat, will lead North American operations for document manage software firm KnowledgeTree at its new regional headquarters in Raleigh.

    Spink is one of two Raleigh-based employees for the South African-based company. KnowledgeTree, which is backed by Hasso Plattner Ventures in Germany, also is in the processing of hiring a sales force.

• Search

  • Mailspect Adopts Sphinx Index Engine

    After thorough testing of the leading Open Source index engines, Mailspect Inc. has selected Sphinx as the search and retrieval engine for MPP, the Message Processing Platform. Sphinx is an Open Source project founded and maintained by Andrew Aksyonoff of Voronezh, Russia.

  • Acquia Search available commercially

    It’s a big day for us at Acquia. We finally took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and made it available commercially as part of the Acquia Network. Thanks to the 250+ beta testers who helped make our hosted search service fit for use in production environments, including Brightcove, JackBe Developer Community, P-O-P Design, Wide Divots and others.

• Government

  • DE: Government reinforces open source resource centre

    Germany’s federal Agency for Information Technology (BIT) is increasing its open source support to public administrations, according to representative attending the Linuxtag conference in Berlin last week.

    BIT’s now employs a team of consultants and technicians specialised in open source, that will offer assistance to public administrations. The renewal of the competence centre is one of the measures taken by the federal government to prop up the country’s economy.

    During the conference BIT’s colleagues from the federal Office for IT security (BSI), part of the ministry of the Interior, presented the most recent version of Kolab, an open source collaboration suite for Unix platforms.

  • Are electronic voting machines tamper-proof?

    Is there a possibility of rigging electoral outcomes in a general election to the Lok Sabha? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by some parties in the recent contest. It is accentuated by the recent spate of articles published in reputed computer engineering journals and in the popular international press, which raise doubts about the integrity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

  • Will New Certification Criteria Fuel Open Source E-Health Records?

    But moving forward, new certification “paths” recently announced by CCHIT will be a boost for modular software packages, especially those from smaller software vendors and open source developers, as well as their potential customers, including doctor practices that don’t need fancier software tools, as well as health care organizations that have a hybrid mix of health IT systems featuring legacy and best-of-breed applications.

• Licensing

  • FYI: GPL violation by Scartel/ASUS

    Hello!

    This mail was sent to you, since you are one of copyright holders of software which used in ASUSTeK Computer WMVN25E2+ WiMAX Subscriber Station.

    At current (2009-06-30) time ASUSTeK sells the above device through their Russian exclusive partner “Scartel” Ltd. (trade name “Yota”) with next GPL violations:

    1) They didn’t give any access for customers to source codes of GPLed software, see (possibly not full) list below, on the ground of their “intellectual property” defense.

    2) They sold their product without mentioning Gnu Public License (and without copy of GPL certainly), nor in printed version of “Quick Start Guide”, nor in electronic version of “User Manual”, nor in any other form.

  • GPL, ScummVM and violations

    I am sure you saw the news post item about certain GPL violation.

    Let me present here some more details about the case.

  • Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Released

    The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.

  • Topocad 11.3 with FDO Database Connection

    Chaos systems AB presents a new and open source database connection, which connect to a large number of databases. It uses the open source FDO from Open Source GEO, which has been adapted to Topocad. Many customers have expressed a demanded of a freestanding database.

  • GPLv3 grows as GPL stumbles

    Black Duck reckons there are about 9,500 GPLv3 licensed applications now.

• Openness

  • It’s Our Data: Time to Open Up

    Last week I wrote about David Cameron’s fine words about cancelling ID cards and generally opening up data. It was full of sound and fury, but I reserve judgement on just how much it really signified.

    But here’s a hopeful sign that things really might change if the Tories win power at the next general election. It’s a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies

  • The Doctor Who Model of Open Source

    How do we sustain Open Source in a distributed world? We are facing this challenge with several of our chemical software creations/packages. People move, institutions change. Open Source does not, of itself, grow and flourish – it needs nurturing. Many packages require a lot of work before they are in a state to be usefully enhanced by the community – “throw it over the wall and it will flourish” does not work.

    Many OS projects have clear governance and (at least implicitly) funded management. Examples are Apache, Eclipse, etc. Many others have the “BDFL” – Benevolent Dictator For Life with characters such as RBS, Linus, Guido Python, Larry Perl, etc. These command worldwide respect and they have income models which are similar to literary giants. These models don’t (yet?) work for chemistry.

  • UNESCO releases new publication on open educational resources

    UNESCO has released its first openly licensed publication. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community. Access the online edition – or buy the book!

  • Why Scientific Publishing Will Never be the Same

    For those of us tracking open access and its wider import, it’s pretty clear that scientific publishing has changed for ever. But for some within the industry, there remains the desperate hope that all this new-fangled open, collaborative stuff will just blow over.

• Programming

  • IBM unveils open source compiler

    Open Source compiler provides automated advice on software code optimization

  • MilePost Compiler: AI optimises machine code

    As part of the MilePost (Machine Learning for Embedded Programs Optimisation) project funded by Information Society Technologies (IST) of the European Union, the IBM research lab in Haifa, Israel, has released an open source compiler which automatically learns how to translate source code into machine code suitable for the respective hardware used. The compiler uses suggestions made by an ICI (Interactive Compilation Interface) plug-in.

  • IBM offers open source machine learning compiler

    Called Milepost GCC, the compiler is the result of a collaboration between IBM and partners in the European Union-funded Milepost consortium. The project is an extension of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) effort.

  • Milepost GCC Now Available

• Applications

  • VirtualBox 3.0 released

    Less than one week after the release of the second beta, Sun Microsystems has announced the release of version 3.0 of its open source VirtualBox desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. VirtualBox 3.0 is a major update that, in addition to a number of bug fixes and performance improvements, introduces several major new features.

  • VirtualBox 3.0.0 (released 2009-06-30)

  • Wireshark 1.2 Released With a Bundle of New Features

    Under development since 1998, Wireshark has been lauded as “one of the most important open source apps of all time” for making network and application troubleshooting more accessible to computer users and administrators. Since many businesses and educational institutions rely on Wireshark to optimize and secure their networks, there is even a certification course aimed at IT staffers.

  • Mozilla Adds New Fennec Versions

    In advance of the scheduled release of its Firefox 3.5 browser, Mozilla on Friday also released two new versions of its Fennec mobile browser.

  • Could There Be an AndroidFox?

    Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system — Android — has become a popular choice for phonemakers worldwide. Now, if Firefox developers are getting what they think they are, we may finally see the combination of Google’s power OS with Mozilla’s groundbreaking browser

  • Google development kit could mean Firefox on Android

    Last week’s release of the Android Native Development Kit could spur interest in an Android version of Fennec, the Firefox-based mobile browser.

  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5: Life In The Fast Lane

    Mozilla released a new edition of its popular open-source Web browser, Firefox. The latest edition of the open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, claims to be the fastest version to date.

  • Firefox 3.5 – A Really Impressive Release

    Firefox 3.5 was released just a couple of hours ago and it comes with great new features and a new version of Gecko, the rendering engine.

  • PHP 5.3.0 released

    Two and a half years after the release of PHP 5.2.0 and following a slight delay, the PHP development team have announced the release version 5.3.0 of PHP. Version 5.3.0 of the web programming language includes several fundamental new extensions, as well as a number of other new features and is the one of the biggest revisions in PHP’s history. Many of the functions originally planned for PHP 6 have ended up in the 5.3 development pipeline.

  • PHP 5.3.0 Released!

    The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

    Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more.

  • Google launches new open source Sputnik for JavaScript

    The Sputnik test suite requires python in order to run – and is already available as a free download. Whether or not Sputnik will become a new standard by which browser vendors will measure themselves is a question yet to be answered.

Leftovers

• Wait, Wasn’t The Internet Killing Journalism?

  Yet another data point to suggest the predicted “death of journalism” that we keep hearing from the old school newspaper guys is a bit overblown, online news publisher Talking Points Memo has just announced that it’s hiring seven new editorial staff.

• Q&A: Charles Nesson

  Q: What does that mean for the record companies?

  A: I believe the recording companies have great skills to offer artists, and there may need to be some reshuffling in the way those skills are passed around and the ways in which revenue is returned.

  Q: You want to webcast the proceedings. Why?

  A: We see ourselves as representing the public interest. And what a fantastic opportunity, to tune in on a case being litigated by all this high-powered talent.

• UK anti-filesharing law proposed for 2009/2010

  The UK government has put an anti-filesharing law on its legislative programme commencing this autumn. The law is based on the Digital Britain report, which includes proposals to make the regulator, Ofcom, oversee protocol and website blocking. Will it contravene the Telecoms Package and how should it be seen in light of the French Conseil Constitutionel decision?

• Content Online Platform – mind the gap!

  The European Commission has quietly released the Final Report on the Content Online Platform. Does it serve the interests of serious policy-making for online film and music?

  Full of grammatical errors and lacking in substantial understanding of the issues, the Final Report on the Content Online Platform poses a challenge to anyone seeking a serious policy proposition.

• Winning the Open Web

  It seems an unfair fight. On the one hand, you have some of the biggest, most powerful multinationals, intent on defending their turf and extending their power and profits. On the other, you have a tiny number of ragtag idealists who believe that knowledge belongs to everyone, and that no one should have disproportionately long monopolies on its supply.

  And yet: in the last few years a remarkable series of victories have been one by the latter against the former, to the extent that representatives of the big media industries have warned that they are losing the “battle”.

  Against that background of uneven forces – but not quite in the way the media companies mean it – sharing information about past successes so as to drive future ones is crucially important. And yet it is rarely done, probably because the practitioners are too busy fighting the battles to write about it.